People Networking - William Buist

Networking - Discussion between Michael Beale and William Buist, October 2007.

William Buist, Director of Abelard Management Services Ltd and Chairman of the BlackStars Club within the Ecademy Business Network explains his view of networking, where and when he networks and what he considers to be some of capabilities and beliefs of effective networkers.

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Michael - Firstly I'd like to thank you very much for taking part in this call.

William - That's a pleasure Mike

Michael - And if I can ask you to kick off, by introducing, and giving the listeners a background of who you are and what you do.

William - My name is William Buist, and I work with business's and teams of business's to help them build trust and collaborative working practices amongst the team, and one of the reasons that I've got involved in that is because it also uses a lot of the skills used in networking to make it effective. I also worked with ecademy, the online network, to help them with their life members club, which is called Blackstar.

Michael - Can you give me an idea of what sort of clients you have regarding your key business?

William - I've worked with a whole variety of dif business sizes, but perhaps one of the better examples is when I did work with one of the trade associations, the association of British insurer's on a project that involved the distribution team drawing people from a number of different companies to work on a company project relating to insurance fraud - and what I was doing was helping to help that team to gel, and work across the boundaries of being in different places, having different drivers and different goals within their own organisations, while having a common goal on an external project.

So I helped to make all of that gel, that's one example. I'm also working on a with a rapidly growing SME, and as they're taking on more staff of course, they're having to engage those staff into those routines, and get them effective quickly. So I'm helping them do that.

Michael - And also some of out listeners won't have heard of Ecademy - so could you give a very brief introduction of both Ecademy and Blackstar?

William - Ecademy is a online network that you'd find at Ecademy - Business Networking - Connecting Business People, and ecademy is primarily aimed at small to medium sized business's, allowing the business owners and senior people in those companies to interact online as well as offline.

They run a lot of meetings and seminars where the members of ecademy can get together and see each other face to face, between those meetings, there's a variety of forums, marketplaces - places where people can share their knowledge and experience online. And so get to know each other before they meet. And continue the relationship building after they've met as well.

Within that there's a community called Black star which is the life members club. And that's a relatively small part of the organisation but a very active one, involving of about 400 people, who've committed to a ecademy membership for life and who meet regularly share their expertise, share their knowledge and help each other.

Michael - Where and when do you network?

William - Pretty much when the sun's up!

William - And sometimes when it's down too. But I think networking is one of those things that it's very easy to think 'Am I networking now, or aren't I?' but in fact what it's really about is building relationships with people you meet.

I tend to be travelling a fair amount with the various bits of work I do, and I meet a lot of people in these travels and often the conversations are purely social, and yet really that's networking. I'm building relationships with these people, I'm understanding them a bit. And maybe these conversations will lead to more detailed conversations - but maybe they don't. However whichever of those two result I feel that its a part of the whole networking process.

Michael - I'll build on that a little bit - what is it that networking means to you?

William - Primarily it's means the opportunity to meet new people, to get to know them, to understand what's important to them, what sort of help they need in their business or indeed in their personal life. It means using the knowledge that I have, both in terms of how networks work, but also in terms of the people I've already met, knowing what they do and being able to bring people together who can help each other, either for personal development or business development and one of the things I've tried to do in all of my networking days is to make those connection, to get the right people together and when I do that people do it for me as well. So it's a two way street.

Michael - So when you're networking, what actually do you do? You meeting somebody for the first time, what do you say to them? Take it as if you were teaching me how to network.

William - Perhaps it's worth taking a step back and talking just for a quick moment about some common misconceptions about networking.

Michael - Excellent.

William - and I think when I was in corporate life, and I've think a lot of people who are in big companies performing a specific role, they tend to be quite focused on that role. And when they meet new people in seminars and all those things that you tend to go on in the big organisations, the focus tends to be around the question that a lot of people ask, and that's 'what do you do? And people then focus on their role, talking about what you do.

While it's important on one level, most of the time most people won't be desperately interested in what you do. Because it's just something that you do, it's part of our general lives.

What they are interested in though, is how what you do can interact with the rest of the world, and in particular with them, if that makes sense.

So the first thing I would say to anybody who comes to me and says 'can you help me to network?' is to take the focus away from themselves and what their specialty is and what their role is in whatever job they have - and to put the focus on the other person, not on 'what they do' but, 'what stops them doing what they do?' 'What's difficult for them?' 'What's hard?'. and the reason to do that is to find a means - fairly quickly - of being able to help them, to give them a pointer, to give them advice, maybe give them a bit of the experience that you've had in these things.

So an early question might be something like "What are you working on right now?" or "What project are you working on?" people will naturally tell you about the things that are important to them in their job in that sense, in the project sense.

And the follow up question is 'what makes that hard?' and it's really to get to that follow up question, that's the one that gets you talking about some things that are perhaps a bit more attached to emotions as well - because when you start talking about things that are hard, it's hard to do that without sensing the emotions that you're feelings, the frustration.

So that's one route -another way to look at that is to perhaps move away from the standard questions, that lead to a very short and perhaps not very well thought out answer like 'What do you do?' that tends to lead to an answer like 'oh,. I'm an accountant' and it's fairly hard to know where to go from there, it's a fairly closed answer. But if you're asked the question 'what's your expertise' you might still get the 'I'm an accountant answer' because people find it hard to think immediately on what their expertise is, but you might also get the answer that says 'my expertise is actually is in understanding the details of corporation tax law, and helping business's to maximise their profits by minimising the tax liabilities that might occur." Quite a different answer, yet still the same profession underneath it.

Michael - I like that.

William - That leads you to be able to discuss elements of that, where you may have some knowledge of somebody who is struggling with corporate tax bill right now for example, a perfect client, a good introduction, you might know somebody know is also in that field maybe with connections to a lot of tax accountants, and an introduction with them might be useful for collaboration. And that's what I'm trying to do all of the time, to find all of those little connections that help people move their business or move their personal lives along. Does that make sense?

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