The Payback Connection

Another blunt insight: "The best connections are payback connections," a top Republican fund-raiser once told me. She explained that as you seek your connection to a particular job or assignment that you want, you must understand the relationship between the connection and the "connectee." The connectee is the person who ultimately makes the decision to give you the job or the assignment for which you are using the connection. If the connection is soliciting a "favor" from the connectee on your behalf, then your chances of success in using that connection are better than nothing, but less than 25 percent, according to this fund-raiser. On the other hand, if you become the chip that represents a "payback" for something that the connection did for the connectee, "your odds shoot up to about 80 percent," she told me.

A novelist, whom we'll call Jimmy, related this story to me. Jimmy's agent was shopping around Jimmy's very first manuscript. The agent liked the novel. After three readings with prominent editors, however, the agent had no takers. So the agent called an editor at a leading publishing house who owed the agent a big favor. Years earlier, this editor was toiling in oblivion until the agent handed him a great novel by an established author looking for a new publisher. Unsurprisingly, the novel did well and it put the editor on the map.

"Now it is payback time," said Jimmy's agent, handing the editor Jimmy's manuscript. "I gave you a great author when you had nothing; now I want you to take a nothing author who I believe has talent." The deal closed the next week. The first novel did so-so, but the second one did better, and the novelist's career soon took off. Jimmy's agent had demanded a payback, not a favor. The lesson: make sure if possible that the decision maker owes something to the connection, and make sure that you become the payback chip by learning as much about the relationship between the connection and the connectee as possible.

Juanita Hinshaw, CFO of the multibillion-dollar electrical giant Graybar, candidly acknowledges that "when you have used connections you have to be willing to be used. So I've let it be a two-way street." In those instances, therefore, where a connection can be helpful, try to be the "payback." It greatly increases your odds of success.