Networking. The horror! 

Honestly, I hate the mere mention of the word, but yet you'll dramatically increase your chances of being hired and finding more opportunities if you do it. So unfortunately, it is somewhat necessary. 

Now, if you're like me, you're gonna feel like, it's not fair!  But yes, it is...if you want to advance and gain more responsibility, more responsibilities usually involve more people responsibilities. And your boss or the hiring manager, they're going to need to see proof that you are good at dealing with people if they're going to give you that kind of responsibility. That's where that networking skill comes in. 

Now, if you don't like networking, I've found that it doesn't help to hear about it from somebody who loves it or from somebody who looks like they're not suffering at all when they do it.

So I thought today that I'd give you my take on networking as a registered, card carrying, spectrum-dwelling introvert. 

I wish someone had told me what I'm about to tell you because it would have saved me a lot of hassle. It turns out I was dead wrong about a lot of my assumptions around networking. 

The first thing I want to tell you is to focus on the quality of interaction over quantity of interaction.

As a person who had newly graduated from design school, I assumed that in order to succeed socially at work, I had to apply the same "being popular at school" logic. And that is, you know, work hard, but mainly, you know, find the cool kids, befriend them. "Befriend," meaning "party hard until they accept you as part of their crew."

And honestly, just imagining having to do that just gives me a full body sweat. I cannot imagine anything more stressful than chatting up a group of strangers and trying to get them to like me. I wasn't good at it in grade school, I wasn't good at it in high school, and in college, I only managed to scrape by because everyone was drunk. (Note: obviously not EVERYONE. But it often felt that way.)

I know that in a work situation, it can feel like if you aren't in with the cool people, you're screwed. But that is not true. At the end of the day, it's a business, and they're really not trying to staff the place with people who party all the time and come in late and hungover every day.  Partying with your coworkers in an attempt to become part of the gang can actually work against you.

And that's kind of the opposite of everything you might have learned in school.  In 10 years, you don't want to be the person that your colleagues remember as the first person to order shots. You want to be the person they remember as being easy to work with and good at their job. 

So I'm going to give you permission right now to not be the office party animal.
It's completely unnecessary and it's not good for your career.

Of course it's okay to celebrate with your coworkers sometimes, but that shouldn't be your main interaction with people. Besides, sometimes you're never in, no matter how many shots you do with people.  And if the people you're hanging out with are worth hanging out with and worth being colleagues with, They are not going to care about stuff like that.

So I hope all that feels like a huge relief to you. 

On the other side of the spectrum, please don't relax too much, because forming quality relationships with people that you work with is still something that you need to do, and it's not going to happen by accident.  You can't JUST keep your head down and work really hard because that doesn't create relationships.

Alright, so let's talk about some other practical advice that will help make this a little bit easier.

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Number one, stop calling it networking. 
Instead of networking, think of this as forming relationships. You are forming relationships with other people in your industry.  It's not a fake relationship, it's a real one and it's based on mutual respect and trust.

You're not pretending to like people so that you can call in favors with them later to get ahead.  The idea that networking is like somehow fake friends is kind of what makes it feel so icky, right? At least to me. 

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Number two, think of networking as just a one on one work meeting. 
For me, I need to have clear parameters when I'm meeting somebody.

I need to have a start and end time, a purpose, an agenda, or I get really stressed out. I really don't like having unstructured social time.  Um,  Yeah, and sometimes even when I do know the person well, it still feels kind of hard to do it. However, when I put it in the context of it being a one on one meeting to accomplish a specific goal, it helps my anxiety calm down.

And I also have an agenda, which I, I'm not going to like, you know, print out an agenda with sub bullet points and present it to the person necessarily, but I just, I just make a little list for myself. I jot down, um, you know, specific experiences and projects I'm going to bring up if it's like some kind of intro meeting.

Doing this little bit of pre scripting and parameterization, it makes me relax enough to actually have fun with it.  And when I'm talking about things that I've done for work, I naturally just feel happy talking about that. I know that affects my body posture  and the overall impression that I'm giving to the person.

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Number three, do something you actually want to do.  
I know this sounds overly simple, but I think most of us need permission to do this when it comes to networking. It's very easy to feel like the event has to be labeled, networking hour, cocktail hour, or something like that.  But what you should really do is go places where you think You'll meet people you actually want to hang out with who happen to be in your industry.

For example, if you hate getting lunch with people or you hate hanging out in bars, don't freaking do it.  Think about what you like and do a Google search. For example, if you like to play board games, Look for board game nights, and maybe invite somebody from your office to there, or suggest it as like an office outing.

You might be surprised at who else is interested in it, and you're automatically going to have something to talk about if you do something you're interested in. Sometimes even taking a class together can be a really great way to network with people.  So, just think outside the box. 

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Number four, don't get overly stressed about networking with the "right" people.

If you have a regular Thursday coffee break with your teammates, guess what? That is networking too.  And you do need to network with your peers. It's actually really important because in 3, 5, 10 years, you and your peers are going to be maybe running the department together.  So don't worry if your networking list doesn't include the EVP, the CMO, or some other department head.

Give it enough time. You are going to know somebody at that level because people have a tendency to keep on moving up. 

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Number five, wrap networking around a cause or an issue that you really care about. 
So see if there's an employee interest group at your job that addresses whatever cause you're interested in.

For example, I used to volunteer mentor for  my women at HBO group when I worked at HBO. I volunteered for a department spirit committee, um, and in doing so I got a chance to put on an emerging tech mini conference for the whole department. And  That was really cool. I mean, out of that, I got to  explore relationships with multiple vendors.

I was interested in working with, and I think this conference actually inspired the whole department to start incorporating more technology in marketing campaigns, which of course, like selfishly, I'm just very interested in cool technological things. So  yeah, I mean, all of that came from. Just volunteering and helping out.

Additionally, I volunteered to walk in the company, um, section of the pride parade every year with my son.  And I met a lot of really awesome people through that as well.  When you're close to a particular issue, you start to become the most authentic version of yourself and people really get to see your passion and your dedication in a, in a way that maybe they don't always get to see in the course of a normal work day.

I also find that my social anxiety just melts away when I am trying to make a difference or like I'm trying to help others.  Actually, getting involved with, um, a company sponsored initiative like this can be a really effective way of hacking your own growth. So, for example, let's say you're an executive assistant or a junior designer or something, and you really want to be perceived as a leader, but it's hard for you to do that in your current role, because it's not part of your responsibilities.

If you were to volunteer for, say, your department's Spirit Committee, and in the course of doing that, you run an event. People are going to be able to see that you're able to coordinate a large number of things and lead a group of people.

And that definitely can have real impact on your growth.


So the last thought I'll leave you with is that it's best to SUBSCRIBE, not guest star.  

Here's what I mean.  Don't go to one event per year to hang out with your colleagues, then never go again. That's not enough to build a relationship.

You want to do something that has repeated frequency so that people can actually get to know you and you can actually get to know them, like a real relationship again.  So for me, like sometimes that looks like scheduling a quarterly catch up with somebody that I want to have a relationship with.

Sometimes it looks like volunteering for a committee because the committee is going to have regular meetings and I know that in the course of that I'm going to develop relationships with people. So I would think about focusing on consistency and frequency over length and depth, if that makes sense. 

Okay, that's what I have for networking as an introvert. I hope it was helpful. Catch you next time.