I was delighted to have the opportunity to co-host EY’s UK&I Assurance All People Call. The session focused on the power of connections, in which we heard from a range of professionals, ranging from new joiners to the firm to senior leaders.
Being presented with this opportunity demonstrates the power of connection, as someone (sadly, I don’t know who) nominated me as a candidate, as a result of having a connection with me in some way, even if not a close one!
Winning in the market by looking inwards
A notable benefit of large organisations, such as the Big 4, is the vast diversity of talent within them. Large size also creates a challenge, departments can end up like silos, making it a challenge to be agile and leverage the skills available.
Building connections internally and across departments is a way to pull in talent from different experts within the organisation to make truly great things happen. This combines the power and breadth of large organisations with the agility of a startup.
In the call, we heard from several partners who specifically mentioned cross-departmental connections as crucial to standing out in audit tenders which they went on to win. They were able to rapidly build exceptional teams through leveraging their connections by being able to bring in specialists and experts from different departments and people from key geographical locations at short notice. Having an existing relationships allowed them to work together cohesively and effectively as a single EY team. They stood out from competitors, which came across as disjointed when it came to specialist involvement.
Building your new network
Insights from our new joiners
On the call, I interviewed an impressive panel of recent joiners on EY’s graduate scheme. Since they are just starting out in their professional lives, they’ve been building their networks from scratch and had some useful insights we can all learn from:
- Prioritise in-person
- The panel all recognised the power of being in the office to ask for help/resolve queries, build rapport and learn from osmosis, noting that this was beneficial for both colleagues and client contacts.
- Don’t miss out on events
- Take full advantage of opportunities to mingle internally and externally, such as socials and networking events. These are easy to overlook as they’re not part of our official roles.
- It’s comfortable to stick with the people you know, make an effort to try and speak to someone you’ve not spoken to before.
- Where networking opportunities don’t exist, create them! The panellists have been involved in starting a regional women’s network in the Leeds office and a department running club in CCaSS, and even as simple as scheduling in a coffee catch up.
How I use LinkedIn to build my network
In the Q&A, I was asked about using LinkedIn to expand my network, my approach is:
- Provide value – I try to share posts that people on LinkedIn will find insightful, helpful or interesting, they may even share it with their network.
- Spread some positivity – whether its humbly highlighting a success you, another or a team has had, or being grateful for an opportunity.
- Use messages – if I find an opportunity or article that someone I know will benefit from, I take the initiative to share this with them, recently I shared an event in the House of Commons that was of interest to a colleague.
- Be patient and have no expectations – a harsh truth of making effort to build an online presence is that not everyone will care and it can take time for people that do to notice and/or appreciate your efforts, stick with it and have good intentions and hopefully you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
I reflected on the reason I started using LinkedIn. Recently, I’ve been asked for advice from numerous young adults who are looking for guidance and insights. I’ve always been willing to help and wanted to share some of the more general guidance I tell them to a wider audience. This helped me to overcome the initial discomfort that comes with starting anything new, long may it continue!
Maintain your connections
Building new connections is great, as with any relationship, if you don’t maintain them, they wither away. My takeaways from the partner’s experiences are:
- Work to build and keep trust in your connections by:
- doing what you say you’ll do,
- sending agendas in advance of meetings and being prepared for them.
- Make the effort to show you care:
- be proactive and responsive in your interactions,
- take an authentic interest in the other person and be curious about their business.
- Take a two-sided view of your connections by having a mindset of what you can do for the other person in a selfless way:
- provide independent thought, even if it means telling them something they may not want to hear,
- sharing opportunities that may benefit them and have no benefit at all to you.
Leave a Reply