The purpose of on-boarding others is not merely to educate them on “how to” build their networks.

Perhaps even more importantly, on-boarding allows you to develop your relationship with new team members.

Ideally, you are looking for 5 great partners who will also find 5 great partners.

You will invest a good deal of time in your 5 ideal partners.

However, the reward will come when they onboard 5 ideal partners and duplicate what you did with them.

When you find your 5 ideal partners, you have discovered 5 people who want to build and lead a team of others.

The main message here is: be willing to invest time in those that you wanter partner with.

Two of the best ways of investing your time with your network building partners are:

Via your weekly onboarding sessions.
Via facilitated advocacy to others in your team and carefully selected others in the CC.

So, you want to make sure that your potential new network building partner

Is prepared to invest time to build their network consistently.
Understands the difference between networking and network building.
And that they are not just briefly excited about what they experienced at the CC Intro meeting.

In the end, you are looking for people who:

Are excited about building their own team of team building advocates.
Are willing to lead by example.

The last thing you want to do is waste your time trying to talk people into joining your team.

In the end, you only need to find 5 people who are willing to build their teams, and you will experience exponential growth!

Keep reminding yourself: It only takes 5!

To help determine if your candidate is serious about building their network, ask them (your version) of the 5 Golden questions:

1. Do you feel you would be more successful (both as an individual and as a business) if you built a strong network?

2. Do you have an interest in building your network?

3. Would you be prepared to set aside some time each week to learn the skills of building a team of team building advocates on the one hand, and leveraging commercial value from your network on the other?

4. Would you be prepared to dedicate some time each week to put what you have learned into practice by, proactively reaching out to those you have not yet met via Social Media?

5. Are you prepared to invest some time each week interacting with, and advocating for, others?

Assuming your candidate answers these questions positively, and you feel it is a good fit, select a time for a weekly on-boarding session.

Let your new team member know that you will set up a recurring event for these sessions. However, you anticipate that these sessions will last for about 4-6 weeks. After which time, you can review what would be some good next steps.

Let them know that each on-boarding session will be an opportunity for you to:

Get to know them better.
Help them learn the system and on-board their first few team members.
Help them meet relevant others in the CC.

What is going to make the most significant difference in the lives of others you are associated with?

In general, most people are easily distracted by the latest ‘exciting’ thing..

Also, many people feel overwhelmed by the many things they must urgently do.
Consequently, they often sacrifice investing time in the important things that would enable them to set up the future that they truly desire.

If you want to achieve the things you truly desire in life, you can and must devote time to your Important, as well as, your Urgent.

This is a progressive paradigm shift that you can help others make – it’s so worth it for them, and most importantly, it will duplicate.

When you have a team out to make a difference in the lives of others, you have a more significant impact than you may at first realise.

You need to show your team members what it’s like to find their first, true, network building partner. Someone willing to build their network, and make advocacy an automatic habit.

In the end, we can accomplish relatively little on our own.

Most significant achievements are accomplished by organisations – in other words, by teams of people.

How you select and equip team members is likely to be one of the most significant determinants of your success – in anything.

Professor Adam Grant has researched this question in depth.

Following are some compelling reasons to put the book Give and Take by Adam Grant on your must-read (or must-listen list):

“Give and Take”, is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, translated into 30 languages​!

It was named one of the best books of the year by Amazon, Apple, the Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Oprah says it’s one of her most riveting reads.

This book is on Fortune’s must-read business books, Harvard Business Review’s ideas that shaped management, and the Washington Post’s books every leader should read.

For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck.

But today, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others.

It turns out that at work, most people operate as either takers, matchers, or givers.

Whereas takers strive to get as much as possible from others and matchers aim to trade evenly, givers are the rare breed of people who contribute to others without expecting anything in return.

Using his pioneering research as Wharton’s top-rated professor, Adam Grant shows that these styles have a surprising impact on success.

Although some givers get exploited and burn out, the rest achieve extraordinary results across a wide range of industries.

Combining cutting-edge evidence with captivating stories, Grant shows:

How one of America’s best networkers developed his connections.
Why the creative genius behind one of the most popular shows in television history, toiled for years in anonymity.
How a basketball executive responsible for multiple draft busts, transformed his franchise into a winner.
How we could have anticipated Enron’s demise four years before the company collapsed (without extensive financial analysis)

Many people have a taking style – erroneously believing they are givers.
Uppermost in their minds is achieving short-term gains before actually earning trust.

Professor Grant’s research shows that the only time Takers achieve greater results is in the short term - (typically less than one year).

After that, the returns accruing to Givers far outweigh the short-term gains achieved by Takers.

Suppose you are interested in achieving your best individual results over the medium to long term. In that case, it’s worth getting your head around this concept, and we recommend reading Professor Grant’s book.

Even if your natural style leans towards impatience for short-term results, it may be worth considering how you can authentically adjust your style for far greater results in the medium to long-term.

Following is the audio from a great TED talk by professor Adam Grant....

The concept of multiplying your time, rather than just managing it, is well explained by Rory Vaden in his popular TED talk entitled: How to multiply your time.

It is far easier to advocate for others in the CC when you are simultaneously growing your team of team-building advocates.

Your team consists of the partners you have introduced to the CC and the partners they have introduced.

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, the best way to create advocacy for yourself is to first create as much genuine advocacy for others (you trust) as you possibly can.

Imagine this:
You Know Like & Trust your CC connector (the person who connected you to the CC and is helping onboard you).

You decide to do everything you can to advocate for and promote your connector to relevant others.

When you onboard people (i.e. you are their Connector), they will see how well you promote and advocate for your connector and, in turn, do the same for you.

In other words, they will duplicate how well you advocate for your connector.

Multiple people doing this for you and looking for opportunities to advocate for you within their teams means you will generate unbelievably great results.

As your team grows:
The advocacy coming your way (both from your team and the teams of others) significantly increases
Your chance of discovering opportunities that can help you scale up also increases
Many of us are interested in increasing our incomes while decreasing the time required to develop that income.
Network building allows you to discover the means of doing this and many other worthwhile “end goals”

For many of us, it is essential to think beyond the reason we started building our networks.
For example, let’s say your original goal was to gain more business.

What if network building helps you achieve that with the result that you become “insanely busy – overwhelmed – stressed”.

Is that really the outcome you envisaged at the outset?
Are those the results you want?

Always keep in mind the higher purpose for building your network – what’s the end result you truly desire, and how could building your network help you achieve this?

It starts with Why

What are the benefits of building and leading a team of team-building advocates?

When you create an exponentially growing team of team-building advocates, you will have close relationships with a few great leaders who will advocate for you to the leaders they know.

Each leader will know and have trust with many influential others.

This is an incredible asset that will support the endeavours about which you are passionate.

Building teams is the substance of results in any endeavour.

After all, every company or organisation is a team of people.
It’s the team of people and especially their leaders that determine the success of the enterprise to which they belong.

The best teams love working together, supporting each other and helping each other to achieve results.

When you build a team of great network builders, you develop your leadership skills, discover opportunities, and receive an ever-increasing amount of advocacy for the endeavours you are passionate about.

Ask yourself: What does building a team of team building advocates make possible - for me?

It all starts with finding and developing leaders.

1. To help you cast the vision to your new member that, although there is effort involved in building a team, they are building an asset. And, in fact, this asset is likely to be the greatest asset they ever build. In other words, it’s definitely worth the effort.

2. To help you explain to your new team member why building a team of team building advocates results in such a great asset.

3. To help you explain to your new team member the value of carefully selecting network building partners.

4. To help you explain to your new member the importance of the onboarding process. Onboarding goes beyond merely teaching new members about the system. It allows you to build trusted relationships, enable duplication and discover great leaders who will develop and lead their own teams.

5. To help you to show your new member how to register new members. These registration steps are well documented. However, make sure to help your new member register others if they are not yet confident of registering a new member on their own.