I used to see myself as an awful networker. I was the one who got caught in a corner swirling my coffee – or wine, depending on the type of ‘networking’ occasion – trying to extricate myself from a conversation I had no idea how I’d got into in the first place. And out of the corner of my eye, I could see my erstwhile colleague (and competitor) in the magazine world swirling between VIPs. She was, in common parlance, ‘working the room’, while I was only working the corner. And doing a bad job at that.
It turns out that when it comes to networking, both of us were doing things wrong – but surprisingly, she was making more mistakes than I was. Good networkers don’t treat networking events like they would a friend’s house party. Nor do they underplay their own potential or skills.
I didn’t want to write a story about networking; it’s something that I tend to shy away from at the best of times, but when I spoke to Helen Nicholson, author of ‘Networking: The Unwritten Rule of Business You Need to Know’, I found out that we all have the wrong idea about networking: we either think it’s about flitting between as many people as we can, or making a bee-line for the VIPs. But it’s not.
All the secrets of good networking are in the next issue… All you need to be a black-belt networker. (And don’t miss our list of all-time most effective women’s networks in SA either).
