Assetmap Blog Company blog on how social capital is transforming business, culture and social change

The Only Thing You Need To Do To Be Great At Networking

The only thing you really need to do to be great at networking is to be as helpful as possible to as many people as you can.

In the middle of 2009, I packed up everything I had to follow the entrepreneurial dream in San Francisco. In moving, I was leaving a place, a reputation, and a community. While frequent career shifts can make for a dynamic learning-filled life, they also have the consequence of upending relationships. I’ve never been great at just picking up the phone to catch up with people, so when I moved this time I decided to try something different to stay in touch.

I began an every other month or so newsletter called the N-List, in which I wrote a short piece on something I had been thinking about, and then included links to brilliant, wacky, inspiring, historical, or hilarious web content. The goal was primarily to create a regular excuse to reconnect with people. But a secondary goal was to have an active channel through which to ask for help when we launched projects in the future. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Assetmap but Isis the dog that made me call on the list.

Isis is my extremely loving, extremely deaf, extremely accident-pruned American Bulldog – Pit Bull mix. Just a few months after rescuing her, she tore the doggy equivalent of her ACL. Our options were let it scar over and have her limp around for the next 7 or 8 years of her life, or get a surgery that cost at least $3000. Obviously we were going to do the surgery, but where to find the cash?

I had only just started writing the N-List, but figured I’d write asking for help with the dog. There were lots of people on there who had nonprofits who I had given to in the past, so why not try? The long story short is that over the course of the next month we raised a full $3000, primarily from people on the list, got the surgery, and now Isis is back to romping around the apartment looking for food and toys, leg good as new.

Over the course of 2010, I would turn to my networks regularly for help finding resources and connections, and more often than not it was for needs that, like doggy surgery, I absolutely did not anticipate: a sales channel for a flip flop company, a modern feminist organization looking to hire an intern, real estate buyers interested in entrepreneurial living in Mexico, a national news outlet to syndicate coverage of a well known conference, and so on.

My inability to anticipate these needs reminded me of a personal maxim to always, always be searching for ways to be helpful far in advance of when you think you’ll need help in return. What it comes down to is this:

• It’s almost impossible to be sure of what you’re going to need five minutes from now, much less five days, five months, or five years;
• Even when you know what you need, it’s extremely hard to know who is going to be able to help – or to introduce you to exactly the right person to help. When we were looking for a technical lead for Assetmap, for example, the recruitment wars were in such high pitch that asking my entrepreneur friends for developers was showing itself to be pointless; they were by necessity hoarding their contacts. In a last ditch effort, I asked all of my nonprofit-y friends who happened to live in San Francisco. Sure enough, we ended up being introduced to the previous cofounder of a well known, venture backed Ruby on Rails hosting and scaling company. He was introduced not because our mutual friend could verify his technical chops, but because he was a “great teacher” and a “great guy.” You never know who is going to be able to help.
• When you do need something, you often need it quickly. The challenge of needing things quickly is that you simply don’t have time to build good will and a reputation as someone who is a good person to help. People make investments in who they help based on what they know about that persons propensity to be helpful in return, maybe not to them, but in general. People want to help others who have good karma. They want to know that their help will be paid forward and eventually returned to them in some way or another.
• The only sure way to get that sort of good karma is to start helping now, and do so assuming that everyone you help could be the exact person you’ll need to help you in the future, even if you can’t imagine how at the moment.

If this advice to “start helping” seems glib and banal, it is surprising how few people anchor their “networking” in the simple act of helping their peers find what they need. For entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders, in particular, our needs are often so immediate and so existential that it is extremely tempting to assess every new person we meet in terms of their capacity to help us. I contend, however, that it is ultimately destructive, leading to being seen as a “taker” and caught in a world of transactional relationships.

The bias towards helping widely, deeply, and without calculus to how I get paid back has been the single most important buoy of my professional life. It has not only helped me find what I need, but at least once or twice has insulated a project from total immolation.

And here’s the best part: this supposedly “professional” strategy of helping widely is also personally liberating. It is a kind of freedom to stop assessing professional relationships only in the context of their potential return on investment. It allows the natural joy of helping others return as a primary motivation for your professional behavior.

Helping in this way is at once easier and harder than it seems. It is easier in that most of the connections we make for people cost us nothing and actually build our social capital by making both parties happier and more closely connected to us. It is harder than it seems in part because we’ve mapped the transactions that happen in markets as outcomes of business relationships onto the structure of the relationships themselves. But it’s also harder simply because it’s strangely hard to discover what people actually need. One of the main intents of Assetmap is to fix this problem.

Networking still feels to many like a strange, frustrating, often inauthentic experience. And the hoards of experts who offer their help to get your handshake, business card, and eye contact right don’t help. But ultimately, networking is not about building a fat rolodex but instead about building a dense web of relationships of mutual curiosity and mutual support. That is the work of a lifetime, and it starts with the way you help today.