A recent article in the Harvard University Gazette, “Cross-cultural study of entrepreneurs has surprising findings“, discussed the results of a recent study completed on 377 entrepreneurs from China and Russia on how gender affects revenues, growth, and profit of new ventures.

When I first read the article, I was confounded. The study found that women have bigger and less useful networks than men and that men have better ‘emotional’ networks than women. Then I started to think about what that really meant.

Several years back, a speaker we had through my TEC group, Tom Hill, said something I never forgot: you are the average of the 10 people you spend the most time with. At that time, his statement scared me to death. I realized I was not seeking out the right relationships. I was not spending time with people who had similar life goals or who had achieved what I wanted to accomplish. Now that I look back, the direct emotional support that I was receiving from my network at that time was nonexistent if not counter-productive.

The study also says that women have larger networks that are often filled with “lots of the wrong people and people who have no useful resources.” Ouch. Men, on the contrary, network strictly for utility and some feel that perhaps women should learn how to network like men. Women tend to build relationships just to have relationships and do not always base their connections on utility. When I am networking, I don’t always do so with a purpose in mind. I don’t make a friend because I want something from them. That said, my networking has benefited me tremendously by providing introductions and opportunities that I might not have otherwise had. So although I did not enter into relationships with a specific purpose in mind, I credit a lot of other people with helping me on my road to success. Hopefully, my relationships have been likewise beneficial to others as I try to give back as much, if not more, than I receive. By consciously seeking out like-minded colleagues (both men and women) and seeing how I can help them, I have been able to also find the emotional support I was previously missing.

So while there may be a difference in the way men and women network, I am not looking to change my current methods. Seeking out people whom I respect and who embody the same qualities, values, and goals that I do, without worrying about what I can get from them, seems to be working well for me.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Business Growth, Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.