As part of my ongoing quest to keep my career moving I picked up a copy of Who Gets Promoted, Who Doesn't and Why Ten Things You'd Better Do If You Want to Get Ahead by Donald Asher. I’m only a few chapters in but I just ran across this line “Book learners – those who primarily get their information from static media – often don’t become fast track careerists,”. This makes me wonder if reading this book is really the right thing to do ;-) but also serves to reinforce the valuable advice in the Manager-Tools podcast series, advancing your career requires you to meet people and build your network.
As a high D high C (as defined by DiSC profiling) the behavior I naturally exhibit is not conducive to building a network and unfortunately it has taken me longer that is best for my career to learn this. By networking I am not talking about a list of people in a book or on a website or computer somewhere, I am talking about a group of people whom I actually know something about. For my network I prefer whenever possible to have actually met the person, or at least spoken to them on the phone. I have a few people in my network whose face I have never seen or whose voice I have never heard but most of those I have had some extended contact with via e-mail of some other communication method. For those that don’t fit any of the above it’s time I reached out and got to know something more about them.
What are you doing to build your network?
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