Regardless of your career path, networking is an essential component of your journey as a professional. In the sports media space, that emphasis on networking is magnified to an even greater extent.
The importance of networking isn’t to suggest that the merits of your work don’t matter. Rather, networking is the superpower that can take your impact and your impressions to the next level – if you know how to use it effectively.
Building relationships is a key fundamental element of networking – the act of exchanging information and developing contacts to extract value from your field. Below, we’ll discuss how building a network of relationships can set you up for long-term success as a media professional and executive.
How Networking is Pivotal for Career Growth
1. Reinforces Confidence
At the most foundational level, networking is a tool that improves your self-concept within your field of work. Imposter syndrome is an affliction many suffer from. In the realm of sports media, where it can be so difficult to find stable footing, that effect is even stronger.
If your first and most basic need is a sense of belonging, networking can be a vital resource. It may take going outside of your comfort zone, but heightened confidence is always worth the investment. Heightened confidence not only fights against mental roadblocks, but it’ll also inspire you to keep reaching out, keep making connections, and build on your early momentum.
Ask yourself this: How can I ensure I belong? How can I build the relationships necessary to thrive and feel confident about my safety net and resource pool in the sports media space? Networking is the very first step after brand development.
There’s one more important note to remember in this phase: When networking, you may receive constructive feedback from peers and prospective mentors. Particularly when building your brand and your brand imprint, don’t take feedback personally. Remain introspective, and keep looking for ways you can improve.
2. Opens Wells of Information
Once you’ve built the confidence to engage in the interaction-heavy world of professional sports media, you can start to reap the benefits of building and sustaining this network. You’ll find that networking can open entire wells of information for you.
Particularly if you’re a newer executive in the sports media realm, the informational aspect of networking will come in the form of mentorship and knowledge supplementation. Many in the sports media realm have managed a role similar or nearly identical to the one you have. If they haven’t, they still have experience that can help enrich your perspective.
Lean on this abundance of information as you grow. Ask questions often, and don’t be afraid to admit when you don’t know something, or if there’s a way you can better understand something. If you know what you don’t know, your network can become your greatest resource.
3. Creates Collaboration Channels
There’s something else you must remember about networking: It isn’t just about you. And it isn’t just about them. It’s about building a community through mutual positivity. Networking isn’t simply a tool to get to the top. It’s an essential part of undertaking the joint journey of growth as a human being – and along the way, you can collaborate with those in your network.
Collaboration can take many different forms, but by definition, it’s an experience where you and your counterpart derive a mutual benefit. Maybe a fellow thought leader in your field offers to have you on their YouTube channel. Maybe the leader of an advanced metrics hub offers a partnership so you can use their numbers exclusively.
As opposed to opening wells of information – which involves a transaction of knowledge – the creation of collaboration channels involves the transaction of experience. And through this transaction, you can not only strengthen your pre-existing relationships, but also source meaningful content from those collaborations.
4. Facilitates Future Opportunities
Developing your skills in the present-day is a primary motivation for active networking. That said, networking also has a future-minded purpose. Both for yourself and for content creators you meet along the way, networking can directly facilitate future opportunities.
Through networking, you naturally build a mass index of contacts – parallel contacts at your level, contacts who involve themselves more with day-to-day content creation tasks, and higher-level contacts who deal more directly with oversight.
Keep in touch with those contacts, because you never know what will happen in the realm of sports media. At a certain point, you yourself may desire a change, and one of your contacts may provide the opportunity you seek. On the flip side, scouting for creator talent is a constant task as an executive – and your index of contacts could lead you to the right person for the role.
5. Broadens Your Market Perspective
We’ve discussed how important networking can be from an information gathering standpoint, as well as a collaboration standpoint. This section, too, falls under the category of information gathering, but instead of catalyzing personal growth, market perspective study is more so you can navigate your realm effectively with the tools you gain from networking.
Do you want to have a better understanding of what your market drivers are? Do you want to know what other executives are considering in their content planning and generation? Do you want to have a better understanding of how factors like search engine optimization and social algorithms are changing, and what the implications are?
Immersing within your network can help solidify this understanding – not only through active search, but also through passive observation of what works and what doesn’t for other executives.
