Strategy #27: Get Your Team To Play For You

A successful job hunt will include contact with a wide range of people who can give you information about potential employers and work opportunities, make personal introductions on your behalf and connect you to key influencers and decision makers. This is a profoundly important element of my work-search strategy and you shouldn’t underestimate its power to transport you directly to the door of the person with the ability to hire you.

All of the people you meet might contribute to the positive outcome of your work search in ways that aren’t immediately obvious so you must nurture your team of contacts diligently in order to get the most out of them. This is the essence of getting your team to play for you in the most effective way.

In this strategy I’d like to give you some guide lines which should help you tread the fine line between exploiting the knowledge and networks of this group of people for your own specific purposes, whilst treating them with appropriate care and attention so that they don’t feel as if their generosity is being abused.

I’ll begin by sharing an unavoidable truth about the contact phase of any work search with you. Some job hunters falter at this stage of the process for one of two particular reasons, each of which seriously compromises their chances of success if they fall into the traps that lie in wait. I want to tell you what these reasons are, how to deal with them if you think you might be susceptible to them, then present a framework for building gold-standard contacts.

It’s not always plain sailing when you’re dealing with new contacts. Dealing with any kinds of people is an unpredictable affair at the best of times, and doubly so when the pressure’s on and your future work prospects are on the line. There’s a lot riding on the positive outcome of most contact-building activities and, because of this, a common problem is failing to make the most of the enormous potential of the connection scenario. Feedback with my course participants and coaching clients tells me that this sometimes happens because a job hunter suspects that they’re taking advantage of another person, and this can sit uncomfortably with them. They hold back, either because they’re reluctant to impose themselves upon a new contact as they see it, or because they haven’t practiced the necessary skills diligently enough.

I don’t dismiss this concern and perhaps you recognise this characteristic in yourself, particularly if you show strong empathic qualities. Fouling up is an eminent possibility if you’re too sensitive to other people’s feelings, worry about what they might be thinking or if you believe you’re taking up their valuable time and attention. It doesn’t help matters if you’re timid, non-assertive or lack self-confidence.

Going to the other extreme, bold and strongly-assertive people who are full to the brim with self-confidence can become their own worst enemies. If you’re used to getting your own way most of the time by force of will, you’ll probably have to reign in these tendencies here. Some job seekers deal with other people as though they were expendable and, if you’re not careful, you can easily destroy a promising relationship through badly-chosen words, a clumsy manner or an ill-considered approach. This is the second potential difficulty you might experience, especially if you’re an uncompromising, relentlessly-determined sort of person.

Finding a middle way that balances these two polarities is where you want to be. You need to avoid being too reticent but without being too garrulous, so this is the way I’d go about dealing with this contact-building task.   

In a previous article I used the analogy of a football team to illustrate the importance of excelling in your particular position, whether that’s on the playing field or within the work role that you occupy. I’ll now make a return to this idea by comparing the way a top-flight sports coach manages a team to extract their players’ best performance with your task of guiding the contacts you make so that you can get peak value out of them.

Of course, this isn’t a precise comparison. A sports team is on the company payroll whilst your potential contacts aren’t. Footballers have a certain obligation to follow instructions in a way that anyone you might consider as a contact don’t. The similarity lies in the undisputable fact that you and a sports coach have the direct ability to influence the outcome of the people on your team. The better you can do this, the more likely it is that you’ll emerge victorious.  

Everyone is different and different people need to be handled in different ways. All very well but, despite this truism, what you really need is a reliable, tried-and-tested framework to operate by during any contact-building activity. I believe that a good starting point is to follow a six-stage process which you can mould and adapt, depending on the nature of the people you meet with and the needs of the situation you find yourself in.

This is the one that I’ve developed over many years of building my own contact networks, and helping countless other people build their own. It really works, provided that you pay attention to the details, and the two guiding principles that I’ll tell you about at the end.

The contact-building framework

1. Know what you want to achieve. How does each potential contact impact upon your job search and what do you specifically want to gain from each encounter? Are you looking for information to add to your research file or details of an onward contact? Do you want background knowledge or are you after confirmation of one particular detail? Is this a get-to-know-you meeting to warm up a new contact or is it a follow-up in which you’ll be pushing them for a final introduction, or somewhere in between?  
2. Understand how can this person help you make progress towards your goal. Some people have broad knowledge of a company's affairs whilst others have a depth of information about just one single topic. Each contact type is useful in its own way and you must get to the root of someone’s background and expertise quickly. As with a sports team, are you dealing with a striker whose job it is to shoot for goal, a midfield general who knows how to control the business gameplay or a defender who’s main task is to ward off attacks from competitors? 
3. Recognise their strengths and weaknesses. Every player on your contacts team will have their own characteristics. Some could be talkative whilst others will be tight-lipped, for example. Some will be generous with their information, divulging remarkable confidences without demur but others could need a lot of prizing open before they talk. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of any new contact, in terms of how easily they assist you, will help shape your plan of attack.
4. Listen before you speak. The best, most valuable information you acquire is often peripheral to the main message you hear. Some new contacts, provided that you earn their trust and they happily agree to speak with you, will help you in precisely the way you want. Others won’t be quite as forthcoming, although they’ll sometimes go through the motions of telling you things or confirming knowledge that you already have, which can be frustrating. Use active listening techniques before you dismiss them as low-quality contacts, and set your antenna for throwaway lines that are sometimes the most informative.
5. Gain their commitment to your cause. This is the key to getting people to play for you. Without an agreement to help you in the way you specify, you can’t really count on anyone you speak with as a trusted team member, let alone bank on them to deliver the goods in a reliable way. There’s no need to be coy about your aims. Simply tell the person you identify as your next contact what you’re hoping to achieve and ask them if they’re prepared to help you. If they commit to this, you’re all set to go. If not, you might be best advised to seek better prospects.
6. Move forward during each encounter. Every conversation must be focused on achieving a specific outcome, and that always means that you move forward in some way. It might be a small move but it could be a substantial shift in the right direction. Whatever else you do, don’t arrange conversations with anyone without having a clear idea of what kind of advance you anticipate. It’s easy to waste your time and effort on meaningless chatter about things that are of no use to you but if you commit to moving forward during each and every contact-building encounter, you’ll go a long way towards avoiding this scenario.

In summary, this is an outline of the process that I teach my course participants to adopt. Crucially, there are two overarching considerations that come above these six steps at a very practical level.

• The first of these principles is to be on high alert not to stray far from the middle of the pathway that I spoke about at the beginning of this tutorial. You mustn’t unnerve new contacts by being too cautious, but nor should you alienate anyone by being too audacious in your words or actions.
• Second, it’s imperative that you practice this element of your strategy as well as you can. Rehearsal is fundamental to any competent performance and no actor would consider going on stage until they’d learnt their lines, developed their character and knew their marks with absolute precision. Neither should you, and this is something I talk about in an upcoming strategy, in #39 of this series in fact. 

Neil Grant, Vocation Master, London, September 2022

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about the issues I raise here, I invite you to contact me personally. Please get in touch via LinkedIn;

LinkedIn/VocationMaster