How Networking Can Help You Become the Best Version of Yourself

We all know we should be networking throughout our career, but that doesn't mean we're actually doing it. It takes time and a lot of energy, and it can be really hit-or-miss whether it's worth your while.

Which is why I'm so intrigued by the concept in Pamela Ryckman's book, Stiletto Network: Inside the Women's Power Circles That Are Changing the Face of Business.

Ryckman has discovered an alternative type of network that's not only effective but fun, where women come together to share ideas, exchange advice and even invest in new companies. She's found that small groups of women yield powerful results in business — creating billions of dollars in transactions, snagging corporate board seats and funding companies. All because they've built strong friendships with like-minded professionals who serve as sounding boards and cheerleaders to help them along the way.

LINKEDIN: How can busy professionals find time to network?

RYCKMAN: They key is to make it fun, so it doesn't feel like work.

When I began to unearth these groups across the nation, I learned that members never thought they were "networking" in the traditional sense. They thought they were having dinner with their girlfriends, having fun and helping each other.

They didn't arrive at the table with an angle, and they weren't trying to shake down other women for their connections. When they shared of themselves -- offering guidance, intel, or insight, or making introductions and recommendations -- they weren't putting a dollar in the relationship bank with the intention to withdraw it someday. Instead they were spending time listening to and advocating for treasured friends. So it wasn't hard to find time.

Stiletto Networks enable women to do what men have done since time immemorial: merge business and friendship, and capitalize on connections. Women are now doing deals not because of affirmative action or an altruistic intent to lift up the gender, but because it is smart business with people they know and trust. And in the process they're having so much fun!

LINKEDIN: What are the benefits of a networking group?

RYCKMAN: I talk about a lot of high-powered women in the book, but it’s important to remember they weren’t all wealthy or accomplished when they started these groups. They credit these groups with cheering them on, giving them courage, and facilitating their success. And they say that having the support and validation from other women – finding women who love you but also give you a kick in the pants when necessary – made all the difference.

What’s so refreshing is that in these groups, there’s no singular definition for success. Being a CEO isn’t necessary or right for all women. Stiletto Networks aren’t about getting to the next rung on the ladder; they’re about living your best life, feeling happy and whole and fulfilled. They encourage each woman to become the best version of herself.

Jacky Carter

Top Advice: Don’t Rely On Your Friends For Advice

Over the past few weeks, I have noticed a significant difference in the way older and younger people see the importance of experts. It’s a classic generation gap.

People in their 40s or older often seek the help of experts when they face a difficult decision. In most cases, they source the experts from friends’ recommendations. In contrast, my friends and students in their 20s and 30s seem not to value expertise much at all. When they face big decisions, they poll their friends.

I don’t believe this is due to the convenience of reaching out to friends on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. More likely, it has to do with trust, and the fact fewer young people have peers who are truly world-class experts.

Nevertheless, relying heavily on your friends for big choices in your life is not the right answer.

Consistent advice from friends is not the same as expert advice

Take one of my former students. Two weeks ago, I heard from him that he had recently been fired from a job he clearly didn’t enjoy. He realized after only a couple of months on the job that it was not a good fit, but stayed because his friends almost unanimously recommended that he not leave before one year because it would look bad on his resume.

As I explained in How Long Should You Stay At Your Job?, it doesn’t make sense to stay at a job to make your resume look better if you are unhappy. Unhappiness on the job usually leads to a marked reduction in motivation, which leads to poor performance. This is in fact what happened, and ultimately resulted in his firing.

“Why didn’t you reach out to me when you realized you joined the wrong company?” I asked. He replied that he was too embarrassed to call, and because he received such consistent answers from his friends. I’m sorry he felt he couldn’t come to me, because I wanted to help. His friends didn’t have a broad enough perspective or enough experience to know the right answer.

Don’t confuse emotional support with expert advice

Over and over again, I see examples of people taking sub-optimal advice from their friends when making critical life decisions. I see young people turn down offers after their friends advise them to hold out for the right title. They take this advice, despite the fact that their friends have had little success themselves, and don’t know that title pales in comparison to quality of company when choosing which company you should work for if you want to build a successful career.

Yesterday, I met a prospective client who built his personal financial plan based on friends’ recommendations. None of his friends had a background in the investment business, but he trusted them nonetheless, because their plans appeared to be well thought out. He wanted to seek the advice of an expert, but he didn’t know how to identify one. Therefore he went with his friends’ advice; now he has a sub-optimal plan.

Emotional support makes it easier for you to carry out a course of action that you’ve decided is right. But don’t mistake it for advice. Advice helps you make a difficult decision. Both are important, but they are different.

It is highly unlikely friends can provide expert advice, but they can be very useful to help you find experts. I often tap them for names, especially if I know my friends have faced a problem similar to the one I am concerned with.

Experts are accomplished

I adore my friends, but I don’t rely on their judgment to figure out who is an expert in her field. Over my 25 year Venture Capital career I learned over and over again that resume, especially accomplishment, is the best way to evaluate expertise. Of course you need to do your due diligence to make sure the accomplishment quoted in a resume is real.

As I pointed out in You learn more from success than failure, only through success can you hone your game. Just because someone is successful, don’t assume they won’t engage with you. But don't try to cold call them. Always get an introduction.

When searching for advice, I look for someone who has broad and successful experience in my particular problem area. Why should I trust someone’s opinion if they don’t have that experience? I would never go to a surgeon who hadn’t faced every possible problem with my particular injury.

Online celebrities are not necessarily experts

Some people I know confuse celebrity with accomplishment. In the age of social media, people can project a broad profile online with little real world success to justify their platform. Many of my students mistakenly rely on entrepreneurship blogs that have been recommended by their friends because they are popular or well written. Just because someone has a popular blog or has published a book doesn’t mean that person is an expert. As I have said before, only through success do you learn the lessons that really make a difference.

When we set out to build our investment team at Wealthfront, we looked for experts who were well respected and highly successful. We were fortunate to recruit Burt Malkiel as our Chief Investment Officer and Charley Ellis to our investment advisory board. Burt is a renowned Princeton economics professor, author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street, the book that launched the index fund revolution, and a former Vanguard board member for 28 years. Charley founded Greenwich Associates, the most respected strategy consulting firm to the financial service industry, and also sat on the Vanguard board. He has taught at the Yale School of Management and Harvard Business School. The kind of knowledge Burt and Charley have cannot be attained in any way other than through success.

Seek advice from the best to make the best decisions

I know this attitude makes me seem old school. When it comes to my choice of advisors, I am. It’s much more convenient to reach out to friends through social media tools, and solicit their thoughts about just about anything than it is to listen to experts. But just because polling your friends is convenient doesn’t mean it’s the right choice.

When you need an advisor, seek experts whose accomplishments give them the perspective to advise.

How Long Should You Stay At Your Job?

Over the years many people who have been granted options or RSUs have asked me for advice as to how long they should stay at their employer. As with most questions the answer is it depends.

It depends on your happiness, the company’s prospects and your career path. For many people, four years seems to be about the right span of time. It’s no coincidence vesting periods for most companies are four years, but your decision to stay at a job should not be driven by your vesting schedule.

Don’t job hop, but don’t be miserable, either

People who are interested in maximizing the diversification of their private company option or RSU portfolios tend to only stay at each company for 1 – 2 years.  The downside of such a strategy is future employers will regard you as a job hopper.

The highest quality startups want employees willing to commit to the company’s cause.

The highest quality startups tend to have their pick of the best talent, and they want employees willing to commit to the company’s cause. Therefore, the only people who will want to hire job hoppers will be the companies you shouldn’t want to work for. As a result you may get diversification, but a diversified portfolio of stock options that are not likely to be worth anything is a poor strategy.

That is not to say that you should stay at a company if you are unhappy.  I have often heard people advise their friends that they need to stay at a job for at least a year to avoid the job hopper label. More often than not I have seen unhappy people who stick around lose their motivation, which often leads to them being terminated. Being fired is far worse than having one job on your resume that lasted less than a year.

In fact, if at any point in your employment you are unhappy because of a job circumstance that is unlikely to change, my advice is to leave. People will respect you for it. I certainly respect people who do.

Vesting is four years for a reason

Stock option and RSU vesting is most often mandated at four years because, frankly, that is what companies have observed as the attention span of most employees. The character of the employer changes significantly over four years. People who like working at startups tend not to enjoy working for an established company as much, for instance. Four years is also a reasonable amount of time to devote to a particular challenge in your career. After four years, employees tend to get restless and want to look for something new.

Your initial grant shouldn’t be your final one

You shouldn’t necessarily leave just because the vesting on your original grant is up. Life is a series of tradeoffs, and option grants are no exceptions. Enlightened companies grant stock to existing employees for notable achievements, promotions and continued service. I recommend to every CEO on whose board I sit that they should grant additional shares (vesting over four years) to employees when they reach their 2 ½ to 3-year anniversaries.

Life is a series of tradeoffs, and option grants are no exceptions.

The size of the refresh grant is often 80 to 100% of what the employee in question would have received had they joined the company as a new employee. The grant can either be made once every four years or a quarter of my proposed grant can be made each year. The logic of the refresh grant after only 2 ½ years is you don’t want to wait until an employee is fully vested to reload them because their minds may turn elsewhere once they anticipate being fully vested.

If you receive additional shares from your current employer, you need to weigh the likely value of the additional grants against what you might earn from a new company grant over the same time period. Mature company grants are much smaller than earlier stage company grants (see our Startup compensation tool), but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are less valuable. A new employee grant from Facebook or LinkedIn when they had 1,000 employees would have been much more valuable than a typical new employee grant from a startup with only 50 employees.

Economics shouldn’t be your only consideration

All that being said, your decision should not solely be based on economics. You need to consider the certainty of knowing how happy you are with your current job’s environment and challenges against the uncertainty of what life will be like at your new company. On the flip side, you should consider the career risk of staying at a company too long. At a certain point, other companies won’t even try to recruit you because they believe you won’t leave.

If you are happy, staying at a company for an extended amount of time is a reasonable decision.

Some people worry about being typecast if they stay in a particular type of job too long. My observation is most people rise through the ranks because they are great at one thing (and hire to address their weaknesses) rather than being very good at a number of things.

If you are happy, staying at a company for an extended amount of time is a reasonable decision. However only in rare circumstances are an employer and an employee a good match for a really extended period of time. That being said, environment often trumps economics if you really enjoy where you work.

You may need a few at bats

One last thing to think about with regard to length of stay is your ability to afford to live in your particular geography.  As we explained in You Need Equity To Live In Silicon Valley, you have the greatest chance of being able to afford to live in an expensive geography if you work for at least a few private companies that award equity.

Foster a Culture of Gratitude

In the movie Remember the Titans, Coach Herman Boone takes his high school football team to the battleground of Gettysburg. Having inherited a fractured and divided squad, Coach Boone implores the players to "take a lesson from the dead. If we don't come together, right now on this hallowed ground, we too will be destroyed, just like they were." Coach Boone then establishes the primacy of an important team virtue: "I don't care if you like each other right now, but you will respect each other."

In every workplace and on every team, all people have the innate desire to feel appreciated and valued by others. Like Coach Boone, leaders of teams — and team members themselves — should work to foster a culture of value and appreciation.

High performing teams have well-defined goals, systems of accountability, clear roles and responsibilities, and open communication. Just as importantly, teams that foster cohesion with a sense of appreciation and gratitude among the team members maximize performance on a number of dimensions. Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, authors of the Wisdom of Teams, define a high-performing team in part by members' strong personal commitment to the growth and success of each team member and of the team as a whole.

Research on gratitude and appreciation demonstrates that when employees feel valued, they have high job satisfaction, are willing to work longer hours, engage in productive relationships with co-workers and supervisors, are motivated to do their best, and work towards achieving the company's goals. Google, which sits atop many best-places-to-work lists, fosters feelings of employee value through an open culture that promotes employee input, routinely rewards and recognizes performance, and encourages personal growth. In a recent interview, CEO Larry Page stated, "My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they're having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society."

And consider the consequences of not fostering a culture of gratitude: A study of over 1,700 employees conducted in 2012 by the American Psychological Association (APA) indicated that more than half of all employees intended to search for new jobs because they felt underappreciated and undervalued.

Several recent articles point out the importance of saying "thank you" and giving specific praise to employees when earned in genuine, honest, and heartfelt ways. Mark Gaston's blog on How to Give a Meaningful Thank-you is full of great advice such as sharing with employees how their contributions had personal significance for the leader and team.
In addition to these very important gestures of thanks, recent research suggests that a leader can enhance a culture of gratitude in the following ways.

1. Help others develop. Interestingly, the APA study indicated that 70% of employees feel valued at work when they have opportunities for growth and development. While promotion opportunities within companies may sometimes be limited, you can still invest in team members' professional development through training, assignment to new and interesting projects, participation on task forces, and exposure to new and interesting different areas through cross-training. Employees frequently have skills that extend beyond the position for which the company hired them. Additionally, they typically grow their skills over time. Leveraging these broad skill sets can lead to greater engagement and satisfaction.
2. Involve employees. Team members feel valued when they have an opportunity to take part in decision-making, problem-solving, and to use their skills to benefit the organization. A 2012 study by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) showed the importance of employees' opportunities to use skills and abilities, with 63% of respondents listing the ability to use their skills as the top driver of their job satisfaction.
3. Support camaraderie and collegiality. I conducted a study many years ago on the positive benefits of friendship in the workplace. Camaraderie in the workplace can lead to greater job satisfaction and commitment to the organization and doing a job well. Leaders should foster collegiality, help to eliminate toxic and dysfunctional team behaviors, and create opportunities for team members other than on work projects. At Google, the games/toys the company provides allow for entertaining and informal interactions among colleagues. These positive and fun feelings carry over when the colleagues work on projects together. The SHRM study in 2012 found employees' relationships with their co-workers was the second highest factor related to their connection and commitment to the organization. Team leaders may also consider using social contracts, explicit agreements on how team members interact, to help shape positive behaviors within their teams.

Taking the time and effort to create a culture that values and appreciates the diversity and similarity within a team can reap great rewards in terms of performance and satisfaction of the entire team. At the end of the day, this principle is really very simple: we all want to feel valued and appreciated. So, in addition to overt recognition to employees, use a variety of ways to build a culture of gratitude.

Article by CHRISTINE M. RIORDAN