Cultivating or Leveraging a Professional Network – What is the Difference?

Once you have the correct mindset for developing a professional network, it is time to cultivate relationships to leverage them in the future. It is always astounding to me that folks start their professional networks by trying to leverage them in a job search. I’ve even seen many people ask directly for a job from someone they do not know.

That strategy is like asking someone to marry you on the first date. It may work on occasion, but how stable is the relationship?  

Cultivating relationships is essential to building a stable professional network that you can leverage in the future. Across industries and geographies, your ability to connect, empathize, and influence others is crucial to your success; however, many folks struggle with connecting authentically with other professionals. 

To understand how to cultivate authentic relationships, you must understand the mutual value in them. Therefore, you’ll want to start with a clear purpose in developing your network and then understand the connections needed to achieve mutual value in the relationship.

A purpose focuses your intention and meaning behind developing relationships. To determine your intent, ask yourself the following questions that allow you to talk passionately and share information.

1. What is a problem or systemic issue that I’m interested in solving?
2. What is your north star?
3. What skills do you love to use and always endeavor to learn more?
4. Where do you spend your time outside of your daily work?
5. Whom do you enjoy spending time with, and what do you talk about most frequently?

Once you have examined some of these questions or others, you can define a clear purpose for reaching out to professionals in your field to cultivate relationships based on mutuality. With a purpose in mind, you’ll want to build a list of folks with mutual interests to contact. Here are three steps to get you started.

• First, identify folks already in our network sharing your purpose. Reconnect to share your current thoughts and ask questions that you have.  
• Second, ask your connections for two other connections that share your purpose.
• Finally, scan social media channels like LinkedIn to find folks outside your six-degree and start following them. Use hashtags based on your purpose to identify folks and organizations.  For more on building authentic relationships through social media, check out the following LinkedIn Learning Video by (5) Michael Taylor | LinkedIn

These strategies will get you started on cultivating relations. In my next posts, I’ll talk more about stabilizing these relationships through mutuality and more specifics on strategies for leveraging relationships when you need them.  

If you have questions, feel free to post here.