Sometimes I feel that Steve and I are living parallel lives. He blogged the other day about being interviewed for an internal paper on Leadership – and I was interviewed the other day by Susanne Doyle Morris. Susanne is writing a book about how Women leaders can find success through networking and how female leaders use their networks internally and externally and wanted to talk to different women working in male dominated worlds to find out their tips for success.
Of course, it’s all about people networking with other people, so being technical, I immediately started talking about hubs and routers :-0. You see, some people are natural hubs, some people act as routers, and some people are endpoints. Lets start with endpoints.
Endpoints (or nodes if we’re staying with the technology analogy) need information. They often don’t have the connections to enough people in the workplace to be able to network efficiently and get the information they need – especially in larger organisations. so they look to hubs to get them the information and connect them to the right people in the organisation.
Hubs have lots and lots of connections with several people throughout their network and will provide the answer to any of the endpoints that come to the hubs for information: often passing an endpoint off to another endpoint. If a hub doesn’t have the answer directly, they will often know someone who has the answer.
Routers pass information onto other hubs to find the answer that they need. So an endpoint will sometimes find themselves connecting to a hub (who turns into a router), being passed through another hub (who may or may not have the answer or the connection needed) and on to another hub or an endpoints.
Hubs and routers are the best connected people inside an organisation and endpoints should find out who their hubs are and make a strong connection with them. The best and strongest connections are between hubs and routers themselves (think fully meshed here now). These are the most valuable connections you can make.
The only problem with this model is that endpoints often have nothing of value to offer a hub. Endpoints only want information – not to give information. And a hub/router, will soon realise this and drop the connection. Hubs and routers get far more value from other hubs and routers.
So if you’re an endpoint – how do you start to get connections – start to become a hub? Well my advice is very similar to Steve’s final paragraph.
When you start to connect with someone, give a little bit more information than you receive. In a conversation when someone asks how you are – don’t just say “I’m fine, thank you”, give a little bit of information about yourself – open up the conversation and encourage dialogue with the other person. Say “I’m fine thank you. What a lovely day to be here. I’m now glad I watered my pumpkin patch this morning before i set off to come here” (or something similar)
Something like this, sharing a bit of personal information opens up the dialogue and encourages the other person to ask about your hobby / garden / gadget / car / whatever and starts the 2 way conversation going.
And you’ll start to be a little hub – and watch your network start to grow…
