Ask A Peer Colleague To Lunch

Today you’re going to learn about how to expand your sphere of influence in your organization, in the place where you work and in your life generally, and also how to get connections with people you may not have connected with before and build your self-confidence and your level of influence all at the same time.

What I recommend doing is if you work in an organization with other people – and most of you probably do – then, chances are, there are people within that organization who are effectively your peers but you don’t necessarily have a whole lot to do with on a day-to-day basis.

Perhaps you work in a large company where there are many projects or many teams working and on each team there are other people in similar positions to you who you don’t have a lot to do with because you’re not working on their project or their team is in a slightly different area or a different discipline to you.

What I’m suggesting is that it’s a good idea to find out who those people in the organization where you work are that are your peers and just to a little horizontal networking, I suppose it is, where you call them up and say, “Hey, what’s say we go do lunch? I haven’t spent a whole lot of time with you. I would love to know what it is that you do and just have a bit of lunch together and hang out.”

Most people are likely to be pretty receptive to this. They may be busy of course, but normally if you give them enough notice they should be able to find a free day where they can have lunch. And my experience was when I started networking with my peer colleagues on other teams or in other disciplines in the organizations where I worked, I started to become known much more widely than when I sat in my own little cubicle and just did my own thing. And it often led to involvement in other projects where I would otherwise not have even been asked to participate because nobody knew what it was that I was good at and what I did.

So I recommend this. If you don’t work in a large organization, then you can also do this with other people just in your social life. You can find other guys around you who you may be are on a sporting team with or maybe you’re going to college or university with that you don’t normally hang out with. Start stepping outside your normal comfort zone and your normal group of friends or associates, and start connecting with some of the other people of similar age or similar level to yourself who you could network with and just get to know, and notice how much it expands the amount of influence that you have in your life and in the organizations where you participate.

This is also a great way of building your confidence because you become more well-known, you become more influential and you start to get to see the organization where you work or live or whatever you’re involved in from a slightly different perspective, from the perspective of the peers that you are going to be hanging out with.

So give it a go. Grab the phone, ring up one of your colleagues and say, “Hey, are you interested in doing lunch today?”