This year, as Forum Strategy enters its eleventh year and as an organisation with professional networks at its heart, we want to share our learning about what makes access to high quality, well facilitated professional networks so critical to leadership effectiveness and sustainability. Alongside this, we share some top tips for making the most of your networks and how we’ve seen huge value realised by hundreds of executive leaders over the years. Central to value (and therefore also the question of which network to join) is quality. Executive leaders need to be discerning in how their time is invested and therefore scruitinising the various offers out there in terms of the quality and the investment in expert facilitation, external contributors and resources produced is key. Forum Strategy is one such network where quality and depth is paramount; demonstrated through years of both content and connection that has helped to shape thinking and strategy across the sector.
So if you are new to networks and wondering if it’s right for you, or if you are a seasoned networker and looking to pinpoint how best to get value from the ones you have joined, read our advice below based on over a decade of experience in this important space.
1. Access to a ready made group of your peers
We know that executive leadership in education can be a lonely place at times. As people at the top, even with the best team around you, sometimes you need time with people who have experience of the role you are undertaking, including an understanding of the challenges, opportunities and dilemmas. In Forum Strategy’s #BeingTheCEO 2023 report, professional networks were cited as the main source of support for CEOs, which underlines the importance of regular access to peers. Within well run and well established networks, you can be discerning about who you want to connect with and why, ensuring you drive value through meeting people you ordinarily wouldn’t have met. At Forum Strategy, we have a number of ways to do this as we play a proactive role in connecting people based on things such as their context, current priorities, and areas for development.
2. Opportunity to dedicate time to your ongoing development
In busy, high pressure roles, finding time to invest in your own professional development can be a challenge, even though in most cases, you will be encouraging this among your team and organisation. Yet learning is essential to our ongoing success as executive leaders, and we need to model it too! When you invest in joining a high quality professional network, not only do you commit time in developing connections and therefore broaden your knowledge and perspectives, you also role model to your organisation that development time is supported and encouraged. However, we also know that finding time is one of the top barriers for executive leadership development. Let’s be clear, it is necessary to commit to making time if you are to derive the most value from the network, yet that is why we call it an investment – and an investment should deliver bigger returns. Joining a network should be seen in a similar way to agreeing to a partnership – to succeed, it cannot be one-sided and requires commitment over a period of time.
3. Saves you time and helps to keep the role strategic
Linked to the above point regarding time for development, joining a professional network also provides dedicated time for sparking essential strategic planning and ‘bigger picture’ thinking. Maggie Farrar often describes this as ‘moving away from the dance floor, to the balcony’ which is a great analogy. Due to the nature of our roles as leaders and given the many priorities and pressures across education currently, it can be easy to be drawn into a more operational space, potentially even reverting to ‘fire fighting’ mode rather than longer term thinking and planning. This is understandable but it can be tricky territory as it can become cyclical and a hard habit to break. We feel busy, but are our organisations laying the ground work for sustainable success and progress over time. In great networks, strategic level intelligence and horizon scanning information is shared regularly, directly and succinctly – allowing you the opportunity to digest and reflect on the information without the huge time investment in finding this for yourself. Two examples of this from Forum Strategy’s networks are our weekly strategy and intelligence briefings and our fortnightly funding and grants briefings delivered directly to inboxes with dozens of useful articles, thinkpieces and opportunities from within education and cross sector, which have been analysed and synthesized for our audience. Our termly network meetings also provide this in a verbal and interactive format. If you had to scour this strategic intelligence individually, it would take hours each week (or days over a year). Professional networks enable the flow of strategic information and save leaders time in each undertaking this individually in isolation.
4. Addresses current or future knowledge gaps
For many leaders, you have already formed your own networks in some way, shape or form. Perhaps people you have come into contact with throughout your career and/or, through the organic formation of local or specialised groups, particularly within education. However, formal national professional networks offer something different – the opportunity to draw from a wide pool of professionals across the country working in a hugely diverse range of settings. For example, in trust executive leadership networks such as ours, we have leaders from various trust sizes, various geographies, various phases and various levels of maturity as organisations. Everyone has something to share, and everyone had something to learn – across all the key strategic issues facing trusts and schools – and our networks recognise that. We also bring in experts from a range of fields across sectors – including AI, sustainability, and finance – in order to inform and spark high quality discussion. As CEOs and executives we are always learning, and our organisations are faced with some rapidly evolving and complex issues that will have a bearing on our impact and success achieved for children and young people. Having access to a broad and diverse network when those gaps need addressing, and where insight and direction will make all the difference, is really important. A network that is well facilitated, draws on expert insight and research, and works hard to ensure those within it can be connected thoughtfully and easily, can make all the difference
5. Offers direct and indirect return on investment
The start of this article was carefully worded to include the phrase ‘high quality and well facilitated professional networks’ for a reason. Such networks offer a wide range of opportunities and services, tailored very specifically to the audiences they encompass and as such, network members can easily demonstrate how the leader, the organisation and those it serves, benefit in the short and the longer term. Such opportunities will often require a level of investment in order that the quality and diversity of the offer can be achieved and sustained over time. On the flip side, there will inevitably be offers of professional networks that appear to offer good value from a monetary perspective (for example offered as ‘free’ or ‘highly subsidised’) but when scrutinised, may not be all they seem. Keep in mind that your time as a leader is an investment in and of itself (and carries a cost) and therefore that time needs to be well spent. Our advice is always to look beyond face value of the upfront cost of joining a network and weigh up the return on investment over time. Seek out quality and credibility as well as value for money.
In conclusion, we would also like to share our hints and tips for ensuring you derive value from the networks you are already a part of. Here are our five short pieces of advice.
1. Commit the time
The number one influencer on gaining value from your networks is allowing sufficient time to engage with the various aspects on offer. For example, at Forum Strategy, members have mentioned ringfencing dedicated time each week to scan the strategy and intelligence briefing for useful intelligence and/or booking time in calendars for network meetings as soon as dates are shared (and only moving them if something really urgent comes up). You will only get as much back as you are prepared to put in.
2. Be present and engage as fully as you can
When there are face to face or online opportunities across your network, however tempting it might be to multi-task or juggle (and sometimes this might be necessary of course), you will get far more out of the opportunity by being fully present and offering up ideas or reflections. This might mean starting more conversations when in a room with people or posting more things in the chat when online. By being more present and visible, you are likely to grow your network and thus drive out more value in the longer term. This also comes back to the point about being discerning about which networks you join. Forum Strategy has over a decade in the sector and has a deep commitment to quality and being responsive to current and future sector need. When you have limited time and you want to be as engaged as possible, choosing the right network(s) to dedicate time to is critical.
3. Share learning with others in your organisation
A great way to extend the value created through being part of a network is to share what you are learning with others in your organisation as it might help them to develop too or to spark a new idea somewhere. One of our COO and CEO network members shared that they structure their regular fortnightly meetings to include learning from Forum Strategy’s networks and to provide formal time to reflect on any important pieces of information. However you decide to do it, there’s an opportunity to weave network learning into opportunities across the organisation for development and reflection.
4. Provide feedback
High quality networks that you are part of will always encourage feedback and suggestions as they understand that the network is there to serve you as network members, particularly the ones whose only accountability is to you as members. It is always worth sharing your thoughts on a regular basis with the network on what’s working well and what you might need more of to improve your experience. In doing this, the network can evolve more to meet your changing needs. Don’t just leave this until a point of potentially leaving the group, otherwise you miss the opportunity to see the network change and evolve in response to what you’ve shared.
5. Help to build the network
Our view at Forum Strategy is that a good network is one that feels personal enough that you can get to know several people from within it but diverse enough that you are regularly connecting with new people. Where networks are built on recommendations from those already within it, this tends to work well as the values and moral purpose of those across the group are often well aligned. If you can help to grow and diversify the networks you are part of through recommendation, it will in turn add value to you as a member as it ensures the networks continually evolve and develop.
Forum Strategy runs three national networks for #TrustLeaders (CEO, COO & Education Executives). Find out more about our three networks here: https://forumstrategy.org/our-networks/
