The Five Emails You Need to Send Before New Year’s to Boost Your Career
There’s no better time than now to refresh your roster of professional contacts
4 min
Yes, you’re busy checking off your year-end, to-do list. But here’s an easy item to add that could pay dividends down the road: connect with five people who, in different ways, could boost your career in 2023.
There’s no better time of year than right now to power up that roster of professional allies. So many people have changed jobs, and entire careers, recently that even the strongest networks need some tending. And while the job market remains strong, the number of companies embarking on layoffs is climbing, and many business leaders predict more job cuts are coming.
It can be daunting to message someone you haven’t spoken to in years or develop a distant contact into a relationship. Here are five people to email, with scripts to do it gracefully.
1) A member of your inner power circle
These are the professional Samaritans for when you need urgent advice, job leads or referrals—and fast. Ask yourself who could help if you were suddenly laid off, and get results?
Try this quick exercise to figure out who belongs here: Imagine you’ve just learned your job is on the chopping block. Take five minutes to write the names of six to eight people you would email first for help.
These are folks who know you well—close colleagues, former co-workers, mentors. Focus your list on the half-dozen who are enthusiastic networkers and have a proven record delivering good intel on industry developments.
Pick one person to email. Remember, this is someone you’d have no qualms asking to tap his or her network on your behalf—so don’t sweat the email too much. Ask them to lunch or a drink in the new year, or a 20-minute catch-up call.
Be clear about why you want to connect. You’re considering ways to grow your career, and would love his or her advice. Or, you want to hear about his recent transition to a new field because you’re interested in a similar move.
2) The influencer
Next, pick a strategic contact you know could be helpful to your career…if only you had a more solid rapport.
Don’t waste valuable words in the opening on compliments or lengthy explanations.
Make your ask, quickly and politely. And please avoid the cliché phrase, “Can I pick your brain?” Instead, try one of the following:
- “I’d really appreciate your insight because you’ve been there.”
- “I heard you speak/enjoyed what you wrote/liked what you said at the meeting, especially___. I would love to hear more.
- “I’ve followed your work closely. What you did with____really resonated with me because I’m doing something similar.”
Point out any shared experiences, and be specific. You went to the same university, or are both women who trained in civil engineering. Mentioning commonalities might give them a better sense of how to help you.
“If you’re an Air Force Academy grad and you ask for time, I’m going to find it,” says Trier Bryant, co-founder of workplace consulting firm Just Work and an Academy grad who spent more than 15 years in the military.
3) The VIP
This is a higher-level professional with the ability to open the right doors, or get you to someone who can. It could be a fast-rising executive in your network. The former boss of your boss. That entrepreneur who commented on your LinkedIn post.
If you’ve never met, can a mutual acquaintance connect you? If so, offer to craft the note, or go ahead and send a brief paragraph on your bona fides and goals to guide them.
Get to the point quickly about who you are and what you want. The goal is to have your target respond “thoughtfully, in the moment, rather than delaying it indefinitely,” says Dorie Clark, an author who teaches executive education at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Columbia Business School.
For example: “I’m looking to go in this direction in my career and would like your advice.” Or, “I’m interested in how you overcame this business challenge as I navigate this industry.”
Make it easy for them to accept your request. “If you ask for a phone call, make it a 10-minute phone call,” Ms. Clark says.
4) That long-lost contact
Cue the awkwardness! You haven’t talked to this person in years and suddenly you’re parachuting into their inbox, hoping they’ll remember you and, ideally, forget how much time has passed since you’ve been in touch.
Don’t dance around the fact that it’s been a while, just embrace it, says Aimee Cohen, who runs Minneapolis executive-coaching and leadership-development firm ON Point Next Level Leadership. She’s opened notes with “Blast from the past,” or “I know you might faint at seeing my name in your inbox but___.”
You can also play on the pandemic whirlwind of the past few years: “I know that it’s only been three years but it feels like 100 since we’ve last connected.”
Make clear that you remain clued into their interests and expertise, and could be helpful. For example: “I’d love to catch up and hear more about what you’re on the hunt for these days.” Or, “I know it’s been a while, but I saw this podcast about triathlons and immediately thought of you. Are you still competing?”
The classic error is to reach out after a significant amount of time with a direct ask, such as wanting help with a job search or a recommendation. You want to be approaching them, “from a position of power, not panic,” Ms. Cohen says. Explain that you’re not looking yet, but would love to learn more about their role and experience.
5) The departing co-worker
When a co-worker says goodbye, it’s an opening. “Leaving a job is a moment of vulnerability” no matter how fabulous their next step is, says Michele Woodward, a Washington, D.C.-area executive coach.
Reaching out immediately is best, but responding to a goodbye note from further back can work, too. Try starting with, “I made a note to ask you what the first 90 days was like,” Ms. Woodward suggests, or, “I made a note to ask you how work is going.”
You could also pose a timely question such as, “How are you all handling return-to-office over there?” The goal is to reconnect, picking up where you left off and moving the relationship forward.
Plan for the Future
Master the cadence of keeping up with different kinds of contacts. Here’s how often Ms. Cohen, the executive coach in Minneapolis, recommends touching base:
- Close contacts (your team colleague turned friend who left for a different company): Monthly
- Midlevel contacts (The boss you worked with for a year before they got transferred to another department): Quarterly
- Extended contacts (The guy from accounting you used to joke with by the water cooler): Twice yearly
- Acquaintances (A vendor you worked with once, years ago): Annually, sending them a note around the holidays, for example
Set a goal of contacting three contacts every week. They can be someone already in your network who’s due for their check-in, or someone new you’re adding to the rotation.
—Kathryn Dill contributed to this article.
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Competitive pressure and creativity have made Chinese-designed and -built electric cars formidable competitors
4 min
China rocked the auto world twice this year. First, its electric vehicles stunned Western rivals at the Shanghai auto show with their quality, features and price. Then came reports that in the first quarter of 2023 it dethroned Japan as the world’s largest auto exporter.
How is China in contention to lead the world’s most lucrative and prestigious consumer goods market, one long dominated by American, European, Japanese and South Korean nameplates? The answer is a unique combination of industrial policy, protectionism and homegrown competitive dynamism. Western policy makers and business leaders are better prepared for the first two than the third.
Start with industrial policy—the use of government resources to help favoured sectors. China has practiced industrial policy for decades. While it’s finding increased favour even in the U.S., the concept remains controversial. Governments have a poor record of identifying winning technologies and often end up subsidising inferior and wasteful capacity, including in China.
But in the case of EVs, Chinese industrial policy had a couple of things going for it. First, governments around the world saw climate change as an enduring threat that would require decade-long interventions to transition away from fossil fuels. China bet correctly that in transportation, the transition would favour electric vehicles.
In 2009, China started handing out generous subsidies to buyers of EVs. Public procurement of taxis and buses was targeted to electric vehicles, rechargers were subsidised, and provincial governments stumped up capital for lithium mining and refining for EV batteries. In 2020 NIO, at the time an aspiring challenger to Tesla, avoided bankruptcy thanks to a government-led bailout.
While industrial policy guaranteed a demand for EVs, protectionism ensured those EVs would be made in China, by Chinese companies. To qualify for subsidies, cars had to be domestically made, although foreign brands did qualify. They also had to have batteries made by Chinese companies, giving Chinese national champions like Contemporary Amperex Technology and BYD an advantage over then-market leaders from Japan and South Korea.
To sell in China, foreign automakers had to abide by conditions intended to upgrade the local industry’s skills. State-owned Guangzhou Automobile Group developed the manufacturing know-how necessary to become a player in EVs thanks to joint ventures with Toyota and Honda, said Gregor Sebastian, an analyst at Germany’s Mercator Institute for China Studies.
Despite all that government support, sales of EVs remained weak until 2019, when China let Tesla open a wholly owned factory in Shanghai. “It took this catalyst…to boost interest and increase the level of competitiveness of the local Chinese makers,” said Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a research service specialising in the Chinese auto industry.
Back in 2011 Pony Ma, the founder of Tencent, explained what set Chinese capitalism apart from its American counterpart. “In America, when you bring an idea to market you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share,” he said, according to Fast Company, a technology magazine. “In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China—execution is.”
Thanks to that competition and focus on execution, the EV industry went from a niche industrial-policy project to a sprawling ecosystem of predominantly private companies. Much of this happened below the Western radar while China was cut off from the world because of Covid-19 restrictions.
When Western auto executives flew in for April’s Shanghai auto show, “they saw a sea of green plates, a sea of Chinese brands,” said Le, referring to the green license plates assigned to clean-energy vehicles in China. “They hear the sounds of the door closing, sit inside and look at the quality of the materials, the fabric or the plastic on the console, that’s the other holy s— moment—they’ve caught up to us.”
Manufacturers of gasoline cars are product-oriented, whereas EV manufacturers, like tech companies, are user-oriented, Le said. Chinese EVs feature at least two, often three, display screens, one suitable for watching movies from the back seat, multiple lidars (laser-based sensors) for driver assistance, and even a microphone for karaoke (quickly copied by Tesla). Meanwhile, Chinese suppliers such as CATL have gone from laggard to leader.
Chinese dominance of EVs isn’t preordained. The low barriers to entry exploited by Chinese brands also open the door to future non-Chinese competitors. Nor does China’s success in EVs necessarily translate to other sectors where industrial policy matters less and creativity, privacy and deeply woven technological capability—such as software, cloud computing and semiconductors—matter more.
Still, the threat to Western auto market share posed by Chinese EVs is one for which Western policy makers have no obvious answer. “You can shut off your own market and to a certain extent that will shield production for your domestic needs,” said Sebastian. “The question really is, what are you going to do for the global south, countries that are still very happily trading with China?”
Western companies themselves are likely to respond by deepening their presence in China—not to sell cars, but for proximity to the most sophisticated customers and suppliers. Jörg Wuttke, the past president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, calls China a “fitness centre.” Even as conditions there become steadily more difficult, Western multinationals “have to be there. It keeps you fit.”
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
