I spent 75 minutes with the Women in Leadership class at CU Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, a mix of business and engineering students from the Business-Engineering Women in Technology (BEWiT) program, working through the networking ideas they’d studied that week in Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter’s How Leaders Create and Use Networks and Ibarra’s Building Effective Networks.
As first-year students, most don’t have networks yet in the traditional career sense. I wanted to leave them with something actionable to get started, not just tell them to go build one, so the whole session ran on a reframe: your network is the people you already know or people you want to meet.
We started with my story entering tech through a nontraditional path (non-profits, marketing, support, then software engineering) and how the network followed during each pivot. Then the students worked from the three reach-outs:
- Who haven’t I thanked lately, who went out of their way for me?
- Who in my work or school life could I get to know better?
- Who in my personal life could I learn more about what they do?
For each, they wrote a name on the list and ideas for the first line they’d actually send, then chose the one they’d send that week. We closed with a live networking practice because this was one of their first few classes. Most hadn’t even met yet!
The whole point: they left with a short list of concrete, low-stakes reach-outs. The act of reaching out is the networking, and it doesn’t require an event. It can be small and more meaningful than it appears on the surface.
Thanks to Dr. Christina Lacerenza for the invitation and for making room for something interactive.