Okay, So… What Actually is Networking?

“What lies between you and your dreams is just a couple of handshakes and jokes”. Sounds easy right? I mean, just introduce yourself to the right person, make them not hate you, and boom… networking.

Networking. What a word right? As I go through high school, scroll through youtube videos, buy stuff from Walmart, I always wonder “how did this get to here?”. Looking at the off brand cereal of a grocery store shelf for example, there are thousands of off brand cereals for each main brand… why does that one in particular go on the shelf? More often than not, when I ask this question, the answer I get is “because the creator shook hands with the right people”. Everywhere I look nowadays, the effect of “shaking hands with the right people” is as evident as ever, but it seems the process; how to shake hands with people, is becoming more and more elusive. Traditional career paths are increasingly being replaced by jobs where there is no clear road forward. Moving up through the company from worker to manager is becoming rarer and rarer, being replaced by entrepreneurs, “risk takers” bypassing the traditional system of merit and achieving wild success. Wanting to learn what networking is, and how I can best network, I did a healthy amount of internet research and I met with Roland Deiser, Executive Chairman at Center for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management, and overall great guy.

Here’s what I learned.

According to the ever so trusty Wikipedia, “Networking is a socioeconomic business activity by which businesspeople and entrepreneurs meet to form business relationships and to recognize, create, or act upon business opportunities, share information and seek potential partners for ventures.” I had to reread it a couple of times too, no worries ;) In laymans terms, it basically means that it is the process of socializing in a business setting to meet the people who can give you what you want, and subsequently getting it from them.

To use an example, imagine you’re on a road trip where you want to get from Los Angeles to New York. Seems easy right? Just take the freeway and make it straight there in 2 days. Problem is, in networking, you rarely ever have a clear direction. You know your friends, but you rarely know your friend’s friends, and never your friend’s friend’s friends. So, how do you get to New York? In order to do that, you need to take a series of links. You could take the road from Los Angeles to Nevada, Nevada to Huston, Huston to Atlanta, and Atlanta to New York. Going in a chain from one link to another, is how networking is used to get in touch with the right people. People are far more likely to listen to someone who is a friend of a friend; someone who has something in common with them, than a cold call. Once meeting them you bring something of value to them and they do something in return.

While this does make a bit of sense, and it most certainly is a way to view networking, the core of networking is really lost. Networking, at it’s core, is simply getting to know people you find really cool, and working with them to make life better. All across the internet you see all of this rhetoric about how to automate your Linkedin profile to network with as many people as possible, about how “I cold called the Rock and got a job”, and while these cool flashy titles and ideas definitely work in some contexts, for the average person there is no point in doing these things. Instead, use the toolkit you’ve been honing all your life — socializing with people you know. At it’s core, that’s all you need to do! But of course, that is far easier said than done. In my experience as a networking-non-guru, trying to talk to someone you don’t know in order to get something (land an internship for example) is excruciatingly painful for two reasons:

Reason number one is simply shyness. It is hard to go up to someone you have never talked to before, they could be mean, they could not want to talk to you, hell, they might think the words to come out of your mouth are the greatest waste of oxygen they have ever experienced. They might… and it would be wrong to think that could not happen, but there are two things that one needs to remember. First, ultimately there is no harm in trying. If you mess up, 9 times out of ten, people will completely forget who you are, and even that rare time it does happen, there’s always a chance for a redemption. People generally are nice, and the possible benefit of getting to know that person and having a really cool conversation far outweighs the risk. Furthermore, the shyer you are the more you project uncertainty, so the less likely it is that that one time out of ten becomes one out of one hundred.

Reason number two is far more of a killer, and is quite difficult to do under all circumstances — that is, be genuine. In the world of networking and business, where dollar signs are everywhere, your youtube recommended feed is a bunch of people riding around in fancy cars, it seems like everything in business is just maximizing profits and screwing everyone over in the process. Fact of the matter is, most things in the business world are not like that. In general, people are in their line of work because they are interested in it, and they want to shape what they work on in their image. Everyone likes talking about what they do, and rather than making your networking conversations entirely transactional, make it simply two individuals geeking out over a topic and potentially doing something together to make the world a better place. If you can frame your networking conversations like that, not only will they work more often, you will feel more fulfilled and make your connections more meaningful.

If that does not make sense, just think of networking like if you only know the host at a party and are trying to make friends. Usually if you’re talking to a stranger the first topic of conversation is the host, and how you know each other, or some other thing that you both have in common. For business, it’s no different. Herein lies the crux of a very hard question, are you pursuing something you are actually interested in? If you are interested, it should not be too difficult to geek out with someone about it, but if you are not interested in it, or even just at that moment specifically are not interested in it, it will be difficult to connect with said person. What’s genuine and feels real is something entirely up to you, it is for you to decide, so trust in your gut instinct.

In conclusion, if you want to network with someone, remember these things: know your stuff, and be able to ask a question that is not stupid, don’t be shy, and be genuine. While this is not the end all be all of networking, there is many aspects to still remember, you do these things, and you are going in the right direction.