By Mark Tosczak

t's been a tough year for corporate America.

Accounting scandals have prompted some corporations to restate earnings and forced others into bankruptcy, resulting in thousands of lost jobs. The stock market has had more ups and downs than a yo-yo, and although economic fundamentals have remained mostly respectable, the economy is still on shaky ground. Retirement accounts, and perhaps the public's confidence in business leaders, have been depleted.

Career planning in this business environment might feel a lot like a ride through whitewater rapids, so taking a fresh look at these four career management competencies can help:

1. Networking - Enlarging your circle of weak ties for better networking outcomes.
2. Leadership and management - Using knowledge of your strengths and weaknesses to increase your managerial effectiveness.
3. Negotiation - Getting results while preserving relationships through win-win negotiation.
4. Tech-savvy - Leveraging technology for competitive advantage. The first thing to think about isn't technology, it's strategy.

1. Don't go it alone: Harness the power of networking
"It's not what you know, it's who you know" is a maxim that is supported by plenty of empirical research, says Kenan-Flagler management professor Howard Aldrich.

"There are dozens and dozens of studies that have investigated the composition of networks, of who's in your network," said Aldrich. "It's irrefutable that the kinds of networks that you're a part of influence the kind of career you'll have."

Aldrich, a sociologist who studies entrepreneurship and small businesses, said networking isn't that difficult and doesn't require an in-born talent.

There are two key principles to consider in building a successful network, Aldrich says: diversity and reciprocity.

Many people are lax in their networking and build a network of contacts among people with similar viewpoints or professional interests - the people who surround them naturally. That's a mistake, according to Aldrich.

"If you don't make strenuous efforts to combat the 'birds of a feather flock together' phenomenon, you will wind up associating pretty much with other people like you in terms of sex, age and occupation," Aldrich said. "There is a very diverse occupational world. If what you're doing is hanging out with people just like you, there's a high probability you'll be heavily constrained."

Aldrich said professionals should seek out people in different departments, companies and industries.

People also tend to do too little to maintain their networks, Aldrich said. Maintaining a contact doesn't have to be laborious - it just means being polite, responding to requests for help, sending an e-mail every once in a while and recognizing others' accomplishments.

"Be more aware that you need to play an active role in creating and sustaining network relationships," Aldrich said, "being very sensitive to reciprocity, being very sensitive to obligations incurred when you ask someone to do you a favor."

Not everyone in your network has to be your best friend. Aldrich distinguishes between strong connections and weak connections. Strong connections are your close friends and acquaintances, people who you trust and bond with emotionally. Most people are likely to have only a dozen or so of these connections because of the time and energy they take to maintain, he said.

Weak connections are all of those hundreds of other names you keep in your contact file - the person you met on the airplane or at a convention, for instance.

"The real value of networking is in enlarging your circle of weak ties," Aldrich said. "Sustaining weak ties is a whole lot simpler - taking someone to lunch, e-mailing them, seeking people out at a convention, turning someone who's a stranger into a potential weak tie. Odds are, you'll never need them, but if you do, those are the people you can use to enlarge your reach."

2. Steering the boat: Leadership in turbulent times
There isn't a clear line between leadership and management. Senior managers, especially, often find both skills are needed daily.

"Management means dealing in complexity, managing day-to-day operations," says David Hofmann, a Kenan-Flagler management professor. "Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating a vision for change and leading that change within the workplace."

Hofmann, along with management professor Ben Rosen, teaches the required MBA course in leadership and management.

One of the key components of the course is making sure students know themselves well. Managers who know their own strengths and weaknesses are better at managing others, Rosen said.

"If you don't identify your blind spots, you can never improve," Rosen explained. To be successful, managers must make sure their self-management skills - their ability to set and focus on priorities, to communicate and delegate, to fit in with the goals and culture of the company - are strong.

And management isn't just about supervising employees, it's about handling the whole web of professional relationships.

"An individual has initiatives that he/she wants to get implemented, and that requires managing the boss' expectations, managing people in other departments whose cooperation is needed, as well as managing employees, and sometimes even people outside the organization," Rosen said. "We try to impress upon folks that growing your influence in the organization is how things get implemented and executed."

Leadership goes beyond the day-to-day operation of a company, department or team and is focused on what the organization is trying to accomplish.

"I would say that leadership, by definition, involves the notion of a vision of the future that is different from the current situation," Hofmann said. "Therefore, an effective leader is taking you from your current state closer to your vision for the future."

While management is concerned more with coordinating efforts, leadership is more concerned with inspiring the right efforts.

"Two very important action steps for leaders that sometimes are not appreciated by new leaders are to articulate a vision and to shape the organization in line with that vision," Rosen said. "We think about a leader as a change agent."

3. Creativity and collaboration: Ingredients of successful negotiation
Negotiating isn't just for grinding out labor-management agreements or getting the best job offer possible from a potential employer. Whether you realize it, you probably negotiate something every day at work and at home.

The ideal for negotiation strategy is win-win, where the parties may start the conversation with goals that seem to be in conflict, but in the end they strike an agreement that meets both their needs - often better than anything either one of them would have proposed alone. Win-win is not the same as compromise, said Debra Shapiro, a Kenan-Flagler management professor who researches negotiation.

"I always ask myself, 'What are my underlying needs? What are the other side's underlying needs?,' and I literally list them on paper," Shapiro said. "I ask myself, 'Does the proposal on the table meet my needs? Does it meet their needs?'"

Win-win negotiating requires listening carefully and viewing the other person in the negotiation as a partner, not an opponent.

"You should never start a negotiation with a proposal - that should be the conclusion," Shapiro said. "You always begin with a general discussion of what you are trying to achieve. The exception to this is when you believe you can make a demand on the other side and get a 'yes' by merely insisting on it. But the odds of this are slim if you are in a negotiation situation - which means a situation of mutual dependence (where neither side can afford to turn off the other since each side depends on the other's support in order to achieve his/her own goals)."

Kenan-Flagler management professor Robert Adler remembers learning the winning-by-intimidation mode of negotiation when he was in law school in the late '60s.

"It was, 'Who can best bluff and intimidate an opponent into backing off and giving a better deal to you,'" Adler said. Though he believes win-win is a better approach, there are still situations where the bluff-and-intimidate approach might be used. "Anybody who says there is no place for that in negotiation is wrong." However, that approach has "a much smaller sphere of effectiveness than we thought before," Adler said.

It might be appropriate to "play hardball" if the negotiation is a one-shot deal, such as buying a car, where you'll probably never see the other person again, Adler said. But if you're going to have an ongoing business relationship with someone, win-win will work better for the long term.

4. Tech-savvy: A necessary tool for every manager
Regardless of the dot-com meltdown, information technology has fundamentally transformed the way business is done.

And no matter your operational area - whether you're a marketing manager or a finance whiz - you can't ignore the importance of technology.

"I don't care which functional discipline you end up in," says Arvind Malhotra, an information technology and e-commerce professor at Kenan-Flagler. "There is no way you can ignore technology. It will impact you."

Technology can give a company an enormous competitive advantage, but only if it's implemented intelligently. And to do that, Malhotra said, the first thing to think about isn't technology but strategy.

"Technology alone can do nothing for you," said Malhotra, who teaches "Strategic Use of Technology," a required MBA course. "I can give you a Ferrari race car, but if you don't know how to drive it, then it's overkill for you."

After you figure out your strategy, said Malhotra, then figure out the best process to deliver that strategy. Only then, do you make technology decisions. Technology is the enabler for the process.

Managers don't need to be technologists, Malhotra said, but they do need to have an idea of the general capabilities of current technology.

The unpredictable element that can upset the strategy-process-technology chain is people, Malhotra said.

"The one stumbling block of everything is how people behave," he says. "They behave very unpredictably." Sometimes people can be innovative and effective in implementing a new process; sometimes, they can kill it.

And while technology is often the last piece of the puzzle a manager might consider, that doesn't mean that information technology experts shouldn't be involved from the beginning, Malhotra said.

"A lot of progressive companies put their IT people in strategy areas," Malhotra said. "Those companies may end up choosing strategies they otherwise would not even have conceived because the tech experts were in on the planning early."