I recently heard a panel featuring kick-ass female attorneys in the general counsel’s offices of some of the largest brand names you know (Um, hello, SPANX!) and one topic the group kept coming back to was women’s lack of network - specifically to powerful people. At a time in life when you’re racing out of the office to make the soccer carpool, dedicating time to attend networking events can feel like a real drag. What should be a top priority for career development falls to the bottom of the ever-growing to-do list.
This crack panel shared their tips for cultivating a network:
Look, I know hiring a sitter to drive your daughter to dance class so that you can attend an evening networking event seems like a colossal waste of time and money. But it's not. Done strategically, you can build your own highly-targeted network that actually saves you time, helps your career and makes your work more efficient.
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Through my Board service to the Society of Alumni at Randolph-Macon College I have recently had the honor of mentoring a young woman, a junior from southern Virginia and first-generation college student. Inspired by Elizabeth Morehead’s writing on supporting first-generation professionals to improve corporate diversity, I wanted to share some advice.
If we ever want to solve big problems like pay equity or women in the Boardroom, we have to support women from the very beginning. It’s not enough to GET to college, you need to maximize the experience. It’s not enough to get the internship, you need to squeeze every last drop of value out of it. And to keep going you need to be supported every step of the way. So I went to my hive mind, my college girlfriends who are killing it professionally and up at 7 AM on a Sunday morning and happy to share advice via text as they sip coffee before launching into their busy days. While some of the advice stemmed from our own internship failures (“don’t talk to the press,” truth.) here is what we came up with:
Remember, this is an audition for your future life. Now go break a leg, sister, you’ve got this. |