Advanced Networking Skills
At senior levels the ability to make contacts at meetings and conferences is vital in developing and expanding your business acquaintanceships. Such Networking Skills can seem easy with friends but more difficult to put into practice when you walk into a room full of business people talking to each other and ignoring you. In that respect Networking events can become intimidating and business etiquette a mine-field of lost opportunities and feeling like you look stupid.
Why do you Need Advanced Networking Skills?
In today’s business world the ability to network is increasingly recognised as a more successful and long-term approach to creating and sustaining business relationships. It is the art of informal relationships based on affiliation. Such relationships are noted for their openness of information, mutual dependency and long term rather than short term gains. The factor that glues these characteristics together is trust. In bringing together the qualities mentioned above it becomes clear that there is a great deal of the personal relationship involved in good networking. As in all relationships, then, Trust is the key factor.
How we deport ourselves and what we say and do gives away how we feel about the relationship that we feel exists. That is a complicated sentence but one that lays out the reason why a course that takes a close look at networking is important. Not only must we be aware of what we say and do in creating and sustaining the relationship, but we also need to think about how we see the relationship and its importance to us and our own values. This is especially important as success or failure here will depend on how you see business relationships in context with your life.
If we see networking as purely a “work thing”, we miss the point. Many commentators use the analogy of a marriage to describe a network relationship. There is mutual dependency and trust, as in a marriage. If either is lost then the marriage is in trouble. If you view network relationships as loose and unimportant things then both parties begin to view the importance of the relationship differently and may act accordingly – looking elsewhere for the trust that once existed. Thus the network relationship will be lost to another, more diligent networker.
Successful networking, therefore, is the ability to engender trust which comes from shared goals, ideas and even mindsets – which are sustained by actions and outcomes. Networking, because of this, has its own business etiquette, a way in which people expect to be romanced and expect to be treated once they have committed themselves.
Is Networking part of the business transaction then? Yes, but one that is very much at the informal level and not necessarily part of any Contract. It is effective communications skills. It is recognizing that the creation of friendship-based relations can clear the way for multi-million pound deals that are good for all parties. It can take place at any level and for any reason; from internal business networking to promote your department, to career networking on a personal level, to specific networking, for example women networking events.
This Advanced Networking Skills Course is designed to help you look at your present interpersonal communications skills; identify and overcome communications barriers and give you some useful tools to assist you in opening communications opportunities to your benefit. It looks at the importance of Emotional Intelligence in handling your networking and the relationships created.