After your efforts to establish and maintain relationships with your business contacts, you must inform the relevant personnel within your organisation of any issues that exist. This will let them know if they need to address these, as well as help you evaluate how successful your networking processes were.
To identify who you should notify about these issues, refer to your organisation’s policies and procedures or ask someone within the organisation, such as a supervisor. In the case of Ace Finance, this would be the Conflict and Problem Resolution Policy and Procedure. You should also use these guidelines to decide if you will inform them of the issues through writing or during a meeting.
Before sending an email or scheduling a meeting to discuss, compile the issues into a list. Some other issues you may have encountered in your professional relationships, regardless of whether you collaborated with them or not, are:
- Business contacts’ lack of interest in the organisation
- Not enough business contacts
- Many business contacts, but your relationships with them are not strong enough.
- Business contacts do not have the resources to help your organisation.
You can also describe the specific events or situations where the issues arose to help them understand better.
In the following 3-minute video, Michelle Gibbings, an expert at helping organisations, teams, and individuals build their capabilities in core competencies, talks about the power of networking and shares tips to help you build rapport. She explains the difference between people who view networking as a (possibly) one-off transactional approach to those who view networking as long-term approach to networking and building relationships with depth and meaning. She calls this the RIPPLE model.
Watch this YouTube video outlining the benefits of networking on building long lasting relationships.
Watch
Episode 11 – Networking
Explanation of the benefits of networking based on building long-lasting and reciprocal relationships
Duration: 3.26
You’ve come to the end of this topic, well done! Before moving on to the next section be sure to complete all the exercises and go back over any linked videos and articles if you need to.
