To make the concept of a network manageable, it's best to separate your present and potential network members into four general categories: (1) Personal, (2) Professional, (3) Organizational and (4) Other.
Look at the lists of people you know in these four categories, and you'll realize that you regularly associate with a lot of potential networking contacts—and could reach many more by expending a little more effort. There will be some overlap among the four categories: you socialize with your colleagues at the laboratory, you choose a close friend as your investment banker, and you see a lot of business colleagues at the monthly Chamber of Commerce lunch.
Each of your four main networks will have some distinctive features, however. Your personal network will include people who never see you with your "game face" on; that is, they don't encounter you in your employment capacity, and the relationship they enjoy with you is anchored in interpersonal bonds or personal service relationships. This is important because if you're using networking for career development and employment purposes, your game face is what you're selling.
Your friends and relatives may care about you, want to help you, and feel a real stake in your well-being. But they're not accustomed to thinking of you as a "product," and if asked to tell someone what you do for a living, they may have a hard time giving a succinct and accurate description. Remember: Your friends know you only in the way they know you.
The members of your professional network may also have an incomplete view of everything you are and do, but at least what they see is your "game face." They see you at work, and they can convey their opinion of the way you work. Often, they can understand the technical details of your profession when even your spouse can't describe your job duties exactly. Professional relationships tend to be more structured than personal ones, which generally puts a more "businesslike" face on networking among professional acquaintances. In describing you to others or others to you, they'll tend to focus on what you do more than on who you are.
Most organizations have various "sub networks" whose function is the dissemination of informal information and protocols and/or the preservation of power. They have familiar labels: The Old Boys Network, The Keepers of the Glass Ceiling, The Grapevine, The Minority and The Women's Straight Talk Network, All Those Who Hate Management, and others. Members of these groups share valuable information with whom they want, not with outsiders asking for favors. Their goal is exclusivity, not accessibility.
Your organizational network will overlap heavily with your professional network. In your organizational affiliations—business associations, community groups, foundations, professional groups, boards of directors, and boards of trustees you may again be showing a face that is different from the one you display at the office or the one you show to your personal contacts. Here again, the opinions expressed about you or about networking contacts within these groups will reflect strengths and deficits in the organizational setting. A mediocre lawyer may be a superb motivator for United Way; a high-profile female executive may earn a lot of respect on Wall Street but be criticized for her half-hearted participation in the several nonprofit boards on which she serves.
Other relationships - those that defy categorization can add real spice to life. These are the chance connections, the unexpected coincidences, the ships passing in the night, the accidental conversation partners who are never seen again. They can include superficial relationships with a large group, all your fourth-grade classmates, for example, or deep, highly individual bonds, the woman whose baby you helped deliver in the taxicab last year.
Carefully cultivated networks offer one other benefit that often is overlooked by job seekers in the heat of the campaign: after you find a new job, you still have your networks. Candid information is essential in all walks of life, and an essential discipline of successful people is the care and feeding of their networks. When they've found a satisfying new position, many former job seekers let their networks rust among the weeds. Maintaining networks is as much a systematic and structured process as creating them.
One Philadelphia lawyer, a marvelous networker who managed the nearly impossible task of moving into law firm practice after starting her career in-house and spending eight years there, is adamant that every name in her revolving file gets at least two phone calls, one letter, and a holiday card each year. This is a lot of work, and she's not even looking for a job. She's doing business development for her firm, and she is doing just fine: She's a highly visible figure in her business community. People seek her out for information and, in the course of doing so; they provide her with a lot of information. She's dialed-in, hooked-up, on top, in control.
"If you're going to spend all that time and effort meeting a lot of people during your job search," she says, "it makes no sense to throw all that effort away after you land."
