If Networking Feels Gross, You’re Doing it Wrong

The best metaphor I've found for building meaningful relationships is gardening. I've watched my parents garden for years. The care and intentionality they gave to their garden inspired my approach to becoming a generous relational investor with my network. I captured my philosophy of relationships in business in my recent TEDx, "If Networking Feels Gross, You’re Doing it Wrong" and I've included the transcript of that talk below along with the video. I hope this encourages you in the relationships you've built or the relationships you need to repair. Business is all about people and relationships make our work meaningful.

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The Struggle: Networking is a Necessary Evil

In graduate school, there was a student I looked up to. His name was Peter. Peter was smart, articulate, and winsome. He was the type of person you wanted to be like.

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One day I saw Peter in the library. It was his final quarter in our program, and he was about to graduate. “Peter, you made it! You must be so excited!” His response surprised me, “I am, but I haven’t really built my network like I should have, so I don’t have any jobs lined up yet.”?His answer terrified me. If someone as impressive as Peter did not have a job, then what chance did I have? As the son of two immigrants, education was the key to success. I could not afford to waste this opportunity.

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I left that conversation feeling anxious and fearful. I needed to find a way to protect my career. The stakes were too high for me to finish school without a job.

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Then I remembered the advice I’d been given countless times. Go network. Build relationships.

It’s all about who you know, not what you know.

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They were right.

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Education wasn’t the highway of opportunity, it was merely an onramp. The highway of opportunity is social capital. Your network. The people you know and more importantly the people who know you.

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I was determined. I set off to build a network that would guarantee my success. I spent as much time as I could building relationships with people who could hire me when I graduated.

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The process worked, but it didn’t feel right. I was meeting the right people. I was having meaningful conversations. Internship and job opportunities started opening up. But networking and building relationships began to feel gross. I was approaching people as a transactional consumer, not a relational investor. My driving question was focused on “What can I get from this person?” “How can they help me?” I was asking the wrong questions.

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Networking was a necessary evil. It felt gross.

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Then one day the tables were turned. I saw a childhood acquaintance at a coffee shop. We started a conversation. He then spent the entire time trying to convince me to join the multi-level marketing scheme that he was a part of.

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You see, the more people he signed up underneath him, the more money he would make. But that’s not all, he’d help me build an empire as well. In fact, he told me that I could make so much money that I’d never need to work again. I could provide for my parents as they aged. I could give back to them for all that they had given me. All by simply helping people change their spending habits and begin buying products from us. Products that they were already going to buy anyways.

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It felt like he was looking at me with cartoon dollar signs in his eyes, only focused on what he could get. How he could use me and leverage my relationships to build his little kingdom. I felt like I needed to take a hot shower afterwards.

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It was at that moment that I began to realize…?if networking and building relationships ever feels gross then you must be doing it wrong.

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It turns out that social scientists have studied this. In 2014, researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard, and Northeastern teamed up to investigate the impact of building social networks on people’s sense of morality. What they found across their work was that building relationships for selfish pursuits left people feeling psychologically dirty and even morally stained. In fact, when people felt dirty after networking, they were even more likely to buy soap and shampoo. They literally wanted to wash themselves off.

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Decades of research confirms the common advice about networking. Building social capital positively impacts all sorts of outcomes like job performance, salary levels, employability, and way more.

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If you want to build your career or your business, then networking is a good strategy. But here’s the dilemma, when people feel dirty after networking, they make less efforts toward those relationships, even though those relationships were critical for their careers.

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There was a reason that I felt gross when I approached people as a transactional consumer instead of as a relationship investor.

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The Shift: Asking a New Question

How can you do relationships in a way that you don’t feel like you need rinse off after every coffee meeting? I started to ask a different question. Instead of, “What can I get from this person?” I began to ask, “What can I give to this person?”

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Everything changed.

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I began to search for a new way. I discovered generous relational investors who introduced me to a different paradigm. Jeff, a business leader in Seattle was one of them. If you meet with him for coffee, you quickly realize that his goal is to learn how he can serve you, not, how you can serve him.

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This new mindset moved me from being a greedy transactional consumer to a generous relational investor. Relational investors leave people better than they found them. The focus is not on “giving to gain” or even about paying it forward so that positive things circle back around for you one day. Relational investors are focused on giving out of the overflow of who they are and what they have already been given.

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Relational investors bring generosity beyond reciprocity.

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They ask a different question. Instead of starting with “What can I get?” they ask, “What can I give?”

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It represents a mindset shift from fixating on pathology to looking for potential.

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The human default is to focus on pathology. Pathology is all about the things that are going wrong. The barriers, the obstacles, the brokenness. My Ph.D. is in Industrial-Organizational Psychology. For decades, psychology – and many other human-centered disciplines – have focused on pathology. What is broken and how can we fix it? Over the last 30 years, there has been a revolution that pushed against pathology to look for potential. What is going well? What is working? How do we make things even better? It’s a shift from scarcity to abundance, an assumption that there is opportunity and potential to be realized.

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Both are necessary... It’s important to understand barriers and limitations but also to see possibility and potential. But our baseline is often self-preservation: protect my career, position myself for success.

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When I moved beyond my fear of finding a job, my perspective shifted from protecting my pathology to pushing for potential.

As the old saying goes, “It’s even better to give than it is to receive.”

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And you don’t have to be a wealthy executive to become a relational investor. I was a poor student. I discovered that generous relational investors give their time, treasure, and talent. Generosity looks different in different seasons. It could be as simple as the gift of your undivided attention, a heartfelt thankyou note, or an offer to help a co-worker with a project. It could be a valuable introduction to another relationship or the offer to review someone’s résumé for them. The possibilities for generosity are only limited by your imagination.

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Because people aren’t a process, people are the purpose.

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And business is all about people. The goal isn’t to leverage relationships, or extract value from people. It’s about building meaningful, generous, mutually beneficial relationships and focusing on how you can serve people, how you can give to them – even if they are helping you. You might not get anything back right away, or even at all. But there is still value in the relationship. Every person has inherent dignity, value, and worth, regardless of the outcome.

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The Solution: Becoming a Generous Relational Investor

Years after my conversation with Peter in the library, I found myself working in a university, helping lead a graduate business program. I was meeting a potential student for my program to learn about his goals for the future. He was a great candidate and I really wanted him in my program. But over the course of the conversation, I realized that what I had to offer wasn’t the best fit for him. Reluctantly, I pointed him in a different direction.

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A year later, I had another similar conversation with a young woman who was also exploring our program. She was amazing. Her goals aligned with our training, and she became one of our best students. It wasn’t till after she started when I discovered that she found out about our program from the young man I’d met with over a year before. He told her that if she met with me, I’d put her interests first and that if she wasn’t a fit that I’d point her in the right direction.

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Focusing on the interests of other people can pay off over the long-term, but that’s not the point.?

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There is nothing more rewarding than giving to other people.

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My parents impressed the value of education on me, but they also demonstrated the value of generosity.

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They have been avid suburban gardeners for over 40 years. They started composting before it was the cool thing to do in Seattle. Every year they carefully till their soil, fertilize it, prepare seeds, plant, water, and care for their garden with great intention.

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As time goes on, different plants will blossom and produce fruit at different times. They tend their garden so well that every year they harvest so much produce that there is absolutely no way that they can possibly eat it all. They have so much that it will spoil, it will go to waste. So what do they do? Instead of going to spoil, they spoil their friends. They take all the excess, they put it in bags and baskets, and they generously share it with their friends and neighbors. Often, they even use their extra seeds to help friends start their own garden.

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As I look back, I realize that my parents didn’t garden just for themselves. They certainly enjoyed the fresh fruits and vegetables, but they had equal if not greater joy in giving to the people around them. The relationships in their lives represented a place for giving, not a vehicle for getting.

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My parents demonstrated that you get more than you give by giving more than you get.

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Our networks, our relationships are also like a garden. If we tend our network well it will grow and it will produce fruit. So much in fact, that there is no way that we can possibly consume it all ourselves. We can share those relationships with someone else who needs what that person has to offer. When we give relational capital, we don’t lose it. It doesn’t decrease, it increases. We can even help someone start their own garden.

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Becoming a generous relational investor starts with a new mindset, its a different paradigm of relationships.

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So, what is your relational posture? Are you a greedy transactional consumer or a generous relational investor? Are you protecting your pathology or pushing for potential? It’s never too late to start asking a different question and to being looking for “What can I give?” instead of “What can I get?”

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Thanks to TEDxManitouSprings and my team at WiLD Leaders, Inc. for making this a reality. Thank you to Epoch Moment Photography for capturing video and to Michael Ashford for expert coaching. Thanks Mikki Gates, SHRM-SCP, GPHR, CAALF for building a relationship years ago and creating this reality.