On Friday we held our 6th annual Shaping the Future conference at UNH. This is a conference I started back in 2016 shortly after I joined the faculty. I had the idea to invite members of the Northern New England chapter of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) to participate in a continuing education conference at UNH. The idea was to provide the members an opportunity to get their continuing education and allow the students in my program to join in and learn and network with them. This year the Northern New England chapter of the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) joined us as well. We had more than 100 people attend on Friday and it was a fabulous day. We had great panels and a terrific keynote from Jeff Weiss, the Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer of Mass General Brigham. I’m hoping to have Jeff on my Health Leader Forge podcast sometime soon.
I didn’t appreciate the power and value of professional organizations until I left the Army and came to UNH. Professional organizations like ACHE and HFMA (I am a member of both now) provide the opportunity for people from different organizations but with some common thread of professional interest to come together and connect. Coming from a family and a class that believed education and skill were the ways to get ahead in life, I tended to think that leadership naturally flowed from being the smartest, best educated, most skilled person in the room. Whomever met that standard should clearly be the person calling the shots, and everyone else should simply follow. Anyone who had money who did not have some sort of advanced degree either inherited it or got it by some shady means. There is some truth in the idea that education and skill are essential for getting ahead, but as I find myself often saying, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition for professional success. High levels of success, financial and otherwise, mostly come from wielding influence. One does not have to be the smartest, best educated, or most skilled person in the room to wield the most influence, though it certainly helps.
Competence is essential for professional success, but many highly competent individual performers find it difficult to transition from being an individual performer to a leader. Being a leader, to me, is where one accomplishes professional success if one is not a high-skilled individual performer (engineer, doctor, etc.). The leadership literature has largely discarded the idea that leadership is about directing people. If you are a leader telling people what to do most of the time, you are not doing the most important thing you are hired to do: unleashing the creativity and drive of the people who report to you. Servant leadership, for example, is all about supporting the people who report to you. It’s about creating an environment and systems where those people can bring their best. A good leader is always asking her/his people, what do you need? How can I help you? Good leaders provide support and lead through influence. Influence comes from being trusted that you are looking out for the good of the organization and the good of your people.
One of the panels we had at Shaping the Future was called Talent Management for Bench Strength Development. Talent management refers to the process of recruiting, training, and retaining the right people for your organization to thrive. The idea of bench strength development refers to building depth in your organization so that if someone were to leave (which we all eventually do), there would be someone ready to step up and fill the hole. Bench strength development is the deep leadership work of an organization, preparing it for long-term success, not just to succeed today.
Networking events like Shaping the Future, and professional organizations like HFMA and ACHE, play a critical role in bench strength development within an industry. They play an important role in information sharing and sense-making, but from my observation and the literature on networking, an even more important role in creating opportunity. A lot of people cringe at the idea of going to networking events. It seems like it’s dirty - a bit of grubbing for opportunity, looking to advance yourself. Or worse, to spend an evening kissing up to people you don’t respect. I think that attitude arises from the attitude I grew up with. Surely my work will speak for itself, they say, I don’t need to go meet people outside of my organization. I’ve come to see networking differently. It is about building your influence, but not by grubbing and brown-nosing. People are smart and see through that sort of behavior. Maybe not the first time they meet you, but it’s hard to be disingenuous over an extended period of time. Homo sapiens are literally hardwired to detect falsehood. It is about building your influence by asking, what do you need? How can I help you? It is the process of asking the same questions, perhaps not spoken directly, but nonetheless understood, as leaders ask. And here, I am not saying that you have to offer some big thing, like a lot of your time or financial resources. Often the answer to “how can I help?” is as simple as, “Can you introduce me to someone who does/knows X?” whatever X might be (not the platform formerly known as Twitter). Sometimes it’s as little as having an ear to listen, to provide some psychosocial support.
I think of networking as network building. Networks are built by giving, rather than by asking. If you attend an event like Shaping the Future only when you are on a job hunt, you aren’t really building your network - you are job hunting by trying to use your network, which is fine. But you are trying to draw on relationships which you may not have invested in. That would surely feel grubby. You are a stranger and you are asking me for something. But if you have built relationships in your network, even loose ties, your network can be quite powerful when you need it. It is like growing a garden. If you care for your garden, in time there will be flowers and fruits readily available to you. But if you have done nothing to tend your garden, why would you be surprised there is nothing but dirt and weeds when you go looking for something helpful? Networks have to be continuously tended, not just activated when needed. When they are well-tended, opportunity and information often flow through them to you without any direct effort at all. People think of you when an opportunity comes up. Your network pulls you toward opportunity.
I think this is what I didn’t understand before I became involved with professional organizations like ACHE and HFMA, which admittedly was late in my career: a person with a well-nurtured network is more likely to get ahead. They are going to have more professional success. It will appear as if they are just getting offered opportunities out of the blue. Which they are. But it’s not an accident that those opportunities are coming. And it’s not some corrupt or unethical process. It’s the way opportunity works. Is it easier for some people than others for a whole variety of factors? Also, sure. But at the margin, you can always move forward with effort, attention, and good will. Effort will yield a non-zero movement. Networking is a form of leadership. It’s informal leadership. You are leading your own network. You are nurturing it, helping it flourish by helping the people you are connected to flourish. And when they flourish, you flourish, too. That’s how people become professionally successful without necessarily being the smartest, most educated, or most skilled person in the room. Because they help make other people successful, people follow them, and this gives them influence.
The reason I started Shaping the Future years ago was to give my students the opportunity to begin to build their networks. Most of them are like me, not coming from backgrounds that understand the importance of networks, professional or otherwise. So it’s one of the things I try to teach them while they are here. Begin building now, before you need it. No flowers grow where seeds have not been scattered.