Rizers Blog

It’s not about having talent, it’s about having scouts in the stands when you display talent.
— NameTagScott

 

In other words, it's not enough to do good work. Nor is it sufficient to have people who know your good work (fans). You must know people who can do something about it when opportunity knocks (talent scouts).

Build your network accordingly.

Most people will never know what they want. I don't know what I want. "What do you want?" is too imprecise to produce meaningful and actionable answer. Forget about.

"What are your goals?" is similarly fated for confusion and guesswork.

The better question is, "What would excite me?" Just as the opposite of love is indifference, the opposite of happiness is boredom.

The cure to boredom is excitement, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. What would excite you?


—Tim Ferriss, 4-Hour Work Week

Thirty one days in January – Thirty-one chapters in Never Eat Alone. Coincidence? I think not.

Let's kick off the new year with a refresher course on the power and practice of networking. Rizers is hosting a virtual book club for a reading through the month of Janaury. As I have written in a review of this great book, Never Eat Alone is a handbook on how and why to build a powerful professional network. Each of the thirty-one chapters is short (average 6 - 8 pages) and is packed with great ideas on building a network.

Here's how virtual book club will work.

1. Pick up a copy (or pull your copy from the shelf) of Never Eat Alone. It is available in hardcover, softcover, audio and Kindle versions.
2. Join the Rizers group on LinkedIn and the Never Eat Alone subgroup. The subgroup will be our virtual book club where we share comments, ideas and reactions.
3. For each day in January, read the chapter that corresponds to that day's date. (Chapter 1 on January 1st, Chapter 2 on the 2nd, etc.)
4. Engage in the discussion in the Book Club subgroup as you assimilate, digest, and expand upon the great ideas proposed by Ferrazzi.
5. Finish the first month of the year (and the decade) with your networking skills amped up to 11.

Leave a comment here, send me an email, or simply request to join the Rizers LinkedIn group if you are interested.

Over at How to Save the World, Dave Pollard has an interesting post on the power of asking open questions . . . and then leaving room for people to truly share and connect. As we help Rizers to network more purposefully, I’d recommend the questions developed for this blog post. Asking several of these in the context of almost any conversation will reveal surprising answers and help you build deeper connections.

1. What stood out for you? (at a recent event)
2. What do you most care about?
3. What's the change been like for you?
4. What do you see your role being?
5. How are you feeling about that now?
6. What's holding you back? (not to find fault)
7. What would you want to see come out of this?
8. How can I/we help you achieve your objective?
9. How do you know that's true? (not asked in a challenging tone)
10. What comes next? (the next part of this is 'Where do you think we should go from here?')

I have to admit that I am completely baffled by the people who are obsessed with obtaining followers on Twitter, actively seeking connections on LinkedIn, or somehow dismayed that they have been “de-friended” on Facebook. Why do you care?

The answer, I suppose, depends on how you use social networking tools. As a career tool, LinkedIn works best when it is a reflection of your real-life network. Ditto for Twitter. I reserve my LinkedIn connections for people I know well enough to recommend with confidence.

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What does Gratitude have to do with your career?

In a word, everything. The most successful people we know, regardless of their level or role in the organization, find ways to share their wins with others. And we have seen a few who made time to regularly and physically thank those who have helped them. It's not as hard as one might think.

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John Beeson has written a terrific article on feedback: understanding it, getting it loud and clear, and using it to focus your development efforts. The article is long, but worth the read. It makes explicit the ways in which feedback is 'coded' (or just plain confused) and must be deciphered.

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Our favorite workforce trend analyst, Tammy Ericksen, over at the Harvard Business blogs, has just posted two terrific articles about the impact of the recession on the workplace of the future.

• How the Recession Is Changing Talent Management
• Reconciling Short- and Long-Term Workforce Trends

 

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