Networking in Place

Three Things You Can Be Doing From Home to Nurture Your Professional Network

I know you know this, but networking is important. However, with most of us working from home these days, it’s tempting to think that networking is one of those things that will have to take a back seat for a while. Au contraire. Just because you can’t get out of the house doesn’t mean you have to stop building and nurturing your web of professional relationships. 

I believe we’ve gotten ourselves in a bit of a networking rut. Somewhere along the way we have come to conflate professional networking with attending events and meeting new people. While events can be fun — and meeting new people is always invigorating —there’s so much more to networking.

With social gatherings off the table for the foreseeable future, now is a good time to tend to your existing network. Networking is about building professional relationships in a meaningful way. There are countless ways to do that in addition to meeting face-to-face.

It helps to think of your network not as a collection of the people you know, but as the magical link between you and each of those people. If you look more closely at those links, you’ll see that each one has a degree of freshness and a degree of strength. For example, for someone you spoke with this morning, the connection is very fresh. For those you haven’t touched base with in a while, not so much.

The essence of networking is simply freshening and strengthening those connections. Anything that freshens a connection is networking. Yes, a face-to-face meeting freshens a connection, but so does an email, a phone call, a text message, a voice mail, a comment on social media, … you get the idea.

Here are three things you can be doing right now that will work wonders to freshen and strengthen the relationships that are already in your network.

1. Review Your Network

Start by doing a review of your network. Leverage the time that you are confined to your home office to pour through your LinkedIn connections systematically from A to Z. If you’re not an avid user of LinkedIn, your address book will do. Allow plenty of time to immerse yourself into the web of relationships you have made over the years. If you have hundreds of connections you might want to spread this exercise over several days.

For each connection, ask yourself a series of questions:

• How did I meet this person?
• Are they still part of my active network?
• How fresh is this connection? Do I wish it were fresher?
• How strong is this connection? Do I wish it were stronger?

Make notes of the names of people that are due for some attention.

2. Freshen Connections

Put the “social” back into social distancing. Reach out to each person in step #1 for whom you wished your connection was fresher or stronger. Send them an email or set up a call. Seek first to be helpful. Find out how they are, what they’re working on, and if they need anything. Then ask yourself who and what you know that might help be helpful.

Be sure to reciprocate by sharing what you are working on as well. People want to be helpful. It is easier for them if they have a sense of what you’re working on.

3. Update Your Profile

Among its many uses, a LinkedIn profile is a great place to get a refresher on who a person is, what they do, and what they’re working on. It’s also a great place to declare yourself as a professional, prepare to meet with people, and generally just keep track of who is in your network. 

As such, now is a good time to update your profile so that people who come looking for you will get the latest in your career adventures. Add enough substance and depth so that a person scanning your profile will have a good sense of who you are. In addition to a few details in all of your job listings, tell us what you learned there as well — what you’ve learned is much more important that what you’ve done.

Finally, update the summary section. Give us a sense of what’s important to you and what you’re ready for. What are you working on? Who are the kinds of people that you help? How is it that you are able to help them?

We are living in strange times and now, more than ever, we need each other and the strength of our relationships to pull us through. All of the above activities are as essential to building and maintaining a professional network as attending events and meeting new people. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”

Now is a good time to review your network and freshen some those relationships.

Happy networking.

If want to know more, check out Helpful: A Guide to Life, Careers, and the Art of Networking.