Page 131 - Free Yourself From

114 It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor

later people will notice your stinginess and their own generosity will
dry up.

What Does Your Strategic Network Look Like?

It’s time to take a look at your relationships or networks.
When I ask people to identify their strategic network, they often
pull out their company’s organization chart. This is a good place to
start, but it can be limiting—a web of relationships should include
your immediate line of reports and colleagues up and down the orga-
nization, but also across and out. This is a good time for women to
think broadly and big.
It can help to stop thinking of your company as a traditional hier-
archy and to think of it instead as a web of interconnected relation-
ships that you can seek out and develop in multiple ways and at
multiple levels.

Building Your Web: Sizing Up Your Network

Think about all the people who report to you, your peers, the exec-
utives in your organization, people outside of your organization such
as contacts in your industry and at previous employers, and the busi-
ness relationships you have within your community and social circle.
Try placing all these relationships in concentric circles based on
how much day-to-day contact you have with them. Take a moment,
and from the inside outward list the following:

• Relationships within your immediate team or functional area

• Contacts you have in your company but beyond your
immediate team

• Customers and colleagues outside your company