Network with what is yours! 

By NGOZI OBIKWERE | Between The Lines

Your peers already have your attention, let them get your time. You are surrounded by a treasure trove of fellowship and truth just bask in it and let it help you become better!

Your greatest network advantage isn’t far away—it’s already around you. When you invest in your peers, you don’t just grow connections, you build a shared engine for continuous growth.

Network with what is yours!

Peer Network – The art of building high-leverage developmental relationships from casual connections. I have written on this before and now choose to refresh this topic because I have found a whole new crew and generation that will benefit from it. Also, it is one of the most dependable ways to create a network that you can grow and groan with simultaneously. When done well it serves as a template for a well charged human accelerator.

In this write up, I will use peer mentor and co mentor and possibly other variations to mean the same thing. 

A peer mentor or peer network is a person or a constituent of people approximately at your level and have dimensions of things you value and need. Below are some key criteria and characteristics to guide an effective peer mentorship process 

1. Make an Identification of what you need and who you need.

Sometimes it is completely serendipity that you meet and engage someone or people that possess complements to your nature, that fill gaps for you. However, it is equally important to know what you need and purposefully find the right tribe to engage. To do the latter here are some practical steps:

1. Identify your peers / future mentors from healthy environments – The goal is to recognise the environment that can firmly “hold” the relationships you need. Remember that to incubate anything the environmental conditions must be right to breed sustained healthy ecosystems and communities. You see environments that allow well-adjusted people to naturally exist are the best finds. So, what does this mean practically? It simply means that if you find an environment where people are given the opportunity to learn, grow, partner, support each other etc.; that is a jackpot! While  people and politics coexist in many spaces,  environments where people are the principal concern typically incubate healthier professional humans, such that good peer mentors and networks abound. 

2. Peer mentors are accessible through many spaces, organisations and networks, including learning institutions, shared workspaces, conferences, hackathons, industry slack/discord groups, professional clubs, alumni groups, sport / recreation groups, diverse teams and more.

3. The relational dynamics of a peer mentor is that it is middle of the road and healthy. Not transactional but not emotionally dependent. There is a strong measure of mutual respect, comfortability, steady relational growth and organic validation. This means you should sense and experience being challenged through access to fresh perspectives, mutual trust and a healthy connection that is anchored in measurable growth.

4. The transition to and recognition that you are in a peer mentor relationship is often organic and wholesome.

2. How relationships become meaningful enough for mentorship

Peer mentorship emerges out of shared time. It typically comes because of unforced quality time. Most times in the most casual of engagements. A peer mentorship relationship becomes visible when some key things show up. Below I have listed some key attributes in functional categories for classifying successful peer mentorships / networks. There are more, but these are adequate to set the tone.

1. Replenishing Interaction

• For an interaction or relationship to replenish itself, it must find complementary ground – not necessarily common ground. For example, your colleague has a knack for details. They get in the weeds and pay attention. They do things with excellence and deliver a level of unmatched quality. They are good at tugging at the important things that are sometimes glossed over. They can declutter your momentum and help you slow down to really create conclusions and outcome. That is mentor material. Basically, you see something that lives in you through them. Now this person is not a “guru” or some subject hyper dynamic subject expert. They are usually not 20 steps ahead of you in any area, but a few glorious steps that you can identify and begin to adapt to relatively quickly. They complement you in such a way that gaps can have accommodations and options. The goal is that their engagement allows you to have the tools to fill in the gaps in the way that brings the best to you.
• A replenishing interaction has continuity, sometimes short bursts but never one-off conversations or engagements – The relationship must allow you breathe but be available enough. A good peer mentor – mentee / co -mentor must be relatively easy to accommodate. It must have range. This means that you are all in it for life, everyone has the honor of teaching or gaining at any given stage. It must not suffocate.

2. Value Exchange enhanced by the Benefit of Difference Factor

• You help each other period! It could be to think, decide, or improve. It could be as complex as working through a strategy for a role or an activity or just developing the tools to think yourselves clear. 
• To be effective it must be diverse in every way. The most successful peer mentorships occur when there is marked difference in the backgrounds of the peers involved. When you have this, there is a deep value exchange between the parties and there is a sharpness to what is gained because the benefit of difference factor contributes significance. You are learning what you don’t know, notice or acknowledge from the lenses of another that knows, notices and acknowledges with discipline.

3. Evidence of impact

• A Peer mentor relationship must clearly demonstrate evidence of impact. These are clear sustainable changes, transitions, challenges and successes alike which have good structures and are deliberately sought. Friendships developed with truth and growth for all while maintaining mutual respect. In other words, each peer mentor will know intuitively how the other is doing and see explicitly how they have grown and changed for the better without changing the core of the person. No clones, but well-formed archetypes.
• One of the outcomes is that the relationships must host an increased network. If the peer group consists of 5 people and each person originally brings a strong network of 5 people. The active network of each member of the peer group now becomes 25. Each member should be able to fully and wholly access the networks of all its peers! In what other universe is this even possible – this is a superpower of true peer to peer mentorship. 

4. Effectively maximisable 

Most people underuse or overuse their networks. The leverage comes from how you engage and balance is key.

With peers:

• You are equals, if you underuse your network, you will not maximise the value and potential that it has. If you overuse your network, you will inadvertently create an unhealthy dependency and shift the power boundary to an unhealthy place. Steady, regular, relevant engagements are the best forums to achieve this – doing dinners, conferences, mutual events deescalate intensity while escalating opportunity to engage and meaningful pour out and receive wisdom.
• Be polished but unvarnished – Polished involves showing off your best skills, being prepared. Just like when you polish a piece of wood or metal, you are cleaning or rubbing off any and everything to expose its brightest beauty (its shiny, smooth and natural finish). In the same way, your peer networks should see your well put together parts as much as possible. You are an adult and professional and should show up as such. Peer networks are co-mentors, so your peers should be able to admire, and look up to you and notice and appreciate your areas of expertise just as you do to them. In the same vein, show up unvarnished, this means to show up with your authenticity. No cover up or pretentiousness. It is hard to do business with anyone long-term if you are not consistently yourself. Peer mentors are reasonably mature in human interactions and can “smell” a fake a mile away. Just like the word suggests a vanished wood has been lacquered, meaning the natural wood is covered by a protective film. Which makes it hard to interact with the texture and the details of the natural wood. Your co/peer-mentors/mentees need to interact with the real you all the time 
• Finally, there must be tributes or testimonials to the engagement: This simply means that participation must invoke organic accountability, improved perspective and measurable momentum 

Happy peer mentoring! Want More? Register to join our August class. 

About the Author

•Ngozi Obikwere brings experience from both private and public sectors, serving in diverse roles-from leadership to practitioner, from developer to end-user from investor to multinationals. Her podcast STemSTocksSTews is a great way to catch up with her as well.