Gordon (yeah, his last name is Curtis) wanted to produce a book outlining his insights into the pursuit of business objectives. He'd never had a book published before, and he had no connections with agents and no experience in the process.
Applying his own system, he decided he needed a critical enabler to help him find and meet the right agent. After some thought, he concluded that he would find the knowledge he needed among people working in the industry or providing services to it, such as attorneys working on publishing and intellectual property issues.
He got in touch with the half-dozen trusted advisers in his network who were in fields somehow related to publishing to ask whether they knew anyone in these categories. This netted him three names—one man who ran a printing company and two attorneys—and he studied their backgrounds and interests to see which were likely to help him.
The printer looked like the best prospect, especially when Gordon checked LinkedIn and discovered a mutual connection he could call on—and then realized that he might actually have met the printer himself long ago, if they'd been members of the same swim team as children. Jackpot, he thought. He phoned the connection—a childhood friend'to confirm that the printer was the one he remembered and to get the friend's permission to mention him when talking about old times. The friend agreed, so he had the referral nailed down. He also came up with a tasty gesture of progressive reciprocity—an introduction to another connection who had developed an interesting short-run printing technology. And first contact seemed promising. They had a pleasant preliminary conversation, and the printer expressed interest and said he'd think about possibilities. Gordon followed up with a promised e-mail, but nothing happened, nor did he get a response when he phoned. Gordon finally realized the printer just wasn't going to help him.
Despite the apparent line-up, it had become clear that the printer really wasn't inclined or available to act as a critical enabler for the book project. So Gordon chalked that effort up to experience, and he returned to his list of prospects. One of the attorneys on the list seemed a pretty remote possibility'the trusted adviser who mentioned him said she wasn't even sure he'd remember her name—but when asked if he seemed like someone who'd be approachable, she cheerfully confirmed it. A review of background information showed that the man had taught sociology before becoming an attorney, and he maintained an interest in social science and is a former psychology professor at Harvard and Brandeis—he looked like a perfect match for a social networking book. Besides, as a gesture of progressive reciprocity, Gordon could offer a referral to someone in his network who might need advice on publishing law.
His new prospective critical enabler responded to Gordon's e-mail within the hour, offering a referral to the agent who wound up placing this book with Jossey-Bass.
Possessing the knowledge you need isn't enough to make someone an effective critical enabler, and sometimes even the best-chosen gesture of progressive reciprocity won't turn reluctance into support. Up to this point, I've been discussing three of the elements of a blockbuster introduction as though they will always work. And indeed it's true that you have to find someone knowledgeable—with the right information and contacts—and you have to set things up so your prospect will feel both obligated and motivated to help you; thus these three basics:
Knowledgeable: Successful networkers know what they want, and they talk to contacts who have the exact knowledge or relationships they need.
Obligated: Successful requests for assistance happen when the contact feels an obligation based on a referral or some previous association with the networker.
Motivated: Successful requests for assistance require something in addition to a sense of obligation; the networker still needs to offer the contact a reason to go out of the way to help, to stimulate their willingness to help.
But to be sure you have the right person, you need to look beyond these three elements. In particular, you want to look for someone who is
Inclined: Successful meetings happen with contacts who understand the value of, and enjoy, investing time in helping other people.
Available: Successful connections require the follow-through to deliver—not just a promise to do so that never translates into finding time for a meeting.
Like-minded: Successful exchanges begin with a real connection'some commonality between the networker and the contact.
The more of these factors you can bring to bear, the higher the likelihood that your contact with a prospective critical enabler will be successful. And when you have all of them, I can predict with certainty that the outcome of your encounter will be blockbuster.
The three characteristics that make a prospective critical enabler with the requisite knowledge virtually certain to work out for you are inclination, availability, and like-mindedness. Although I've seen many Right Person–Right Approach relationships succeed without some of these qualities, those that turned out to be truly blockbuster in terms of mutual benefit and exchange possessed these characteristics. Hence, it's best to look for a prospect who possesses them all.
Monitoring these qualities is the last element of maintaining control over the process. Such qualities generally are fixed in someone else and largely out of your hands, except to the extent that a truly well-chosen gesture of progressive reciprocity can evoke inclination in someone who initially appears to lack it, so your "control" in this area will tend to take the form of choosing which prospects to develop. That is, although these qualities are inherent in the person you are preparing to engage, the control is all yours when it comes to building on them for an easy and productive exchange.
When screening your prospects, prioritize them according to where they fall on the spectrum for each of these characteristics, from zilch to wild abundance. Because your ability to influence these three aspects of personality is so limited, you need to pay attention to them so as to avoid wasting your time and effort on someone who shows signs of disinclination to help you, no matter how attractive the knowledge and relationships they may have.
The quality of inclination depends mainly on someone's character, and evaluating it can feel more like going by instinct than making a logical assessment. In reviewing your pool of potential critical enablers, it helps to look for people who "feel right"—who seem to have an exceedingly receptive personality type, perhaps backed up by choice of profession, indicative of a natural inclination to be helpful.
If you'd like a more concrete list of qualities to back up your instincts, consider the kinds of people Malcolm Gladwell identifies in The Tipping Point as the ones at the heart of getting things done: the connectors who have "a special gift for bringing the world together," and the mavens who want to "solve other people's problems."
The concept of inclination in the Right Person–Right Approach framework builds on the types of people Gladwell describes'the ones "who link us up with the world." However, it is easy to be so dazzled by someone who is well connected that you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get to know or get a referral from the person, to no avail. But why wouldn't someone who connects with the world connect with you, too? Because connectors are not all created equal, and they're not all disposed to help you in the same way. Some people are connected to a lot of others simply because they are rich or powerful. If so, their connections may largely come to them, and you need to be offering far more than the sort of hopeful gesture that is usually effective if you want to join their crowd.
This view of inclination also builds on the concept of super-connectors Keith Ferrazzi describes in his excellent best-selling book Never Eat Alone. These too are the people most likely to be inclined to help. Although they are the ones to look for in your pool of potential critical enablers, however, it is a good idea to look closely to make absolutely sure your time is well spent. Although there are no hard-and-fast rules, here are some clues for spotting people who are likely to be inclined to help you:
Look at professions where people are paid, rewarded, or even just valued for networking. For example, entrepreneurs, consultants, attorneys, and financial advisers tend to be willing to offer their assistance as critical enablers.
Look for people who work in relatively small firms, because they can be more likely than people in large firms to have a hand in developing business and are thus required to be more resourceful with their networks. This makes them inclined to be active networkers—and to see you as a potential source of future benefit.
Look for people whose associates regard them as good connectors. That may seem circular, but it's something you can find out if you ask. That is, when discussing a referral to a potential critical enabler, simply ask, "How approachable is this person? Do you consider him/her a real networker or connector?" It's unlikely that it would occur to anyone to volunteer this kind of information, but almost everyone will know what you are asking.
And perhaps most important, look at the responses you get. How someone behaves in responding (or not responding) to your first inquiry can tell you a lot about their inclination if you are paying attention.
The key here is to avoid falling into the trap of investing too much time cultivating relationships with people just because they have knowledge and relationships you'd like to tap into. You may not be able to tell who's inclined to help you until you offer a gesture of progressive reciprocity. But if you don't get a positive response and your target either shows no interest in the sort of "needs interview" described in Chapter Six or talks to you without revealing needs you might fill, it may well be time to cut your losses. And even when someone does respond positively to a gesture of progressive reciprocity, you still need to watch carefully for signs of continuing inclination.
Let's look at another client example. Bella looked carefully for inclination in her prospective critical enablers, and she confirmed that this was a make-or-break quality.
Bella had a new job as senior VP of customer service for a company that managed assisted-living facilities. Her first priority was to give the company a clear picture of the amenities it needed to invest in to make its properties more competitive in the marketplace.
Assembling such a picture required significant knowledge about the assisted-living industry—knowledge that Bella, whose prior experience was all in banking, realized she needed to acquire very quickly, both to do her job properly and to avoid discrediting the family friend who'd helped her get it. Like many others facing such a major challenge, she also realized that she couldn't expect on-the-job training. She owed it to her employer to find other ways to come up to speed.
One of the problems was that she was so new to the industry that she didn't know what she didn't know. That became her first focus: how to determine not only what she needed to know but also how and from whom she could acquire that knowledge. Through our discussions she learned she needed to talk to experts in several areas: assisted-living real estate and property management, asset management, and trends in aging. As usual, the key question boiled down to, Who makes it their business to know what I need to know?
She shifted to looking for a gatekeeper, a lightning rod, a clearinghouse, or a manager of a watering hole. In her case it soon became evident that it would be someone running a university's center or institute on aging and for someone else who worked in an industry that developed and sold technology to assisted-living facilities. One of the people in her network was a prominent M.D., a family friend who specialized in geriatrics. She went to him and asked whether he could help her by recommending thought leaders in this area to talk to. In addition, she went to the Web site of an assisted-living industry professional association and found blurbs for several conferences that included the professional qualifications of the speakers, and she identified several possible critical enablers in this way.
She narrowed her choice down to two people who likely possessed the knowledge and relationships she knew could catapult her learning curve: a member of the board of directors of an assisted-living professional association who was also a professor of business at a prominent university, and the head of marketing at a health monitoring device company that sold to the assisted-living market. Either of the two seemed likely to have all the knowledge Bella needed to get off to a fast start.
Bella had already done a good deal of research into the industry in her efforts to become familiar with her new territory. For the college professor who was her first prospect, her gesture of progressive reciprocity involved an offer to share the research findings she had collected. That research would, she reasoned, be particularly helpful to him in his specialty field of commercial real estate, and she added an offer to make a presentation to one or more of his classes about the assisted-living real estate market—and to consider his students for internships in her company, which was an industry leader.
Although he agreed to meet with her, he seemed hesitant. "Despite the gesture we came up with, he still made me feel like I was imposing on him by asking him to meet with me," she told me. He opened the meeting by demanding, "How much time will you need from me?" She assured him that she'd be very quick and to the point, but that didn't allay his worries. He was terse, cold, and aloof, and he seemed to think she was asking him for a big favor. These were all indicators that he was not inclined to help her, even though she could have offered many things of value to him. She later said ruefully that she knew her normal pit-bullish nature would have led her to keep her jaws locked on this guy as she tried to shake loose the value that appeared so close. However, once she started thinking in terms of inclination, she saw that no matter what she offered, he was not going to open up to her, so she thanked him for his time and departed.
She turned to her second prospect, the marketing director, realizing in hindsight that she probably should have started with him. Prior to taking his current position, he had been head of development (that is, fundraising) for a university, and both that job and his current one were the type that attract strong networkers, people who culti-vate many business contacts. She also had a stronger gesture of progressive reciprocity to offer to this prospect: along with the results of her initial research, she could gently suggest that she would try to help him sell his products to the more than two thousand assisted-living properties her company owned and managed.
Here, Bella received welcoming signals of inclination from the start. The marketing director scheduled an initial meeting with her very quickly, and they happily laid the groundwork for several subsequent meetings. Based on the information he provided, Bella became a recognized architect in the development of a strategic change in her company's business model. She recognized that she was unlikely to have been able to amass the kind of information she received from this critical enabler on her own, let alone do it in the space of six months she took to prepare her plans for change.
One of the key points to be taken from Bella's story is that you don't want to fall into the trap of believing that simply because people agree to talk with you or tell you they're interested in you, they're necessarily inclined to become critical enablers. Trust your instincts when you're face-to-face with a prospect. If someone appears reticent even though you try to explore variations on your gesture of progressive reciprocity, as Bella's first prospect did, it's likely that you're not going to get what you need. When that happens, cut your losses and move on to another prospect.
Important as inclination is for determining if a prospect is a critical enabler, availability is equally critical. It's all too easy to reach out to a hot prospect and ignore the signs that it isn't going to work because the prospect isn't available for you. What you need is someone who has time to help you, or who considers responsiveness a high enough priority to make time for you.
To determine whether someone is available, assess clues like speed of response to your letters, phone calls, and e-mails and the extent of follow-through on commitments to work with you.
People who score high on availability tend to
Take your calls right away
Respond to your voice and e-mail messages within a day or two
Respond to your requests with dates and times to meet
Give a time frame of their ability if their schedule does not permit an immediate meeting
People who score low on availability tend to
Be hard to track down even if they initially seem inclined to help
Require more than one call or e-mail to get them to respond
Initially express interest in sharing contacts or information but have a hard time delivering
Tend to be overcommitted and frequently report being busy
Postpone or cancel meetings you've set up with them
Such unavailability can be episodic, but sometimes it is chronic. You may desperately want to talk to certain contacts and feel you are close enough to taste the value they could provide—but don't blind yourself to reality. The chances of making the connection may still be slim.
The word available describes those individuals who make it a priority to spend time exploring mutual interests. Availability directly relates to time and effort—yours and the other person's. It may not be worthwhile to invest time in waiting for someone to respond to you when there could be an even more valuable and available critical enabler right around the corner. From the very beginning you should decide how much time you are willing to invest in every prospect—and move on when that time expires.
This can be hard to do when someone at first appears to be able and willing to help. When communications switch from warm to cold, consider the burden of what you are asking for. If you've allowed someone to take control over your request for a third-party meeting, they may regret the offer later if it turns out to be harder than expected to deliver. The regret leads them to ignore your follow-up calls and messages, another form of unavailability. If you suspect this is what's happening, it may be worth one more try to get things back on track by offering to make the third-party contact yourself—but it may not be possible to get through if the gates are really shut. Again, if that happens, shrug and move on.
Charles, the "green energy" broker whose success story opens Chapter Six, got off on the wrong foot at first. His work as a commercial real estate broker had given him solid networking credentials. However, the people he knew were more apt to benefit from his new set of services than to help him put together a portfolio of companies and technologies to offer potential clients. His interactions with his network also tended to be highly transactional; that is, without a concrete exchange'say, buildings for money'there wasn't much else going on. His network tended to lack the sort of personal aspect that would make people willing to go out of their way to help him.
Given this state of affairs, Charles pounced on the concept of finding a critical enabler'someone who already possessed the intelligence he was trying to amass and would share it with him. His attention was drawn by a venture capitalist he knew only casually but with whom he felt he had a good enough rapport to approach as a potential critical enabler. His prospect welcomed Charles, and it looked like he was off to a great start. Unfortunately, despite an excellent progressive reciprocity referral to a technology transfer at MIT, Charles soon felt he was getting stonewalled. His calls weren't returned, or his contact was "out of the office," and Charles wasn't making significant progress toward his goal of identifying up-and-coming green energy technology companies. When it became clear that the prospect's unavailability was going to continue'making it unlikely that he would ever actually meet with Charles, let alone exchange information with him—we began to look for other prospects.
Unlike inclination and availability, which can be difficult to assess without a direct encounter, like-mindedness is something you can often discover in advance. It's well worth looking for, as it can turn a potentially lukewarm contact into something bordering on the magical.
A like-minded individual can feel like an instant connection with you in one or more of several important areas:
Age
Cultural or geographical background
Religious or spiritual beliefs
Activities such as sports or hobbies
Educational background, including pursuit of the same course of study or graduation from the same college
Personality traits—being outgoing or reserved, for example
Family status, especially if you have children of similar ages
Like-mindedness goes way beyond simply walking into someone's office and looking at the pictures on the wall to get clues as to interests or hobbies or friends. The like-mindedness component of the Right Person–Right Approach framework enables you to take the practice of identifying the right people to the next level.
In many ways like-mindedness gets lost in the shuffle in this day of impersonal Internet communication. Because of the false sense of security we tend to derive from the enormous number of contacts generated through Internet-based networking, it's easy to neglect taking time to get to know people as individuals. Although social networking sites make it easy to find people with similar interests, interests alone don't begin to guarantee that someone will have all the other attributes that would make for a good critical enabler. Indeed, that's one of the reasons it can seem so hard to pursue objectives in the current networking environment: having too many casual Internet contacts translates into not having the resources to do the necessary homework to be successful. And not doing your homework is one of the surest ways to waste a potentially productive attempt at exchanging value with another. So rather than trolling through your network looking for shared interests, it's useful to reverse-engineer the problem. That is, once you have found a potential critical enabler who seems to fulfill the rest of the right person criteria, then it's worthwhile to dive deeper in search of interests you share.
Some clients tell me they don't feel comfortable doing this kind of research. It can feel like spying on a contact. I certainly don't recommend that you do anything that makes you uncomfortable. But I'd also like to point out the many ways in which looking into people's backgrounds and discovering their interests is a normal and beneficial thing to do before you meet with them—it's the most primary of human needs to feel validated and understood, and your research is designed to help you satisfy this need and demonstrate a genuine interest in them personally.
With such an overwhelming number of people already posting their professional (and often personal) information on social networking sites, it's become a natural part of any business interaction to look someone up on Facebook or LinkedIn or another networking site. In fact, one of the first questions you often hear from someone you've just met is, "Are you on LinkedIn?" Having your information on these sites is the contemporary equivalent of handing someone a business card. If the person is not on one of the social networking sites, that might mean they are uncomfortable with putting personal or professional information "out there" for everyone to see, or the information they share is strictly business and it might be an indication that you should proceed cautiously—perhaps uncovering this information during your first face-to-face meeting rather than behind the scenes.
Keeping a close eye out for people's non-business interests often makes a big difference in how quickly they will identify with you. It predisposes someone to want to work with you if you share the same outside values and activities, whether it's fishing or bridge or martial arts. In addition, there is tremendous additional value to be gained by knowing more about the human side of the people you want to engage. Among other things, doing this kind of homework truly differentiates you from others who may be trying to approach this person. Although the cryptic, transactional approaches that I see people use seem so simple, all too often they are devoid of any human element or rapport building. Therefore, on this one dimension alone, it can be a breath of fresh air to your prospect if you simply acknowledge that you are kindred in some way other than business. Here's how it worked for one of my clients.
Richard was a partner in a leading international corporate strategy consulting firm, responsible for (among other things) the development of new business. In pursuit of this objective, he was talking with the CEO of a major credit card company. They'd had an initial meeting based on a referral, and Richard saw the prospect as having strong potential as a client. He knew this decision maker needed his company's services, but felt as though he hadn't been able to make the kind of progress he'd expected with him. When Richard met with me to discuss a second upcoming meeting, I asked him, "What do you know about this guy?"
"Well, I know about his job, of course," Richard replied, "and a little about his career history."
We immediately sat down to look up this potential client. One of the first things that popped up in our search results was that Richard's decision maker was deeply involved in a nonprofit organization whose mission was to support and encourage solid father-son relationships, especially among disadvantaged families. We got the very strong sense that his commitment to serving others was an important part of his identity. As soon as we began to understand this interest of his, I asked Richard if he knew anything about this. Without hesitation he said, "My uncle is involved with this same nonprofit organization, and he's recruited me to become involved as well."
Bang. Immediate connection. This identification of a key area of like-mindedness proved to be key to the success of Richard's meeting with this prospect. In fact, it immediately transformed their relationship. A formerly unresponsive potential client was now suggesting they go out to lunch, on the strength of Richard's connecting with him on this very human level.
Being able to identify like-mindedness is one of the keys to delivering the "lightning strikes" relationships that further your business and career objectives.
Discovering the inclination, availability, and like-mindedness of your prospective critical enabler is the final step in making sure you've identified the Right Person. Once you've completed the process of identifying, screening, and contacting your critical enabler, the next stage in the Right Person–Right Approach process is using the knowledge and contacts you acquire through your critical enabler to approach your target. Chapter Eight presents three case histories that illustrate how the Right Person–Right Approach method enables you to do that, not only to achieve your business objectives but also to use the framework to go beyond your original goals.