The Connector’s Advantage

by Michelle Tillis Lederman

  Mindset Mission

  Invest Time

  Think of five people you want to reach out to this week. Give yourself a reason to make it easier to follow through. It doesn’t have to be an earth-shatteringly good reason. It could just be “You popped into my mind and I thought I would check in.”

  In person:Who: ________________________Reason: _________________

  Phone call:Who: ________________________Reason: _________________

  Email:Who: ________________________Reason: _________________

  Video chat:Who: ________________________Reason: _________________

  ___________:Who: ________________________Reason: _________________

  Now reach out. Then think of five people you want to reach out to next week. Keep a list going in your calendar of people you want to reach out to. I have a list of people in NYC that I want to connect with live. When I plan a city day, I reach out to see if we can get together. It can be as easy as saying, “Hey, I’m going to be in your neighborhood this Wednesday; are you around?” Even if you don’t get together, you’ve come to the front of their mind and kept the connection alive.

  Choose your channel to connect. Email is the least invasive but also the least responsive and easiest to ignore. The most proximate channel for connection is face-to-face, but Skype is a great backup. Next most proximate are phone calls, then text/instant chat. They have a speed of response that aren’t usually found via email. If you’re unsure of the other person’s interest, choose the least proximate channel—email—to initiate. I’ll sometimes follow up with a voicemail if I’m worried my email tone may be misconstrued.

  If you are wondering if there are better times of the day or week than others, my answer is it depends. I have one client who works in government, and between 5 and 6 p.m. is the sweet spot. He’s just too busy during the day to ever pick up my call. Occasionally, I’ll try 8 a.m. with corporate clients. If they are early birds, often their assistant isn’t in yet and they pick up the phone. I personally don’t feel that there’s a bad time of year to make a connection. Sometimes even the holidays are a great time to meet for coffee.

  If you are not yet convinced connecting is worth the investment of time, perhaps Kristen Pressner can change your mind. She is the global head of human resources for a $12-billion and 35,000-person diagnostics company, the mother of four, and the sole breadwinner for her family. She is one busy lady, yet still found time for an interview for this book. She shares, “I spend 50% of my time investing in relationships that will remove 80% of my work later.” When pressed on the statistic, she explains, “Connecting with a wide range of people is in the ‘important but not urgent box.’ It is a leap of faith that the payback—as obscure and unsure as it feels now—will come and it’s a good investment. I’ve always found this to be true.” Me too, Kristen, which is why I am writing this book!

  Making Time for Connections

  Juggling all the demands on your time is something everyone struggles with. I don’t think balance exists, but choices do. We can all make choices about what we want to fit in and what we don’t. The bigger challenge is how. So I reached out to Dorie Clark, author of Entrepreneurial You; Reinventing You; and Stand Out; and adjunct professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business (DorieClark.com). She receives daily requests for her time and still prioritizes connecting.

  She shares, “As you become more successful, inevitably there’s a shift: instead of having to petition others to meet with you, people start to seek you out. At first, that can be enormously flattering. But as you get busier, you realize that while a certain amount of ‘non-strategic’ networking is a mitzvah, it can quickly derail your productivity and ability to accomplish your own work.” She shares three tips for fitting it all in.

  Use content creation as a first pass. Dorie has a simple way to deal with requests from people who haven’t done their homework before reaching out. If they ask a question already answered in her articles or books, she simply refers them to the resource in lieu of meeting with them. You may be thinking this doesn’t apply to you, but it could. With the access and ease of technology today, anyone can create content via blog posts, articles, videos, or podcasts to answer the questions you hear most often. Alternatively, if you are the go-to person for something, help develop another go-to person. Consider the other resources and other routes to get the information they seek from you.

  Combine networking meetings with your existing schedule. Much of the time, people are just seeking to initiate or extend contact without a specific question. Rather than making time for individual sit-downs with everyone, Dorie suggests you think about events you’re already scheduled to attend (like a charity event or professional association gathering) or activities you’re already planning to do (such as take a class at the gym). Perhaps you can invite your new contact to that event and multitask. I often meet someone right after a workout at a diner. After all, I have to eat. (I do warn them I will be sweaty.)

  Host group gatherings. This is my favorite Dorie-ism. I was honored and admittedly a little confused, the first time I was invited to what I fondly call Dorie’s Dinners. She frequently hosts group dinner gatherings and invites new contacts as well as those she wants to stay connected with to all attend. She is not buying a room full of people dinner. She picks a place willing to give separate checks so everyone has the freedom to leave when they need to. As Dorie explains, “This provides a great way to get to know someone casually—and to see if I’d like to deepen the connection later—and also provides value to them, because they’re meeting multiple new people in addition to me.” It is also extremely efficient, if you ask me. Now she cohosts dinners to expand her network and we are planning one together soon.

  Now I am not unrealistic: I get it, I have a graveyard of business cards on my desk. You can’t reach out to and follow up with everyone, so don’t. I give you permission to not follow up with everyone. Be selective. Stretch out the frequency with which you touch base with and nurture your network. It is okay to position yourself as the recipient of the reach-out and leave the initiative to the other person sometimes. I will never be able to reach out to all the people who hand me a card, but if you email me, you will always get a response. It comes down to this: don’t say you will if you are not sure you will. An action stated and not executed erodes credibility. We’re all busy, and it’s not always easy to make time to build and maintain new connections. With these strategies, you can take control of your schedule and therefore be more likely to enjoy the connections you do make.

  Connectors don’t act from a place of fear or scarcity, rather they believe in abundant opportunities for all. They give credit to others and don’t feel like they’re in competition with anyone but themselves. They believe that things don’t just happen to you—you make them happen. Abundance begets abundance.

  Refresh Your Memory

  Abundance is what a Connector believes in: an abundance of opportunities, an abundance of work, and an abundance of relationships.

  Acknowledge the fear. Scarcity is understandably scary. To overcome scarce thinking, acknowledge and seek to understand the source of the fear.

  Trust yourself, your skills, and your value to build internal confidence and access abundant thinking. Stop judging yourself in relation to other people.

  Give credit. When you shine the light on someone else, it reflects back on you. Look for opportunities to credit others.

  Practice gratitude by focusing on the positive. Encouraging the practice of gratitude in others propels abundant thinking.

  Be motivated by others. Coming from a place of abundance doesn’t mean you never have moments of envy. Use the feeling not to be competitive with them, but to be motivated by them.

  Invest time—it’s one of the best things you can do as a Connector. Find the underused time of the day or week when you’re less productive on work and use it to con
nect.

  Connectors Trust

  “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

  Ernest Hemingway

  There Is No Connection without Trust

  Trust is at the core of a Connector: the ability to trust yourself, the inclination to trust others, and the potential to be trusted by others. But what exactly is trust? Webster’s Dictionary defines trust as “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” An alternative definition is the confident expectation of something, hope. I like that one, as hope is an indication of faith or belief without proof.

  Trust is this amorphous concept that we all know but each of us may define it a little differently. To me, trust is having confidence in a person to complete a task, and it’s how you expect someone to respond to a given situation. It’s unwavering and consistent. To explore what trust is, I took the question to my training programs. During a module on building trust, I ask a group to write a definition of the word. I have overheard participants discuss the idea from the noun, verb, and adjective angles and struggle to define it. At the end, they always come up with a definition, but I have never gotten the same definition twice. Two have always stuck with me:

  Trust is the expectation of predictability.

  Trust is a feeling or connection that creates a bond rooted in certainty, reliability, and consistency. There is no timeline for creation or destruction. It is fluid.

  I love that: trust is fluid. I think it is also situational. I trust my dog to let me know if there’s someone breaking into my house, but I do not trust my dog to not eat my food if I leave it unattended. We have different levels and types of trust with different people in different situations.

  When you are connecting with someone, your bond grows stronger and deeper along with your knowledge of the other person and how your interactions will flow with them. We all have that one friend we know we’ll love seeing a certain movie with, and another one we call when we want to go shopping, and another we’ll chat about work with. Because of the trust we’ve built up in the relationship over a period of time, we know which friend will give us candid feedback on a career issue, or have advice for child rearing, or job searching, and so on. Without the faith you have in the person and your relationship, you wouldn’t be reaching out to them. You wouldn’t open up. Bottom line—there is no connection without trust.

  You Must Trust Yourself First

  Self-trust is not dissimilar to self-esteem, or inner confidence, a quality my research showed was felt at a higher rate in Connectors. We are all familiar with the saying, “Trust your gut.” For those who rely more on facts and data, trusting your gut can be uncomfortable. On top of that, we must overcome our formative years, relying on peers, parents, and pop culture to form opinions on right and wrong, cool and uncool. We spend so much of our life evaluating how we should act, how we should feel, and what decisions we should make from the perspective of other people. As a result, it is hard to separate our opinions from the opinions that surround us.

  Cultivating positive connections will bolster self-trust. Many of us have toxic relationships that we may not realize are eroding our self-trust. I had a friend in college who was always there for me, always offered to drop everything if I asked. I never asked. I didn’t need someone to be extreme, so it didn’t occur to me to offer to be extreme for her. But when I didn’t offer, she deemed me a terrible friend. I was always questioning if I was being a good enough friend, worried about her assessment of me. I was on eggshells and the friendship didn’t last. Reduce your exposure to the toxic relationships in your life. Spend time with people who are reinforcing and resilient. You become more like those who you spend the most time with.

  Self-trust stems from an increased awareness of what you are thinking and feeling and not just to what you are doing. It is a critical success factor in your career and work. It is the ability to share your knowledge and allow others to experience the real you. When you trust yourself, you listen to your inner wisdom and don’t minimize what you know. Trusting yourself is a learned skill. It is a habit that will become muscle memory. When you don’t trust yourself, you can hardly expect that others would be able to trust you. So start with yourself.

  Mindset Mission

  Increase Your Self-Trust

  Just as gratitude journaling can help bolster an abundant mindset, acknowledgment tracking can build the muscle of self-trust. A few questions can prompt your mind to recognize what you do well and bring it to the surface. Make a daily practice of answering a few of the acknowledgment opportunities listed below. You do not need to do all of them every day. Allow yourself the empathy you’d extend to another. Find your habit.

  What is one thing I did well today?

  I am proud that I _______.

  Today I accomplished _______.

  I had a good encounter with _______.

  I overcame it when _______ happened.

  I felt good about myself when _______.

  I had a positive impact on _______ (person or situation).

  The Four Pillars of Trust

  I talk a lot about being aware of how people perceive you, building your personal brand, and becoming clear on how you want to be known. It starts with that instant assessment someone makes of you. But that is (hopefully) just the beginning of a relationship. If you want to create a lasting connection, what makes the difference is the long-term perception that the other person has of you. Your lasting brand is built on the belief that what they know and expect about you is what they get. It’s the promise of the experience they will have when interacting with you. Relationships are about trust—because trust is the foundation of connection.

  So how do you infuse trust into the impression you are making? In my work, I have identified four fundamental aspects of trust which I call the pillars of trust: Authenticity, Vulnerability, Transparency, and Consistency. Each of these pillars is an integral part of building and maintaining trust with those around you, and none can be neglected.

  1.Authenticity

  The first Law of Likability is that the real you is the best you. That doesn’t mean we don’t flex and adjust to enable connections with one another. It does mean that we stop acting like we think others want us to. There is no “work persona”—there is only you. You have to be willing to share some information about yourself, because if you are not bringing the real you, there’s no ability to connect or trust. The Connector mindset of being open and accepting will enable authentic interactions and is the foundation for trust.

  2.Vulnerability

  Vulnerability used to be a completely offensive idea to me. After all, who wants to be vulnerable? If I am vulnerable, I am leaving myself open to being hurt or taken advantage of. People will think I am weak. Any of those thoughts resonate with you? I get it. It took a long time to realize that vulnerability is not weakness; it’s openness. Vulnerability means self-disclosure, acknowledging your mistakes, and being okay with being imperfect. Vulnerability leads to credibility. Which would you rather a manager who criticizes you when you admit a mistake or a manager who takes the moment to share a similar experience they went through or a time when they messed up and how they recovered from it? Allowing others to see behind the curtain is being vulnerable. Using your experiences to teach allows others to learn from you and establishes credibility, connection, and trust.

  3.Transparency

  BusinessDictionary.com defines transparency as the lack of hidden agendas accompanied by the availability of full information required for collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision-making. Transparent leadership is key to creating a culture of trust between leaders and their employees. When employees are kept in the loop and understand their role in the overarching purpose and goals of the company, they are more engaged and have greater trust in their employer. It comes down to this: if you don’t share inf
ormation, people will come up with their own answers to their questions. They will spin their own stories, which will rarely be the ones you want them to be. Keep people in the loop even if you don’t have all the answers, and they will trust that you will tell them when you do.

  4.Consistency

  To be consistent is to act the same way over time. Consistency is the cornerstone of trust. If trust is an expectation of predictability, that cannot exist without consistency—since that expectation and belief is formed through experience. At the end of the day, all of these aspects are needed, but they won’t matter unless you demonstrate authenticity, vulnerability, and transparency on a regular basis. They are not just do-it-once concepts. You have to consistently apply these four pillars time after time in order to build and maintain trust.