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Glass Ceiling
Technical Competence isn't enough: The professionals below a glass ceiling of their own making
© Andrew Bass
Relationships that lead to sales
The marketplace abounds with offers of genuinely excellent services and products. There is often little to choose in terms of price or technical quality. How then does a client decide who gets the business? As a marketing director from a corporate law firm put it recently: "All things being equal, clients chose to buy from the people they like and trust the most".
Yet the way professional and technical specialists are educated, up to and through university level, often does little or nothing to prepare them for this commercial reality.
Can You Get Away Without Building a Network?
We've met plenty of people would like to think so, and their education and professional training will often have reinforced the view. Many people buy in to the idea that the rules of the game are "Get good grades, go to a good University and get a good degree, and then you will be a success". It works up to the point they get the good job.
It may have been the case 20 years ago that business development in a top professional services firm meant sitting behind your desk and waiting for the work to role in, but young professionals with that kind of strategy today are denying a reality they might do better to face. A delegate we trained recently mentioned a friend who had just joined a top-tier law firm. She was a high-flying graduate with a first class honours degree and had landed a plum job. She also thought that networking was 'cheesy' and had no intention of doing any. She expected business to land on her desk because she was clever and worked for a prestigious firm. I recounted her case to a business associate of mine who happens to be a partner in one of the other top law firms in the city. Her response to this hot-shots naive position was brief and to the point. Five short words: "She won't have a career."
What a reliance on educational and technical accomplishments ignores is the importance of personal relationships. And this is true in any field of business where price or quality are insufficient to distinguish a product or service in order to make the choice for the buyer.
And it may be impossible to avoid social-business situations even if you still want to. It's not unusual after concluding a deal for the client to say: "Let's go for a drink". Or, to have to travel with a senior manager that you don't know well. Sometimes there is no escape from such a situation, and how it's handled definitely DOES matter, both for the individual and the organisation they represent. Many people have had 'firm' offers of jobs or business retracted at the last minute because of how they handled just this kind of situation.
A lot of business gets done during 'smalltalk'
Mintzberg (1973) and Kotter and co-workers in various studies during the 1980's showed that contrary to popular belief, general managers spend most of their time in conversation, often on topics not directly related to the business, but nevertheless central to maintaining networks and relationships, and to developing goals and action plans.
Furthermore, making smalltalk has been found to correlate with success. Luthans (1988) concluded that, using speed of promotion as a measure of success, the most successful managers spend more time socializing and interacting with customers, suppliers and other contacts than did their less successful counterparts. And this was true even when the less successful managers were judged at least as effective in their substantive jobs.
In the worst case, that means that B.S. Artists left their more competent colleagues behind, with their heads pressed against a glass ceiling. And worse still: it was a self-imposed glass ceiling!
Technical Competence isn't enough
In professional services firms, excellent but un-promotable people top-out one step below Partner because they lack the wherewithal to develop business. These people are often cause frustration to themselves and their bosses and suffer unnecessary pressure as a result. Unnecessary because in most cases the necessary skills and behaviours can be developed.
It's not enough to "Just Be Yourself"
Often people who find small talk hard receive the advice: 'Just be yourself'. Is this advice sound, or does it just increase the frustration?
Obviously pretending to be something or someone you are not is fraught with problems, and is hardly likely to lead to sound relationships as time goes by. On the other hand, as a piece of advice, "Just be yourself" has a major difficulty:
It doesn't actually tell someone what to do or say when they walk into a social gathering, networking meeting or reception.
So how do we resolve the confusion?
This popular piece of advice isn't wrong, but it is operating on the wrong level to be helpful. It's common for people to talk about who they are (their identity) in terms of what they do (their behaviour). We often hear people who find small talk difficult tell us "it's just the kind of person I am", almost as if it's genetic.
Yet if we put someone at the wheel of a car without having had any driving lessons, we would not accept the idea that they couldn't drive "because they're not that kind of person". Driving is a skill, not an identity. And we expect to have to learn skills. This is as true of communication as it is of driving, sports and playing music. Children have to learn not only to speak, but also how to pragmatically use language: to make requests, to ask interesting questions, to 'be polite', and so on.
To learn a skill well, people need the right kind of instruction and the right kind of practice. And communication is a skill most people learn in a haphazard way, according to their varied experiences growing up. Children do an amazing job of language learning. If their parents speak a different language in the home than the national language, the children learn both, and somehow manage to keep them separate.
When it comes to learning to use language to achieve results, however, the results are more variable. If someone hasn't learned to use language to make good small talk, it won't happen, not because of who they are, but simply because of what they are not doing.
Research shows that people who chat easily follow systematic patterns of behaviour (whether they are aware of it or not). They listen in a particular way, they ask questions in a particular way, and they know what to do or say next because they have a sort of map in their minds of how they want the interaction to unfold.
Those patterns of listening, questioning and directing a conversation can be learned, with valuable results.
Key Points
- Most reluctant networkers can be turned around - and it's worth it.
- A lot of repeat business can flow from relationships that started out with small talk while at a client's.
- Just pushing people to "get out there and do it" creates a counter-productive response. Many people need support (skills, encouragement, coaching) in order to become effective.
- Standard training courses may be of limited effectiveness if they don't have good follow-up support. Programmes based on a little-and-often approach over a longer time period (say six months) will produce better results.
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