Last week, someone asked me if I still work for Harlequin.
I handed in my security pass there in April 2008. Admittedly, I hung around for a while as a consultant, but it’s been years since I spent my days at the Romance Mothership.
Yet, some people think I still work there. And it’s my own fault.
We are collectively terrible at keeping tabs on what is going on in one another’s lives.
As a director building a board career, you may feel like everyone knows about your new board seat, your latest blog post, or your next interview. You are hardly hiding these things. It probably feels like you talk about your board aspirations all the time.
Surely, people know. Except when they don’t.
The majority of people can actively recall a sliver of information about you.
I promise that they didn’t see your tweet fly by in their newsfeed. They missed your new job on LinkedIn. And if you haven’t made an effort to connect with them in the past year, they may not think about you at all.
Veteran corporate director Spencer Lanthier encourages networking on a nearly constant basis. “The key thing is to follow up. Once you’ve met with someone and left your CV, it will probably be forgotten after three months. Maintain contact.”
In my free online workshop, I offer a framework for how to communicate your board readiness. Rather than thinking on our feet, it’s easy to follow a tested structure for highlighting our strengths and interests in a memorable way.
Module Three of the workshop reveals one of my favourite networking techniques. It’s a simple tool that encourages a routine for an activity that no one relishes. In my experience, consistency can’t happen without frictionless processes supporting the task.
If self-promotion makes you cringe, you will never go wrong speaking up on someone else’s behalf. Being generous, sharing information, and connecting others are acts of service that don’t feel overplayed.
Keep in touch. Clarify your message. Keep listening and serving others. Consistency will pay off for you too.
Thank you for reading! If you found this post useful, please share it with others in your network. Doing so helps my work reach others and would mean so much to me.
