1. Immediate Relatives and Friends – A young sales person will usually get the immediate family members to be his first customer.  This will follow by his relatives then friends, and then uh-oh… he is out of networks… Personally, I wouldn’t recommend selling to your relatives unless it is a really fantastic product that really benefits your relatives.  Picture this; if the product (1) wasn’t what your relative wanted in the first place or (2) does not prove it is beneficial or worth to your relative, you will be labelled for life for selling crappy products to them.  That will leave you with two choice, either stand up to the possible mockery in future or be absent from family gatherings.  But of course, not all failure stories end up that way.  However, if what you sold was genuinely good for them, then that is a plus point and they will propagate the benefits to their friends becoming your strong first line network!
2. Reconnect with long lost friends – Take time to look through the list of old friends.  Those during your college days, your previous company or friends from the old neighbourhood.  Browse through social network sites that you have accounts in and see if your friends are there.  You will be surprise at how your friends have grown and changed over time.  That point aside, do some catching up through online chats or an email.  Be genuinely interested in the events of life that they have gone through and not blast your latest offers immediately.  It is easier to link up with old friends as there are common topics to talk about.  This reconnection can reveal a network of different expertise or help that you need (but do not know where to find).
3. Get to know more friends at work – Have conversation with colleagues of a different team.  Arrange lunches with colleagues from those teams.  Not only you break the boring routine of having lunch with the same group of colleagues, you get to know what you do not (or may not know) that is happening (rumours) in the company, open new problem solving ideas and build links (and trust) to with another department!  Birds of the same feather fly in a flock.  It holds certain truth in this phrase.  You will have the same mentality (group culture) if you persist to stick with the same group of friends.  By interacting more with peers of different teams, you build a supportive network and trust and will be useful when an inter-team effort is required!
4. Build relationship by extending your current ones – Lastly, from your existing relatives, friends and colleagues, always take the opportunity to find out more about friends of friends, friends of relatives, friends of colleagues, etc… you know what I mean.  Get to know your friends and his friends.  Take the opportunity to build a relationship with this possible new friend.  Ask to be included in their next friends meet up sessions or even propose to link up with this new friend yourself!  This will help you expand your existing network to a bigger one!

These are just ways to build a strong network to support your goals.  Remember, network is your net worth!  So how do you build your strong network?

1. Be open about yourself – The first thing that you should ever do when you want people to talk is to be open about yourself.  Being open about yourself allows people to be comfortable with you.  How?  You give them trust by sharing information about yourself first.  In this way, people respond with theirs.  If you do not start somewhere, then it will be difficult to maintain the conversation for long.
2. Avoid talking too much of yourself – Being open is the first step that you should take too build trust in a conversation.  However, avoid the loophole of talking too much of yourself.  This becomes self-centeredness and attempting to put the focal point of discussion around you.  A right touch (amount) of self information that portrait openness is good.  Too much of it will irritate and bored your partner.  They will only view you as being self-indulging and living in your own world.
3. Be genuine curious and interested about your other partner but – Be genuine interested in finding out more about your partner.  By being curious about your partner, you tend to come out with questions that can relate to your partner.  When your partner finds that you are really interested in them (and after building trust between you and him), he will more likely share more information with you.
4. Give the right balance amount of attention to everyone in a conversation –In a group conversation, usually, there will be one or two “alphas” that lead the conversation.  And usually you are one of them as you are taking the lead to get people talking.  Be it any conversation; give rights to everybody for them to voice their opinion.  If they lack the initiative to speak, ask for their opinion or consensus instead.  Example, “Mary, do you agree with the Joe’s comment about banker’s salary?”  In this way, the introvert Mary will not feel left out in the conversation and you assisted to be brought into the conversation.
5. Bring similarities of topic in a conversation – Another tip in group conversation where there are individuals that lack initiative in voicing their opinion; Assist to bridge similar experiences of different individuals together.  Example, “Joe loves rock climbing.  He does that every weekend!  Hey, Mary, you are a rock climber too right?”  In this way, you bring two experiences (topic) together and a common topic both Joe and Mary can follow through.

Use these conversational tips to get people talking!  Are there other tips that you used to get people talking in a conversation or to break the silence?

You’ve got a couple of options to start with in influencing your colleagues.  Apply them in a balancing manner.  Do not overuse any one of it as they may either take advantage or end up developing resentment in the office.

1. Influence them positively using tangible benefits – This directly targets the concerns of your colleagues.  They can be salary-related, off-day related or bonus-related benefit.  Of course, at times it is not possible as you may not be the approving authority for giving out cash or time offs.  (That is where your influencing skills on your boss come in!)
2. Influence them positively using implicit benefits – Buy your colleagues favours such as gifts or cakes.  Treat them a meal or buy them some cappuccino to boost them up. This shows you care for your staff and will motivate them to work for you.  Allow free play of work in the office.  Your colleagues appreciate the freedom.  Also, implicit benefits may be allowing your colleagues to go off early if there are nothing major going on for the day.
3. Influence them positively that they will benefit from your proposal – This will target the WIFM (What’s in for Me?).  Although it may you’re your colleague some time to work on your proposal, but he knows that he can reap the benefit from it and will put in effort to it as well.  With something he can benefit from, he will willingly put his share of effort into your proposal.
4. Influence them negatively using negative consequences – The other end of using positive influence is the use of negative factors to make your colleagues work.  You can consider this as using threats.  You deprive them from the basic needs.  Example, “if you do not complete this work by today, you will not be allowed to take leave for the subsequent months”.  You influence those using negative consequences of their actions.

We highly recommend positive influences as this will motivate them to work harder for you in the long run.  This encourages appreciation and trust between your colleagues.  We do not recommend using negative influences as this will degrade their motivation and trust in you.  A prolonged negative influenced work culture that the management is thriving on, the bigger the desire for the employee to tender his resignation.

Trust is fundamental in communication. When trust level is high you get things done faster and easily. Your superior trusts you. He trusts your ability to deliver and assign you work. He chooses you to complete the task. He does not monitor your every activity as he is assured of what you can delivered. Your co-workers trust you. They feel more assured working with you as a team. They know that you are a team member and can complete the portion of your work and deliver on time. All of them trust you that you will deliver results as what they wanted on time and target. They know that you can uphold the commitment to them.

Trust promotes personal productivity. Trust is a catalyst in influence at work. It is the mechansim behind influence. When someone trusts you, he gets influenced more easily with what you are proposing. They trust your ideas and believed what you are proposing to them is beneficial to them. They believed in you. Through these trusts, you are able to deliver information and delegate work faster and easier than usual. You need not convince them over and over again to gain back the trust. When trusts between you and your co-worker is taken to another level, you synergized with them. You find more solutions than anyone of you alone can do it. You deliver even more quality output than you can imagine with just yourself.

Now, without trust, we become more unproductive. We create more work for ourselves. We monitor our staff on their every move and progress. We put in place check points and milestones for them to stay on course. We make guesses of our superiors and co-workers. Even at times, you didn’t trust your co-workers in completing a certain task. In the end, you take over his work and complete on your own. Imagine all these amount of time and energy you’ve spent just because of the lack of trust! You could have been more productive if you were able to trust them!

Unfortunately, trust is not easy to build yet easy to break. A long-lasting trusting relationship can help you get things done easily. But when we break it, it will take two times as hard to win back the trust. Our advice, when we made a promise at work and life, honor it, live up to the promise. Be consistent with whatever you say. All these, earns a little trust every day. It adds a positive value to your trust account. When we do not follow such simple rules of being consistency and upholding our promises, we will one day loose their trusts in us.