What If You Spent Less Time Networking?

I have a couple of networking expressions, I pull out with some frequency. When asked for a good networking “hack” I typically respond with “don’t be a jerk.” No one wants to network with a jerk, so don’t be one. The second, of equally practical application (especially for the time-strapped) is: stop committing random acts of networking.

Limiting the number of urgent, impulsive, and ill-thought-through (aka random acts of networking) from one’s calendar is a point of view I’ve held for a long time. In my first book Build Your Dream Network, I argued that networking works when our actions are purposeful and focused—not when we simply do more of it, or say yes, to every networking “opportunity” tossed our way by some well-meaning contact, or leap on every activity someone suggests as being “good for our business, career, profile" or whatever (they never usually are). Nearly a decade after publication of Build Your Dream Network, I really haven’t changed my relationship-building tune.

Arguably, I've become more adamant about it.

Which is why I smiled when I got to reading Chapter 9 of my friend Fran Hauser’s terrific new book, Twenty Minutes Is the New Hour published by Penguin Random House

Fran’s argument throughout the book is wonderfully liberating: we’re spending far too much time on things that simply don’t require that much time. And networking, as she makes clear in Chapter 9, can absolutely one of them.

More coffees. More events. More introductions. More yeses because someone asked. More time spent talking to people we’ve been “told” to talk to (and because also perhaps, we’ve been told that networking is something ambitious people spend a lot of time doing).

It’s no wonder networking feels time consuming and exhausting - because approaching networking in this random, haphazard way is bloody time consuming and exhausting.

Fran offers a far better starting point: know why you're networking.

Questions Fran suggests you ask yourself:

1. What are you trying to learn?
2. Who are you hoping to meet?
3. What gap are you trying to fill?
4. What kind of work do you want more of?
5. Where do you want to be in a year or two?

Answer these questions, then—and this is the important part—let your answers to those questions determine what networking step you take next.

This understanding (your networking “why” in the parlance of Build Your Dream Network) is where Fran’s twenty-minute mindset and my thoughts on networks so beautifully collide.

Because here's the thing: to get ahead you don’t need to attend every event, you don't need to accept every invitation which lands in your inbox. And hey, you sure as heck don’t need yet another “you two should know each other” contact. You especially don’t need to waste valuable time (yours and others) running around meeting new people when someone already in your network could provide the insight or introduction, answer or whatever you need. And no, staying connected doesn’t require a 2-hour lunch lunch, 30-minute coffee (heck no coffee date is ever 15 minutes!) or 60-minute meeting. If you're going to achieve and flourish more, you've got to network your time smarter than that.

Stop confusing time spent networking with doing "networking" well.

But I wouldn’t want anyone to read Fran’s Twenty Minutes (or either of my books on networking) as a reason to make every relationship-building interaction ruthlessly efficient. Let's face it: there is something rather transactional about approaching networking that way.

• A conversation with a potential client may deserve an hour. Or more.
• A mentee deserves whatever time we can offer when, other than the positive feelings from sharing expertise and insights, there may be absolutely nothing immediately obvious in an outcome from the mentoring relationship for us.
• Time spent working towards completion of a community project or common goal matters even when we can’t point to an immediate return on the hours we spent, nor can we show how the effort neatly aligns with our KPIs

Some of the most consequential relationships in our lives - personally and professionally - develop precisely because we weren’t staring at the clock wondering whether they were producing sufficient ROI.

Networking is a human activity. Humans are messy, difficult and monstrously inefficient. The best networkers understand this. You tinker at the edges to operate efficiently, all the while understanding life (in its glorious bounty of emotions and urgencies) can derail the most efficient of plans. 

The distinction I make—especially in my second book The Social Billionaire: A Networking Roadmap for Women Seeking to Flourish and Achieve More —is between being efficient in how you choose your networking activities, and being stingy with your relationship building time.

Getting clear about our networking purpose is efficient, it stops us from wasting hours on networking that isn’t serving our ambitions and calendars. When we're more efficient on our end of the networking continuum, we are more likely to be efficient in the use of other's time and energy (which is a generous thing to be when you're networking).

Back to Fran’s know why you’re networking guidance, here are three additional questions I suggest you ask yourself: 

• What are you trying to achieve? 
• What network will that ambition require? 
• Based on your answers to the first two questions, where does your finite networking time and energy belong as a result?

Networking efficiency isn't just about time, and time isn’t the only thing we’re spending when we network.

We’re equally spending and seeking reputation, social capital and energy when we're networking, too.

That endless industry event you think you “should” attend has a cost. So does the person who repeatedly asks if they can “pick your brain.” (If you're the person always asking to "pick someone's brain" you're inflicting a cost on someone else.) So does the person who repeatedly asks “if you know of anyone” or “could you check with your network.” So does maintaining a connection out of obligation rather than genuine interest. So does saying yes to every introduction, every coffee, every community, every invitation. It can add up to a lot of random, wasteful networking energy on our calendars.

Every networking choice spends something: time, energy, reputation or social capital.

Understanding why you are networking is particularly important for women. On average, women are asked to take on 200 more hours on non-promotable tasks than their male colleagues and are 44% more likely to be asked to take on office "tasks” - so feeling like you’re carrying more than your fair share at the office is not an illusion. And carrying all those extras may cause you to procrastinate (one of Fran’s 4 P’s) on the critical career activity of networking. Now add to this the fact that women have been handed a boatload of networking advice - the you should, you must, join this, do that networking BS - that works for men (and not women, trust me on this, it’s the research behind The Social Billionaire) without anyone (at least till now) suggesting women might just need to approach networking differently in order to get ahead.

I beat that drum loudly in The Social Billionaire, and now, in chapter 9 of Twenty Minutes, Fran is too.

And I love her for it.

Put Your Networking Time to the Test

Fran’s twenty-minute challenge is a good reason to examine not simply how much time you’re spending networking, but what all that activity is actually doing for you, your relationships, your career or venture.

Inspired by Twenty Minutes and pulling from The Social Billionaire, here are six suggestions which will make your networking more meaningful, as well as efficient and productive:

• Start with the outcome. What are you trying to achieve right now? As I say in The Social Billionaire, give each network the right job to do. By getting specific on what you’re seeking to achieve, you’ll make wiser choices on the invitations you receive and the introductions you ask for. 

• Audit where your networking time is going. Look at the networking activities you routinely default to—the events, coffees, conferences, communities, online activity, catch-ups, etc.. Which are actually contributing to the outcome you’ve identified in bullet point one? Which networking activities have simply become habits? Consider where your networking routine needs to be shaken up.

• Check the energy bill. At the end of your workday, notice what left you energized, depleted or somewhere in between. Keep a list. By doing this long enough, patterns will emerge. Consider which people and networking activities replenish you. Which consistently drain you? Can you approach the drains differently (if discarding them altogether is an impossibility)? 

• Put up some guardrails. Where do your prioritization or time-allocation choices need a boundary? And who in your network needs a boundary? 

• Try the “tack it on” test. When someone asks for “just a few minutes,” resist creating another meeting. Could the conversation be attached to something already on your calendar—five minutes before or after an already scheduled meeting? Seek out ways to put others' time on your work calendar in a way that works for you. If your answer to their “just a few minutes” doesn’t work for them, well, perhaps those few minutes weren’t quite as urgent as they advertised.

• Look at the network you already have before adding more people. The networking solution you are seeking may already be sitting in your network, and looking to see who you already know, and asking them for help is far more efficient in the short term than the alternative - trying to convince complete strangers to lend you a hand. BTW you are not alone: most of us chronically undervalue the social capital we already possess wildly assuming the solution to our networking woes is another event or introduction.

Fran’s twenty-minute mindset and my own belief that intentionality beats random acts of networking arrive at the same useful place: stop measuring networking by how much of it you do. It's a pretty inaccurate measure IMHO.

But there is one final caution I need to add on efficiency. Too much efficiency is dangerous. When you optimize your networking solely around what works for you, networking turns transactional. And who likes networking when it starts to feel like that…

In all your efficiency, you may just optimize away the meaningful, magical and serendipitous connections you didn't alott time for.

Remember, networking is a human activity, and as such there will always be inefficiencies and imperfections, messy connections and dead-end leads. No system, template, AI assistant—or twenty-minute timer—can get around that. By approaching networking with clarity, along with some humility and understanding, plus a whole lot of generosity, your networking should work as it should - it will work as efficiently as it possibly can, for everyone

📙 Fran Hauser's new book - Twenty Minutes Is The New Hour - is out now. Find retailers here.

📘 Find my book - The Social Billionaire: A Networking Roadmap for Women Seeking to Flourish and Achieve More - in paperback (workbook) format on Amazon + Barnes & Noble + Bookshop.org and in ebook on Kindle, Smashwords, Vivlio, Thalia, Apple Books, Fable , Bookshop.org and Rakuten kobo.