Connectivity continues to shrink our world, and in the process transform businesses and industries. The potential benefit from collaborative problem solving, distributed innovation, and cross industry learning is more compelling than ever.
We know that peer-to-peer discussion and sharing can often provide a more effective and less expensive way to improve performance and reduce risks. And industry benchmarking, trend analysis, and best practices all help shape your strategic decisions. You can use your professional network to leverage colleagues who have “been there and done that”. Below are four ways to use your network to accelerate decisions, programs, and results.
Peer-to-peer discussion and sharing can often provide a more effective and less expensive way to improve performance and reduce the risk associated with new initiatives. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use your professional network to avoid problems that have already been solved. The network will help you make quicker, more accurate decisions based on real-world experience and field-proven strategies.
Find the fast path. A key value of your professional peer network is its ability to condense time frames by vetting strategies, streamlining the decision process, accelerating program development, eliminating missteps, and shortening implementations. Your network can show you the best path to almost any destination.
Your professional network provides valuable opportunities to benchmark programs, practices and performance. Understanding how these data are effectively applied in your unique business context is best achieved through candid dialogue among peers. Colleagues and industry contacts offer fertile ground to share and compare strategies and evaluate results. Seek out peer-to-peer discussion, industry benchmarking studies, and special-interest initiatives. Your network can help to validate (or not) what you’re doing and inspire you to refine and improve.
You can also use your network to vet tools, partners and resources. Your network can help assess/ascertain the merit of technologies, solutions, partners, resources, and affiliations. What journals, blogs and forums are helpful? What professional groups are valuable? Which benchmarking studies are worth your time? Which colleagues and consultants offer the best advice? Your network can be a compass and help direct you to valuable resources and a filter to help remove unnecessary time-wasters.
Check back next week for more ways you can build a truly powerful professional network. For a complete list of all 24 best practices you can use this link for a copy of the full white paper. You’ll get a .pdf you can save and share and immediate access to the content online.
Lon Hendrickson is the Executive Director of the CCNG Magnet Program.
