For women only? Power networking

Ken Attale, advertising guru enters the ballroom of the Cascadia Hotel and is obviously surprised.

His brief has been to talk to a group of women about the art and practice of that great business skill, networking. But as the Lonsdale Satcchi & Satcchi Chief Executive Officer enters the ballroom, the buzz is palpable. Close to sixty of the country’s leading female business executives and entrepreneurs are exchanging business cards, making contacts, entering information on their Palm Pilots, setting up appointments, listening and giving.

This is clearly not a coffee and cake women’s group. They are members of the Association of Female Executives of Trinidad and Tobago (AFETT). And they’ve got game. Many of them could probably give a few master classes in networking for business success. But at this particular session they have come to refine their art, to listen to the advertising guru talk about his own experience in building a professional network.  More im-portantly, they are attempting to un-ravel a code: do men have a different formulae for setting up and keeping connections than their female counterparts?

It’s a question — given the audience — that the advertising executive must have expected. If he didn’t, he certainly did let on for it is with the confidence of a general going into battle that Attale leaves the podium, strides into the exclusively female crowd and leaves some key messages: that old boys club can be penetrated, that there were certain networking skills that are not gender specific and that female business leaders are perhaps better at making contacts but sometimes fell short in knowing how to leverage those contacts into business opportunities. He could not have found a more fertile ground on which to deliver his message.

According to Attale, networking has many benefits but among the most important is that it is an efficient way to accomplish business goals with the best networkers often possessing contradictory skills. Networking is about results and relationships. Effectiveness and efficiency. Assertiveness and graciousness. Persistence and trusting. Promoting yourself and promoting  others. Building your business and building your life. Receiving and giving. Accepting support and contributing. Requesting and offering.

The master networker told members of the Association of Female Executives that there was great value in joining professional and charitable associations because they emphasised one’s talent for project execution, the ability to work part as a team and a disposition in some cases for philanthropy.  Attale also mentioned that when it comes to networking it helps to have a distinctive identity, to be opinionated on a variety of subject matters and to be known as a woman of substance. But at the Cascadia Hotel there were sixty women with distinctive identities, sixty women of substance who for all of Attale’s assurances find it consistently challenging to develop a networking approach with men.
 
One AFETT member Judy Chow, a tourism professional, noted that the ability to network consistently still had a lot to do with gender roles. According to Chow, women in their traditional roles as wife/mother and business executive did not have the same amount of time to invest as their male counterparts to go to the watering holes, to attend functions and join the plethora of associations. Not to mention that some of the “fields of networking” were still predominantly male and that men often felt threatened when their sense of belonging to a pack seemed to get wind of  the scent of a woman. Chow’s comments engendered an ‘Aha’ moment.

Do men and women business executives network differently? We know they do. If only because we have different leadership styles. Women are concensus builders, communal albeit decisive and men are aggressive, power-wielding and authoritative. But common ground can be found. Here’s what we can do. We can form our own associations like AFETT, we can be forthright in our pursuits, almost unconsciously conspiratorial in our collective and mutual understanding that we can call upon each other for referrals and to explore beneficial business opportunities.

Real networking — power networking — is a requisite part of the business game. It’s not inane. For women who want to rise to the top of their game, it’s absolutely mandatory. Judette Coward is a communications consultant. She is a board member of the Association of Female Executives of Trinidad and Tobago. The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Guardian Life.

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