When you consider the benefits of learning, it makes so much sense to allocate time for it.

Most significant results are accomplished by teams of people rather than by an individual acting alone.

Therefore, it makes sense to devote time to develop your leadership and people skills and learn how to communicate better. Asking better questions and having more deliberate and productive conversations helps you greatly improve your results. In addition, a great deal more can be accomplished when you get better at dealing with people.

It is also great to listen to other leaders whose success you admire. This helps to keep you hopeful, inspired and positive.

The attitude you adopt is so vital to the results you achieve. People like being part of your team when you uplift, inspire and recognise them.

If you stop listening to and reading positive material, you will typically notice a decline in your attitude. You will be less resistant to the negatives that come your way all the time.

When you deliberately take time to learn, apart from becoming more effective with others, you also learn better, more efficient ways of organising yourself and accomplishing tasks more efficiently. This alone can save you many hours per week across a variety of non-networking related activities as well as activities that are related to network building.

We highly encourage you to create a culture of lifelong learning with your team members.

One of the best ways to create a habit of learning is to listen to the Podcasts provided by the CC. It’s easy to listen to Podcasts while performing other activities such as a daily walk.

It is our experience that most people struggle with how they allocate their time. That is why we have created a Podcast in the Builders menu called “How to invest your time”. As a leader, this is one of the Podcasts we highly recommend you listen to and promote to your team members.

It’s great when you can excitedly recommend a talk you’ve heard to other members of your team. This can also save you the time to explain the concepts presented by the speaker on the Podcast.

We have a whole section in the Builders menu devoted to Podcasts. This makes it easy for members of your team to access and listen to them.

In particular, note that the Podcasts display particularly well on smartphones.

Also, note that you can easily save any CC webpage to the home screen of your phone. This is particularly useful to facilitate fast access to Podcasts.

Most people enjoy the meetings provided by the Connect Collaborative and gain great value from them.
During these meetings, you often meet others that you can advocate for and that will advocate for you.
You often meet people with whom you can build reciprocal relationships.

It’s easy to see how immediate benefits can flow by participating in networking meetings.

On the other hand, it is more difficult to see and patiently wait for the benefits that indirectly flow from your network building activities.

Time flies when you participate in enjoyable CC meetings. On the other hand, time can easily drag when you spend time on activities such as sending invitations to connect on LinkedIn.

If achieving great results is important be aware of where you are spending your time.

Prior to COVID, many people spent several hours a week just travelling to networking meetings. Then there was the time spent before during and after the networking meeting.

Fortunately, with meetings conducted on Zoom, we can now all save the travel time and not be limited to interacting with only those that live locally.

Let’s say you’ve decided to allocate a total of 6 hours of your week to build your network, participate in networking, CC workshops and learn from the syllabus.

How should you spend those 6 hours to achieve the greatest results?

It would be easy to spend 6 hours attending meetings, learning and networking with those you meet in the CC. It is highly likely that this would result in some valuable advocacy. However, if you invest no time in network building, your results are likely to be severely limited.

It is therefore important to first decide how many hours per week you will devote to building your network. Then devote the remainder of your weekly allocation of hours to networking, advocating & learning.

Let’s say you decided to spend 10 minutes per day, 5 days per week reaching out to others on LinkedIn. That would be say 1 hour per week. Then you could spend a further 2 hours on team onboarding and network building activities. That would be a total of 3 hours per week that you would spend on network building leaving another 3 hours per week available for networking activities such as attending meetings, advocating and learning.

The main message here is to be deliberate about how you spend your time. Start by deciding how much time you are prepared to devote to your CC activities. Then decide how much time you will invest in network-building activities. Then decide how you will divide the remainder of your CC time. In other words, what meetings will you attend? How much advocacy will you participate in? How much time will you devote to listening and learning?

Consistent network building is the prerequisite for having a large, growing advocating network.
Having said that, there is no obligation to build a network.

It’s up to the individual to decide if they want to just enjoy networking with others in the CC or if they want to build their network and contribute to the growth of the CC and achieve much greater personal benefits as a result.

Given that network-building takes consistent effort, it’s good to remind ourselves of the benefits of network-building compared with networking. So let’s re-look at some of these.

You are building an exponentially growing asset. In other words, you are feeding the goose that lays the golden egg.
In the process of building your network, you clarify what could now become possible for you because you are building an exponentially growing network.
As you meet people and listen to their ideas, it helps you discover exciting ideas that you can implement.
When it comes time to implement your ideas, you have a large group of supporters who are willing to advocate for and support you in any way they can.
You can connect an increasing number of people with each other. This means you can help an increasing number of people achieve their goals.
You develop valuable leadership skills that can be applied in any situation.
You learn about people and what motivates them on mass and individually. As a result, you develop people skills, become more intuitive about working with your team members and develop your emotional intelligence.

What kind of activities do we categorise as network-building?

1. Conducting Discovery calls with people you already know or are meeting for the first time.
2. Reaching out to others you have not yet met on LinkedIn.
3. Helping your team members on board their new team members.
4. Attending CC Intro sessions with your guests.

What kind of activities do we categorise as networking rather than network building?

1. Attending CC meetings such as workshops, results accelerators and SIG’s

Such meetings are usually great experiences. And in many cases, you will meet others that you will be able to help by advocating for them to people you know (and vice versa).

Attending these meetings help you accomplish great things through the people who are already part of the CC. However, attending these meetings does nothing to expand the number of people who participate in these meetings.

2. Having 1 on 1 Zoom meetings with others you have met in the CC

These meetings can be inspiring - especially when they represent the opportunity to create business for you.

However, it’s always good to remind yourself that receiving increased business should never prevent you from feeding the goose that lays the golden egg.

Before receiving an avalanche of new business, it’s essential to establish mini-habits that will allow you to consistently spend some time on network building activities.

3. Advocating for other CC members
It takes time to help your team members and others in the CC meet contacts that could be very valuable for them.

Although this is a very worthwhile activity, we do not categorise it as network building.

How much time should you allocate to network-building?

We recommend you decide on a level of personal network-building activity that you can consistently maintain.

For example, you may decide that you can easily send out a minimum of 5 invitations to connect on Linkedin every day. How long would that take? About 5 minutes a day.

If your team members sent out 5 invitations per day, how long would it take for them to achieve Core-5 based on that activity alone? Based on our experience, it should take about 40 days (roughly 2 months).

What about the time taken to onboard new team members?

We suggest that you have an onboarding session each week with a new team member for roughly 4-6 weeks. This onboarding period allows you to build your relationship with your new team members as well as helping them to learn the how-to’s via our Syllabus. After the initial onboarding period, you can decide to modify the frequency with which you meet. This could be every 2 weeks or monthly as an example.

It is essential to help your new team members onboard their team members.

This can be time-consuming. However, it is essential to realise that you are looking for leaders. When you find a leader who is ready to commit to building their network, they will gradually take over the building and ownership of their group. This means you can gradually decrease the amount of time you spend in that group. As a result, you can add value, and you don’t have to do all the day-to-day work.

In conclusion, it is very exciting to realise what building a team of team-building advocates can help you achieve. Amazing things become possible when you learn how to build advocating teams of people. At the same time, it will take deliberate focus to establish the consistent network building habits required to create an extensive network.

If, you have decided that building your network is important, it makes sense to decide how much time you will devote to your network building activities.

We have observed that people tend to invest more time building their networks as they see the value of building a team of team building advocates.

It is interesting that before COVID, networking activities tended to be relatively limited and inefficient. People often spent significant amounts of time travelling to local networking events. Then the people they were able to network with were confined to other local attendees.

Yet, even before COVID, many people recognised the importance of networking and were, therefore, prepared to invest significantly more time in networking than they need to today, when our networking meetings are held by Zoom.

After deciding how much time you are going to invest in building your network, it is then necessary to decide how best to allocate your time over the following possible activities:

Network Building
Networking
Continual Learning

The Connect Collaborative exists to help people build their teams of team building advocates. This is what we mean by network building.

In other words, we suggest adding people to your network with a view to empowering, them, to add people to their networks.

Personally advocating for others is powerful and builds trust.

However, building a team of team building advocates is infinitely more powerful than merely increasing your personal advocacy for trusted others. It’s far better to have many others in addition to you practising advocacy.

So, we believe you will achieve the greatest results by setting aside a consistent amount of time each day, to expand your business relationships, to see if they could become network building partners in your team.

We also believe that you should set aside time to help your team members onboard others and work through our syllabus.

There is ample opportunity to network with others in the Connect Collaborative. This naturally happens as a consequence of meeting others in the small break-out groups conducted by the CC. However, it also occurs as others want to set up meetings with you to learn more about what you do and how they may help you.

It’s almost automatic to set aside time for networking! Networking will occur simply by attending CC Zooms. After that, networking will take care of itself.

This means you need to be very deliberate about forming daily network building habits. The same applies to advocacy. When you see the opportunity to valuably advocate for someone in your team or another member of the CC, be deliberate about making it happen!

When you are so busy attending meetings, reaching out to others you have not yet met on LinkedIn, helping your new members onboard their new team members, advocating for others, and so on, it is easy for continual learning to take a backseat. However, to ignore the power of learning provided by the CC would be a big mistake. Learning is vital. Knowledge can save you a lot of time and money and can help you earn more of the right type of income.

As with all of us, you only have a limited amount of time. So you need to become deliberate about where you invest your time.

Following are examples of how you may be able to use your network building and learning time more effectively:

When you onboard a new team member, don’t just see it as an exercise of equipping them by taking them through the syllabus. Realise that at the same time, you are also building a relationship with them and thinking about how you may be able to advocate for them to others.
When you learn to do better Boolean searches and use tools such as MyMostTrusted, you become more effective and efficient with your LinkedIn outreach.
You can listen to podcasts while doing other activities (such as driving, exercising or rocking the baby).
You can learn how to limit the time you spend in Zoom conversations by careful scheduling.

In summary, our message is that Network Building is your highest priority. You need to make time for your network building activities deliberately. Getting to know and advocate for others will typically automatically occur as a consequence of attending CC Zoom meetings. As such, these activities do not require as much deliberate focus as network building and continual learning.

The secret to allocating time to network building and continual learning is to determine how much time you plan to invest in these activities, then, deliberately focusing on them until they become automatic habits.