Often, young managers and leaders get confused by what networking skills really mean and why these skills are so crucial? Let’s begin to explain this with a hypothetical but extremely representative example.
Chris had no intention of expanding his network when he was hired as the production manager of a newly acquired e-commerce company. The main issue he faced was a lack of time: where would he find the time to lead his team through a substantial overhaul of the supply chain process and then consider strategic matters like a corporate expansion?
He had no choice but to shut himself in his office to carve out time and yet get home to his family at a reasonable hour. Meanwhile, he dealt with day-to-day concerns, such as a repeated feud with his sales director over special orders that harmed delivery efficiency.
Chris’s situation isn’t uncommon. Managers go through the leadership transition, a turning point in their careers that forces them to reconsider themselves and their responsibilities. In the process, experts have discovered that networking skills — the process of establishing a web of personal relationships that can provide support, feedback, insight, resources, and information — are both a self-evident and a dreaded growth obstacle for aspiring leaders.
An Introduction to Networking Skills
A large majority of the managers believe networking is either dishonest or manipulative — at best, an elegant means of putting people to work. Not surprisingly, we encounter numerous managers who struggle to overcome this fundamental barrier for every manager who instinctively builds and maintains a beneficial network. However, the alternative to networking is a failure — either in pursuing or achieving a leadership position.
So, what does it mean to have networking skills?
Leadership networking skills are all about building and utilizing your networks in a way that helps your organization’s work and goals by strengthening relationships and fortifying partnerships. In today’s workplace, the ability to influence others in non-hierarchical ways, rather than merely through positional/hierarchical power, is critical.
What Are The 3 Types of Leadership Networking Skills?
ABB, a Swiss-Swedish multinational corporation, uses e-learning for up to 80% of all employee training. From 2012 to 2015, they experienced a six-fold increase in supply chain management online training. [Source]
According to the research from KPMG, e-learning motivators for employees are individual learning pace (95%) and no traveling (84%). [Source]
A great majority of companies expect corporate learning to change significantly within the next three years—both the capabilities imparted and the new agility required to match the faster pace of business. Most also acknowledge that these developments will probably have a material cost: over that period, more than 60 percent of the respondents’ companies plan to increase their learning-and-development spending and 66 percent to increase the number of formal-learning hours per employee.
Companies have spent decades perfecting brick-and-mortar corporate learning and development universities, but many of these facilities shuttered in 2020 because of COVID-19. For L&D professionals, 2021 was a year of experimentation, and it only proved that hybrid learning is here to stay.
Companies can reskill and upskill their current people via continuous learning, allowing them to personalize their careers like a playlist.
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