Winner Winner- Chicken Dinner!

Recently, I had a scheduling conflict which forced me to turn down an offer to conduct an In-Service Workshop on effective communications for a school that I really wanted to visit.  The job came to me via a contact (networking) who was trying to recommend a speaker to someone in her network who asked for a referral.  Follow me?!  Let me bottom line it- seven-degrees of separation at work.

It was important to help this school find a quality speaker to take my place; I also needed to recommend someone who would reflect positively on me and not try to compete with me for future engagements.  It was important to the person who referred me initially that I follow through; and lastly, it was important to the person who initially asked for the referral for this school that we all deliver!

Naturally, my first thought was one of the other practitioners at The Sparrow Group, but we were all booked.  Dilemma!  Enter…”my network”.  I went to my LinkedIn contact list and was reminded of a contact, Paulette Hansen, whom I had met a year or so earlier through a networking group for cool women called MOXIE Exchange Movement.  Paulette, I recalled was conducting some meaningful workshops geared toward improving the workplace.  Paulette was also, in my experience, someone who had high morals and a very keen business sense and would be someone I could trust.

I dropped her a line, via LinkedIn (because I didn’t have an email address for her) and through a meeting and some emails, was able to help Paulette land this important engagement!

As I was reflecting on this today I found myself in awe at the rapid advancement/improvement of “networking” because of sites such as LinkedIn.  Even a few short years ago this would have likely been a missed opportunity for Paulette to take her workshop onto a national stage, and for me to make a great impression on a future client.

We all won because of a little thing called “networking”.