Taking the Work Out of Networking: An Introvert's Guide to Making Connections That Count

Advance praise for Karen Wickre and

Taking the Work Out of Networking

Karen Wickre may be the best-connected Silicon Valley figure you’ve never heard of, widely regarded in tech as a champion networker. Now she reveals in highly readable, practical terms how anyone can create and sustain a network painlessly, and why it matters. This book can change your career, and your life.

—Walt Mossberg, former columnist and conference producer for the Wall Street Journal, AllThingsDigital, and Recode

Karen Wickre has taken a lifetime of learning and put it into a practical, easy-to-use book that people of all stripes and backgrounds will find useful. (And by the way: it’s not only for introverts!)

—Sree Sreenivasan, former Chief Digital Officer of New York City, Columbia University, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Listen to Karen Wickre. Taking the Work Out of Networking will make you a better questioner, observer, relationship-nurturer, and, yes—networker for all the right reasons."

—Blair Shane, Chief Marketing Officer, Sequoia Capital

If you believe relationships are the bedrock of both adventure and achievement, then you must read this book. Step by step, concept by concept, Karen shares her wisdom on how to build a community of relationships that help you change the world.

—Keith Yamashita, founder and chairman, SYPartners

Networking is essential for business success, yet many still dread it. Prepare to change your mind. Karen Wickre’s inspired new book shows readers how to embrace their true selves while building an authentic, sustainable network.

—Dorie Clark, adjunct professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and author, Stand Out Networking and Reinventing You

Most of us dread the awkward phone calls to strangers and the transactional nature of what we think of as ‘networking.’ Karen Wickre recasts the notion completely—and extremely usefully—in terms of connections, friendships, and reciprocity. A very user-friendly tool for those of us introverts masquerading as extroverts.

—Amanda Bennett, journalist and author

For introverts who panic at the idea of networking, Wickre’s book is a deep, calming breath. You can do it.

—Sophia Dembling, author of The Introvert’s Way and Introverts in Love

People will always be moving and changing jobs, but the value of human connection doesn’t change. Karen Wickre shows how ‘loose-touch’ interactions can make your life better. If you’re an introvert, you will find help making connections in ways that don’t feel forced or artificial. If you know an introvert, this book makes a good gift.

—Matt Cutts, former Googler

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For Tom, who taught me about fearlessness, and for all of you who are my tribe. You keep me going.

Collecting the dots. Then connecting them. And then sharing the connections with those around you. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing.

—Amanda Palmer

Foreword

by Roy Bahat, Bloomberg Beta

When you think tech company, images of computer networks or server rooms might pop into your head. Your first thought wouldn’t be about human beings supporting each other, chatting over coffee, or making new friends. Yet one of the biggest open secrets in Silicon Valley is that the tech industry runs on personal networks more than it does on computer networks.

Whether or not you work in tech, this tends to be true. Many of us struggle with the same questions about the people in our professional lives: How do you choose who to work with when you barely know a person? How do you know who to trust? How do you nurture something real when your friends number in the thousands?

Our relationships matter. They are more than just runways we light up to land a new job, or close a sale. Relationships are what make us human, in a world where machines often outdo us. So: what could be better than becoming more expert in how to connect with one another?

More than any other industry I’ve seen—and I’ve worked in government, for nonprofits, at a Fortune 500 corporation, in universities, plus cofounding a little company, and now as a startup investor—Silicon Valley knows how to answer these people questions. After a meeting at our venture capital fund, a visitor quipped, For folks who invest in technology, you sure do talk a lot about people.

The author of the book you’re now holding—a seasoned veteran of the tech industry—is therefore the perfect person to tell you how to build and keep your personal network. Based on her years at startups, big corporations, and long stints at both Google and Twitter, Karen Wickre has become an artisan of the Silicon Valley–style relationship building.

Karen’s keen eye for the tradecraft of building a relationship makes her, like me, a student of the details of how we meet one another, what we have in common. The venture capital fund I lead focuses on investing in the future of work; we obsess over these nuances. What’s the right subject line for an introduction email? (Pro tip: A one-word subject line like Intro will get lost in everyone else’s inbox.) When should you text someone versus sending them a DM? What’s the right order for several names in a calendar invitation?

As Karen will tell you, the tech world is famously fluid. There’s no harm and no foul in moving often between companies or roles. Because technologies themselves evolve so quickly, and because tech loves a good reinvention (and, yes, disruption), this constant motion makes people in tech rely on our connections—a network of allies, colleagues, and friends—more often and more deeply than we rely on our (current) employer.

This Silicon Valley way of building relationships is about giving: It’s about starting with what the other person needs, instead of what you want from them. It’s about planting seeds and getting to watch them bloom and outgrow you.

And networking in this way just feels more natural than pressing your business card into someone’s hands at a conference. It feels less slimy, less transactional, than the way most of us think of networking. It’s the opposite of the smile-and-look-over-your-shoulder move you see at party after party.

Karen’s book encapsulates this networking-by-nurturing approach, and offers nugget after nugget on how to make it your own. In this paperback edition, Karen also helps us navigate life inside a company. She reminds us that—as companies get bigger and the tidy org chart’s boxes and lines blur—we should be just as giving to our colleagues as we are to customer prospect or contacts.

Even if you’re obligated to go to a crowded work to-do, Karen can show you how to survive trauma-free. She turns being the quiet person at the party into an engine for earnest empathy. Or relishing the fact that social media works beautifully for people who would rather avoid chitchat. (On the internet, nobody knows you’re an introvert.) And I respect how candid she is about her age and the accumulated value of being in this game for many years.

Karen also understands that if we’re going to honor our relationships, we need to take care in how we relate to people outside of our insular communities. We can either fall into the addictive traps that many social networks—including some where Karen has worked!—set for us, or we can fashion our own way of doing things. We can choose to start by giving, limiting our exposure to the less generous, and getting curious before furious.

Read this book to see that forging connections isn’t about you getting out there, or forcing yourself to eat a meal with a stranger when you’d rather have time to think, or breaking your phobia of starting a conversation. It’s about us: about seeing the best in each other and showing each other that we notice.

When Karen asked me to write a few words for the book you’re holding now, I was unsure which of us was doing which the favor. Was she giving to me, or me to her? And then I remembered, as Karen herself points out, favors can be mutual.

At the risk of making your eyes roll, this is a book about networking. And even so, you’ll see the best of how to be human at work on every page. Nothing in our evolutionary programming—rooted in small tribes, knowing a few people deeply—has prepared us for the modern way we connect with each other. Silicon Valley has figured this secret out. This book shares that secret with you.

Roy Bahat

San Francisco

https://also.roybahat.com

Introduction

Networking is more about farming than it is about hunting.

—Ivan Misner

Networking is one of those things most of us think of as a chore—an unloved task to undertake when we need something: a new job, better career guidance, more education, or other useful information. As I was developing the idea of this book, virtually every person I mentioned it to said the same thing: I hate networking. Anything to help me avoid it, or survive it, would be great. When I asked friends on Twitter and Facebook what specifically they hate about having to network, the replies flew in:

Everyone’s trying to be something they’re not.

The goal-driven artificiality of it. Conversations had for the sake of achieving a goal, rather than for creating connection, feel fake.

I hate having to have surface-level conversations with people who I will probably forget for the sole mutual purpose of trying to take advantage of the relationship for personal benefit.

As a lifelong introvert, the idea of forcing an introduction, talking too much about myself, or even asking for a business card has always been anathema. I get anxious if my calendar gets crowded with meetings, calls, and other obligations requiring me to talk too much or be in a crowd.

And yet, despite my own need for self-protection and solitude, I’ve ended up at age sixty-seven with a few thousand contacts across the world. I would never work a room, but I’m not afraid to initiate a conversation with virtually anyone. Over my long and varied career, my network of contacts has come to enrich my life every day. Friends and acquaintances (and the people they know, and so on) regularly come to me for ideas, support, connection, and introductions. And I do the same.

Wherever you fall on the introvert > extrovert spectrum, the need to network in order to develop new connections has never mattered more. A few proof points:

• We change jobs a lot. Younger baby boomers hold nearly a dozen different jobs during their working years, and millennials are projected to hold even more (Bureau of Labor Statistics).

• Job hopping starts young. New college grads today work at twice as many companies in their first five post-grad years than in earlier eras (LinkedIn).

• We move a lot. People in the United States move more than eleven times in their lives (FiveThirtyEight.com

).

• More of us work for ourselves. There are nearly 41 million self-employed Americans aged twenty-one and up, and the trend is growing (MBO Partners, Nation1099.com

).

For all of these reasons—job changes, freelance work, geographical moves—it’s become incumbent on most all of us to make networking a regular practice. And as we move through our professional lives, we’re going to continue to need an ever-changing, ever-growing variety of people to call on. A contemporary definition of networking is to make an effort to meet and talk to a lot of people, especially in order to get information that can help you. That doesn’t sound too bad, right?

Nevertheless, People Hate Having to Do It

But to lots of people, networking conjures up images of pressing a business card on everyone in sight as you make sure to collect an equal number. Other dreaded aspects of networking: having to meet strangers to get in line for a new job; needing the inside scoop on a new field or city; trying to game the hiring system to match your experience to an interesting role. It all seems phony, and baldly transactional. Plus, for all the time we spend avoiding networking, we think we have to get out there exactly when we feel most needy. When things seem at their worst (an impending layoff, dead-end role, intolerable work environment), we feel vulnerable—sometimes even desperate. Who could be their best under these circumstances?

Of course, there are also people who don’t believe they need to network. After all, they say, their job is secure. (Until it isn’t.) And there are some who feel resigned to their current job because, frankly, they can’t imagine anything better, or feel they can’t afford, for any number of reasons (tenure, title downgrade, lower compensation, commuting logistics, and so on), to make a switch. A friend described to me the lifelong conundrum of networking: Traditionally one is raised to not discuss work in social situations, to not be self-important, not be self-promoting, not be opportunistic, not make use of one’s friends—and then, as a professional adult, one has to somehow integrate the need to market oneself. The conflict never seems to feel any less awkward.

For introverts, multiply that distaste and even fear about having to connect with strangers. No less a figure than Carl Jung has described an introvert as someone who needs solo time to recharge, who regains energy by spending time alone—whereas extroverts get a special charge by being in a crowd and having lots of human contact without seeming to need a break. Most of us are somewhere along the spectrum between the two. In my own experience, and from what I’ve heard from kindred spirits, we who tilt toward introversion are more at home with our thoughts than we are in a chattering crowd. The idea of having to elbow our way into a conversation or a noisy room is just about the worst chore imaginable. Before I head back out in the world, I need unscheduled time for my brain to wander and rejuvenate. You, too?

All of the negatives associated with networking can lead to some mighty magical thinking when we face a big job or career change, or even simply recognize the need to make a change. The fantasy is that we will hear directly about the perfect new role; our resume will make it to the top of the pile; our friend on the inside will help us cinch it. Or maybe the magical thinking is: we’re fine where we are, and there’s no need to do anything for a long time to come, if ever (because it’s too horrible to consider networking). Like I say, it’s magic!

My Long and Nonstrategic Trip

The fact, though, is that for many of us, making career and life moves is more a mix of fits and starts than it is a grand plan or a seamless upward trajectory. I offer myself as Exhibit #1, with as long and unplanned a career in Silicon Valley as one could have. By today’s standards, my career in tech began late: I was thirty-five in the mid-1980s when I got into the then-lively world of personal computer magazines. My longtime passion for writing and editing helped me to become a consumer tech journalist, a (reluctant) PR flack, and an editorial and project manager for startups and creative agencies. Not a straight path, in other words.

In 2000, Silicon Valley experienced a major economic downturn. I had joined an eighteen-person startup that year, an early e-commerce personal gift business called Violet.com

. Four tumultuous months later, we turned off the lights for good; no second round of funding was forthcoming. I went on to an established creative agency that was opening a San Francisco office. That turned out to be bad timing (downturns don’t lead to clients), and before long the firm decamped to its LA office—without me. By the end of the year, there were very few jobs to pursue, and not much contract work. No one was hiring. Over the next fifteen months or so I struggled with not enough work or money. I started an informal support group for a few friends in the same boat. We met weekly to cheer each other on and share leads. I reached out to lots of contacts to see if they might need writing help. One of these calls was to a friend I’d worked with twice before, who had recently taken a job at a startup called Google. I asked if she needed any writing help; she told me they just hired a marketing writer but promised to keep me in mind.

A couple of months later, she called back. It seemed work was piling up. Would I come in and meet the team? She stressed that she couldn’t hire me directly; others would have to like my work (and me). I must have been a port in a storm, because at that very first meeting they asked me to jump in, which I did eagerly, working from home. Within a couple of weeks, it was clear that I should spend more time in the office to get face time with the team. I began the daily seventy-mile-round-trip commute to Google HQ. Once I became a regular fixture, I raised my hand for every assignment. I wanted to be seen as indispensable as possible, because I could see Google was somewhere I’d like to be. Not a big partier by nature, I even hosted cocktail gatherings at my flat for the team—the team I wasn’t yet on. My goal was to become as familiar as the bean bag seating around the office so people would know they could rely on me, and that I was suitably Googley. It took fifteen months for all the forces to converge for me to be hired into a full-time role as senior editor (a title I made up, by the way). I then remained at Google for eight more wonderful and life-changing years.

I recite this history for two