I recently travelled to Breezy Point, in northern Minnesota, to speak at a conference. Since the trip involved five hours of driving, I made sure I had some audiobooks to pass the time. I started listening to Taking the Work Out of Networking: An Introvert’s Guide to Making Connections That Count, and within an hour I had an idea for the next presentation I wanted to give at a conference.
As an introvert, the idea of networking doesn’t appeal to me. Imagining myself walking up to strangers at a party to convince them to do something for me makes my skin crawl. Fortunately, the audiobook helped me reframe my thinking, pointing out that “networking” doesn’t just mean convincing others that they want to help you. It can be a simple as asking a friend if they know any good restaurants. In other words, my view of networking was far too narrow.
I should have realized this earlier, but like many things in life, I need other people to explain things in simple terms for me to recognize something that, on some level, I already know. Throughout life, I’ve gotten a lot of things I’ve needed through people I know, and I’ve been able to help others get what they need. It started in grade school when my friends and I would trade a bag of potato chips for a cookie at lunch. It’s become more advanced since then, but the basics are still the same. Others have what I need, or they can use my assistance, and together we help each other out.
As I said, the audiobook gave me an idea for a conference presentation. Not only would I talk about networking, but I would do it in the style of Family Feud. For those who haven’t seen the game show, two teams are presented with a survey question, and the team that can guess the more popular responses to the survey wins. I came up with four survey questions about how networking makes people feel, and I sent them to a bunch of friends, colleagues, and whoever else I thought was appropriate.
The answers surprised me. A few people shared my view of networking, with one of my school friends calling people who network “a**kissers”. But most others said they enjoyed networking. They said that networking helped them meet new people, and it taught them a lot about topics beyond their own interests.
Of course, the irony is that in sending out my survey questions, I was networking, and I was loving it. Everyone on my email list had input I needed, and I genuinely wanted to know what they thought. Even better, when I explained why I was polling them, almost everyone made some comment about how fun the presentation sounded, and they wished me success.
The word “networking” still rubs me the wrong way, and there are types of networking that I will never find appealing. At the same time, realizing that “networking” is just another word for “getting to know others” makes things a lot easier for me.
by Marti Maltby, Director Peace House Community – A Place to Belong
This article originally appeared in “The Alley,” the newspaper for the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis.