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Peer-to-Peer
Power Networking—What Does Senior Management
Do
to Stay Connected?
Yes, Virginia, it
IS Lonely at the Top, and Often Cold—Whether You’re
the Jolly Gift Giver at the North Pole or in the Ranks of
Senior Management. |
K.
Jack Speer
President
The Delta Associates |
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If you’re in senior
management, from director to CEO, it seems that all you do is
network—with direct reports, key customers and prospects, your
finance people, and with staff involved in
crisis after crisis. Everyone wants some of your time and they’d
like you to be involved in their issue.
So why is it that senior managers are
notorious for becoming isolated and insulated?
Bill
Gardner
AMD Director
Corporate Growth &
Development |
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One corporate VP
recently promoted to the inner circle of a CEO’s senior
management team achieved her goal by being a savvy
networker. She confided in me, nonetheless, that since her
recent promotion (less than a year) she has done practically no networking at all.
Truly the most difficult kind of
networking for senior managers is peer-to-peer--when you’re
sowing the seeds for tomorrow and developing trust with
contacts you can call on for an outside perspective on
what you’re experiencing and the strategies you’re
contemplating.
It's an activity that any senior manager would declare a must,
but often in vain for the time to carry it out.
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Privatizing the Senior Manager Networking
Function—How a Private Entrepreneur Established a Senior
Management Forum
If you could set aside a morning in which you
could walk into a room with a small group of peers with whom you
can immediately establish rapport, would that be worth your
time? Most senior managers with whom I’ve visited say it would. Several have tried expensive seminars with headliner guru
speakers only to find their peers weren’t present. Others have
tried their own professional associations and found their peers
most noticeable for their absence (Click here to see "
Reinventing Associations").
| Enter an entrepreneur to fill the vacuum. For
a modest cost Aryae Coopersmith, of Learning Synergies,
has established senior management forums (12 to 15 people at any
given meeting) that put peers together with the topics they want
to discuss.
Coopersmith puts the meetings together—the
people and the topics—in consultation with his members. He
serves as gatekeeper and carefully makes sure that the people
attending the meeting are professionally congruent (similar
company sizes, company role, experience, etc.) There is no board
for Coopersmith’s organization, although an advisory board
helps him work through current issues. He attributes the success
of the forum to the flexibility he has in making final decisions
about the program without getting bogged down in boards and
committees, as often happens in non-profit organizations. |
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Aryae
Coopersmith
Principal
Learning Synergies
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Bill Gardner,
Director of Corporate Growth & Development for Advanced
Micro Devices, is enthusiastic about his membership in the High
Tech HR Forums. "I feel that those involved in the Forum are my
peers. Aryae works to make sure that each of the people involved
in the Forum share similar responsibilities in their
organizations at similar levels." Gardner belongs to one of
the directors’ forums. There is also a VP forum.
Gardner’s group meets once a quarter. The
High Tech HR Forums have introduced regional meetings that combine
the various forums, developing subjects of common interest to
the larger group.
The regional meetings in which Gardner
participates include short presentations from subject
matter experts (called "thought leaders"), usually
from the field of high tech HR.
The thought leaders make a 20 to 30 minute
presentation and then answer questions. For the remainder
of the meeting there is dialogue among the members and thought
leaders.
When participants come
into the "local" (small group) meetings they write "hot topics" on the board.
These topics are issues that the members are
wrestling with now, on which they would like peer input. The
group sets the priorities for the discussion. There
are also email lists that members can
use to stay in touch between meetings.
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