Talking to People and Knowing Things

As a recruitment strategy, its perhaps not the best approach. When people ask me to explain what I do, my go to answer is generally this – “I talk to people and know things”. There’s usually a slightly awkward laugh, and then I try and recover the conversation by explaining what I mean by that. In fairness though it does ultimately boil down to the same thing - talking to people and knowing things.

I work with communities and community leaders, and one of the core principles that I tell them is that a leader doesn’t need to be THE expert – in fact they SHOULDN’T be the expert in the community’s particular domain. It creates an imbalance in the community dynamic, as everyone automatically defaults to learning from the leader instead of learning with the leader. Instead I say that its crucial that a leader should be informed and have a clear opinion of what good looks like, but they don’t need to be the sole expert amongst the group.

The skill that I promote above all else is environmental awareness. To understand what is going on in and around the community, who is having problems, who is finding solutions, and what areas they are operating in. As a professional there is no feeling I love more than when I’m talking to someone about a challenge they’re having and being able to say ‘you know, there’s someone I’ve been talking to who’s been having that problem too – would you like to talk to each other to see if you can work it out together?’. It is the true essence of being people powered, as its allowing people to use people to solve problems.

This concept is known as Convening, a term I learned from Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner’s book Systems Convening. It’s the art of helping others create and realise value in a way that they wouldn’t be able to alone. In the book they point to many examples of where Conveners are an organisational catalyst; helping to create valuable connections that help solve meaningful problems. In my experience these roles become more and more crucial in larger organisations. There is a critical mass where an organisation gets to a certain size where it is simply impossible for any one person to be able to be aware and connected to what is going on in the rest of the organisation. By definition, we automatically find ourselves siloed, because our networks are limited by scale. Learning in one team or part of the organisation is simply too far away to be seen or heard of in another part, meaning that the value realisation that learning creates is equally limited by scale. The Convener’s role - as I said earlier – is to cross these scale induced boundaries and talk to people about what they’re doing, what they’re struggling with, what they’re succeeding at, and to know who else might benefit from it.

Here's an example from my own experience that I can share with you. I was at an internal networking event and I was booooooooooored. The snacks were poor, the drinks were warm, and the mood was sullen. Still, in order to justify my continued employment I thought it best to make an effort and set a good example, so I went off to find someone to talk to. My own personal game to play at events like this is to find someone and see how long I can get them to talk for. And so I found myself talking to who I discovered was one of our Recruitment Managers, and he had a problem. There was a real focus on recruiting technical talent into the business, and he and his team were really under pressure to make sure we were bringing in strong high quality talent. The problem he told me was that they didn’t have the skills within the recruitment team to appropriately gauge a potential candidates technical competency – they knew enough to get by, but not enough to know whether what a candidate was saying would represent the type of deep knowledge we were looking for. This rang a bell for me – a couple of weeks prior I had been having a coffee in a different office with one of our high performing junior staff, and she’d also had a problem. She wanted to make a name for herself and get promoted, but was struggling to find an opportunity to demonstrate it. To find a way where she could use her technical skills to make a broader difference to the business that she could point to and say ‘see that? I did that’. Amongst other things, we’d been discussing the technical challenges she’d been working on to keep her skills sharp, and how they did or didn’t relate to the work she was doing now.

‘Here’s an idea’ I said the Recruitment Manager ‘I know someone who’s way more technical than you and me, and they’re looking for an opportunity to use their skills to make a difference. Perhaps it would be worth you two meeting and seeing if you can help each other?’

A month or so later, they had met, found a common thread that would allow them to both solve their problems, and had started to work together. She had taken what she’d learned and begun designing some relevant technical challenges that could be used during interview, and had written a cheat sheet for the recruitment team to use when screening candidates (what green and red flags to look for when talking about tech). What happened? Over time the recruitment team saw an improvement in the quality of candidates being progressed through the interview process, with a higher percentage of latter stage interviews leading to an offer being made. The junior engineer was able to point to real world value that she was creating, and built it into her (ultimately successful) promotion case.

You will notice that I did nothing here, other than talk to people and know things – and yet, by doing that you can see the real world difference that was enabled because of it.

Some might think of this as networking, and if you’re boring then yes you could look at it like that. I don’t think so though – I think the key difference is that a convener works in service of others, and is looking to help others leverage the people power of community to solve their problems. Pure networking (to me at least) is the opposite of that; seeking opportunities to create value for one’s self. These two positions don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and there is of course an enormous amount of overlap between the two – the difference is above all else a question of motivation.

What’s interesting about this is that I’ve spoken to others who identify as Conveners, and they describe themselves in a similar way as I do. I met someone who referred to their job as ‘riding around on my bike and drinking coffee with people’, which I particularly love. Over in the By People For People Community I asked this question and notable answers were ‘Professional Networker’ and ‘I help people do things’, and all of these point to the same core value – that we see the value that we bring to the table is helping others do more and go further.

Thanks so much for reading, if you’ve enjoyed this post I’d really appreciate it if you could share it - alternatively you could always buy me a coffee 🙂