Everything I Know About Networking, I Learned the Hard Way: You Don’t Have to Take Up Golf!
This essay is Part 2 of my series, Everything I Know About Networking, I Learnt the Hard Way. You can read Part 1 here.
At one point in my career, I seriously considered taking up golf for networking and career advancement purposes.
My family is golf crazy. Growing up, I even had private lessons with Mr Muridzo, Zimbabwe’s first Black professional golfer, whose son Lewis Chitengwa once famously beat Tiger Woods as a teenager.
Mr Muridzo was deeply unimpressed with me. I remember him calling over a much younger child, she must have been about 5 or 6, to demonstrate a proper swing. Pretty pathetic on my part. It was a hopeless investment, the talent simply didn’t exist.
My mum was the lady captain of her club, and when I was a teenager the whole family would head out every Sunday morning while I stayed at home watching TV or hanging out with my friends until they came back. Today, I live next door to a golf club and there’s a set of clubs in my garage gathering dust.
I couldn't be better placed to take up golf. I just really don’t want to.
But I work in real estate, where golf can be pretty handy, so I started wondering whether I should take it up to , you know, help my career.
When I told my big brother, probably the most golf obsessed, he said it was the dumbest idea he had ever heard. He was right.
People can tell when you’re forcing an interest. Golf would be a huge investment of time in something I already know I don't enjoy. I would have been miserable. There had to be a better way to network.
There’s an episode of Friends (a show I can’t stand but occasionally hate-watch) where Rachel takes up smoking because her boss smokes.
All the important conversations are happening outside during smoke breaks, and it seems like the only way she can get access to them.
That’s probably the worst possible interpretation of networking.
Once you accept that people do business with people they like, it’s so easy to conclude that you need to work out what the right people like and just … become that person.
Take up golf. Join the office five-a-side team. Stay out until midnight several nights a week at the pub across from the office. Manufacture the version of yourself most likely to be invited into the room. A lot of people have had jobs where networking seemed to mean exactly that.
But imagine if networking authentically meant finding more of the people who genuinely like the same things you do. Or, at the very least, people who like the person you already are.
When I worked at McKinsey, there was something people called the Airport Test.
The premise was pretty simple. Imagine your flight’s been delayed by six hours and you’re stuck at the airport with one of your colleagues. How do you feel about that prospect?
In that highly competitive environment where several people were equally capable of doing the work, the answer sometimes influenced who managers wanted on their team for the next three months.
The obvious problem is that it can create similarity bias. If people keep choosing colleagues who look like them, sound like them or come from similar backgrounds, it becomes a serious problem very quickly. That’s how environments morph into homogenous seas of blue suits.
The reality is that when competence is broadly equal, people will often choose the person they actually want to spend time with. The same thing happens in business, especially in real estate which is such a relationship driven industry.
Competence Matters but People Do Business With People They Like
Of course competence matters, as does track record, price etc. You need to be good at what you do. No amount of charm is going to make up for being rubbish. But competence is often just the price of entry.
There are lots of competent people. Plenty of business decisions aren’t between one brilliant firm and one completely hopeless one. They are between two or three perfectly credible people who could all technically do the work.
At that point, the human stuff starts to matter. Who do I trust? Who listens? Who follows through? Who do I actually want to spend the next six months working with? Who is going to make my life easier rather than harder?
I’ve been on both sides of this now. I have bought professional services and I have sold them. There have absolutely been times when I looked at two perfectly credible options and thought, quite simply, I’d rather work with that person.
Years ago, I read How to Win Friends and Influence People.
It was published in 1936, which means people have been trying to work out how to make other people like them for at least ninety years.
Most of Dale Carnegie’s advice is super simple. Listen to people. Take a genuine interest in them. Remember their name. Ask them about the things they care about instead of spending the entire conversation talking about yourself.
It sounds so obvious that it’s almost embarrassing to write down.
The people I like when I’m out networking usually listen, ask another question, remember something I told them the last time we met. They make me laugh or tell me something interesting about themselves. We have essentially, a normal human conversation, and this is the bit about networking that we sometimes make far too complicated.
Being likeable doesn’t necessarily mean being incredibly charismatic or slick
It took me quite a long time to understand that the things that make us a little less polished are often the things that make us more likeable. I had this image of what a good networker looked like: gliding through a room with a glass of champagne charming everyone like they say Bill Clinton was like at his peak.
I am not that woman, and yet I am a power networker.
I am more likely to be holding a Diet Coke and discussing a very obscure topic with someone who, for some reason, is also interested in it. I am quite direct. I don’t like small talk. I curse more than I should for a lady who sings the psalm in her church choir every few Sundays. I have also been known to linger near the smokers’ corner on occasion. Just to observe, obviously. Ahem. Don’t try this at home, kids.
It’s okay, no, awesome, to have a little bit of awkwardness, a weird hobby, a strong opinion about something completely inconsequential (pineapple does belong on pizza - I prefer Americanised Italian food to the real thing). These are markers of humanity. And people seem to respond to them.
Make enough of yourself visible that the people who naturally connect with you have something to connect with.
Let people have some idea who the human being behind the job title actually is. My “personal” essays on Linkedin like the weird things I ask my assistants to do or the introduction to my wig collections have impressions 2-3x as high as my pure business content.
And get this - the readers aren’t somehow separate from the clients and business partners I want to reach - it’s literally the same people. I‘ve caught up with clients who fondly referenced something surprisingly specific about me because they read something I wrote six months ago.
The goal isn’t just to make the right people like you, but to find and connect with more of the people who actually do.
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