Network and influence

I gave a short talk to an internal MS community this week. The topic of the day was “influence”, and I thought it was appropriate to talk about the value of building (and maintaining!) an informal network – and the impact of that network on influence. The advice to have an informal network isn’t new – I bet it’s mentioned in the majority of books on leadership, but I don’t think enough people who want to be leaders (or be influential) take the point seriously enough. Your network is a resource for discovering new information as much sounding board,for ideas you want to share.

Your network is also an opportunity for you to build credibility. I know people who claim to be leaders. Sometimes they claim to be a leader because they’re in a position of authority. Other times, their “leadership” is just a self proclaimed act. In my world, you aren’t a leader until other people say you’re a leader. You don’t get it any other way than building credibility and trust among those you want to lead – and your network is a great place to build that credibility and trust across people who don’t have to listen to you if they don’t want to.

There are other values of a network. In HWTSAM, I talked about the Test Architect Group (TAG) at Microsoft. TAG is a collection of senior testers who meet regularly to talk about a variety of testing topics.

The value of having Microsoft’s most senior testers regularly review, brainstorm, and dissect solutions for complex test problems is immeasurable. In recent years, TAG has become something of a sounding board for new thinking, new methods, or new tools in testing. Presentations and demonstrations of ideas and implementations from test groups spanning every Microsoft division fill many of the meeting agendas. The value and depth of the feedback that the TAG provides is respected and sought after. A few meetings a year are reserved for “TAG business,” which includes discussions about company-wide initiatives driven by TAG
and other projects where TAG is a significant contributor (such as the MSDN Tester Center).

Perhaps the largest benefit of the regular meetings is in the value of networking. The extensive peer discussions and the view into the variety of work done across the company that is presented give TAG members much of the knowledge and information they need to make strategic decisions that affect the entire company.

I’ll say it again because it’s huge – the value of this particular tester community is the network. The fact that we talk to each other about what we’re working on gives us a small-world network – a huge reduction in degrees of separation between just about any testing knowledge in the company.

Yet – many people don’t take advantage of their opportunities to build their network. They don’t have the time – they think their day job is more important, or have something else to do they think is more important. It’s hard – last week I was in a great “hallway conversation”, but I found my mind wandering as I wondered if I should really be back in my office doing “real work” (I didn’t, now I’m behind, but it was worth it). Alas, some people who do consistently prioritize their commitment to building their network find that their superiors don’t share the priority and look down on work spent “outside of their core job” (my advice for these people is to find a new job).

I was asked once whether it was leaders who built great networks, or if people who built great networks became leaders. My old answer was that it was a toss up. Today, as I think about this more, I realize that there are a great number of leaders who got there because of their effort to build, maintain, and nurture a huge network of informal relationships. I’ve also seen leaders (including exec level leaders) fail because they thought that their position was enough, and didn’t work to build their network, credibility, and trust.

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