There are many reasons why business students can be successful in their later career life in business. They can have certain attributes or abilities that allow them to be successful. But also their networks have a big impact on their success. But which part is actually more important? Is it more important to have a good network or have a good professional competence?
First of all it is important to distinguish between objective and subjective success in career life. Objective career success is observable career accomplishment, which can be reliably judged by others. Examples for objective career success would be an increase in compensation or ascendancy. In comparison to objective career success, subjective career success more refers to individual appraisals of one’s career success. Several studies showed that networking refers to subjective and objective success factors (Forret & Dougherty, 2004; Langford, 2000; Michael & Yukl, 1993; Orpen, 1996). So I can concentrate on networking as a whole and do not have to distinguish between them.
Mark Cummuta, who is called the new pope of networking, says that networking needs to be effective, consistent and dedicated. With effective he is not referring to the quality of networks, but rather to the quality. He states that to have good network contacts is by far the most important point of all in order to have a good career. He also refers to a Chinese word “Guanxi” which stands for relationships among people. The basic idea behind is to give knowledge to other people without expecting anything back for this directly. One should be aware of the fact, that one day it will be rewarded. In order to give this a certain structure, Chinese students often often connect in an early stage of their careers in these Guanxi. Those ties are often stronger than the ties to the company. Networking is also the most effective way to secure professional positions. There seems to be a big correlation between the thickness of the tie and the network value. It is therefore very important to take care of the network. Therefore it is necessary to be proactive to maintain networks. If people just contact the person when they need them, this seems to be not a very successful strategy.
But for sure there are good arguments against that whole networking hype. John Agno, who is coach for leadership skills, argues that it more effective to achieve the goals for the career without networking, just by simple doing the job with good hard skills. He states that hard skills are as effective to get the reputation in the company to be a hard working, trustworthy employee. He is by the way one of the few who also concentrates on the benefit of the company and not only on his own benefit. He uses networks only for the exchange of knowledge and ideas. I think that in that whole discussion about weather networks are important or not, most people do not pay much attention to this aspect. Another aspect that is mostly overseen in this discussion is that some people are better communicators than others and it is easier for them to do networking.
What can we conclude from that? If you ask London Business School what is the biggest impact for your career, they say: “From one-week Executive Education courses through to our full-time, 15 to 21-month MBA programme, studying at London Business School will equip you with the skills, knowledge and networks to assist you in realizing your potential.” Similar results occur if you go to other business schools. So for them the network is as important as important as skills and knowledge. I totally agree with that and I would conclude that in the end a mix of both, networking and hard skills is the best way of doing things. If a person just hangs out at networking events without spending time on his desk or the other way round, he is not going to be as successful as he could be. I think that a mix of those three aspects will lead to the biggest success.
http://www.cio.de/karriere/personalfuehrung/850622/
http://www.laser.uni-erlangen.de/papers/paper/72.pdf
http://belladomain.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/effective_networker_study.pdf
http://www.london.edu/theschool/careerimpact.html
2 comments:
Very nice, Martin. Lays the groundwork for debate arguments, too.
I think being able to build a large network is a sign of a good business leader. If a person is truly successful they have built their business by the relationships they have with clients, partners, employees and other businesses. To me all of these people can be consider people they network with. I'm getting ready to take an online executive course from Thunderbird and one of the things I'm most looking forward to is building new business relationships. These are just the beginning steps to my career and I think both, furthering my education and new business relationships, are essential to success.
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