Network Maintanence
Wow. You actually opened this post? This has to be the least interesting post title ever. I don’t know what you were expecting… but I can gaurentee IT Professionals are going to be dissapointed.
This post is about a talk I attended (NEWaukee‘s Speaker Crawl) this spring. I was really excited to see one of my favorite CEOs giving a talk, Rich Meeusen, CEO of Badger Meter. First of all, some background on Rich and why I was excited to see him.
Rich is my previous boss’ mentor, and I saw a lot of myself in her, so when i heard she looke up to ths guy I knew he would be a catch. He is the now leaving CEO of Badger Meter, and he has served the role for 16 years. Last time I heard him speak (Spring 2017) he delivered his content in a very different way from any other CEO I’ve seen. He discussed The dark side of the CEO, where he literally talked about all the crappy things he had done, and had to do because he was CEO. He talked about closing an entire factory in France and why he had no friends. But something always struck through. He was by every quantifiable business metric succesfull. He wasnt afraid to make the controversial decision when he had to.
So all of that is breifly why i was interested in what the hell he had to say this time around. Since 2017, he has officially annoucned his retirement, and is currently training his replacement. This time instead instead of talking about the dark side he talked about the importance of not growing you network, but nurturing your network (not to say you shouldnt grow it, just a different perspective of how to utilize your network). He reflected on how he landed his gig to become a VP at Badger Meter by utilizing his network.
He didnt apply for jobs. He pulled out his rolledex and contacted his closest contacts. The people who would vouche for him. The ones he had already done a favor for in the past. He reached out and bluntly said I want to be a CEO, can you help me? He didn’t need to remind them of the favor he had done for them in this time of need, because before he was in a time of need he had already been reaching out, helping and reminding, that way when the time came, this time, he could ask for some help back.
This is something I think a lot of people forget to do. With growing social media networks for everything from catching up with friends, to business encounters, to a single farmers platform, they all emphasize connecting with more people. Creating a larger, more dense web of connections. But no one is thinking or talking about how to nurture those relations.
This reminds me of the study claiming you can only have about 120 close connections. This was based off tribalism and being able to track all of the political relations. I think this number is stil true, although many would argue it has grown. People believe they have way more friends then they do because they look at the FB friends or linkedin connections and see 500+. But the case is, you hardly know what 20% people are up to, how their jobs are, how their relationship is, what there doing in their free tie. Really you jsut see a bunch of accomplishment and milestones, but you dont know those people at all. Or what makes them tick.