The Real Way to Build a Network

The February 6, 2012 issue of FORTUNE magazine contains an article with the above title.  The article is an excerpt of a book by Reid Hoffman (partner at Greylock and founder and executive chairman at LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha (award-winning entrepreneur and author).  Just the first five paragraphs, which appear below, contain considerable wisdom.  Hoffman's and Casnocha's book is entitled, "The Start-Up of You."

Many people are turned off by the topic of networking.  They think it’s slimy, inauthentic.  Picture the consummate networker: a high-energy fast talker who collects as many business cards as he can and attends mixers sporting slicked-back hair.  Or the overambitious college kid who frantically e-mails alumni, schmoozes with the board of trustees, and adds anyone he’s ever met as an online friend.  Such people are drunk on networking Kool-Aid – and are looking at a potentially nasty hangover.

Luckily, building your network doesn’t have to be like that.  Old-school networkers are transactional.  They pursue relationships thinking solely about what other people can do for them.  Relationship builders, on the other hand, try to help others first.  They don’t keep score.  And they prioritize high-quality relationships over a large number of connections.

Building a genuine relationship with another person depends on at least two abilities.  The first is seeing the world from another person’s perspective.  No one knows that better than the skilled entrepreneur.  Entrepreneurs succeed when they make stuff people will pay money for – and that means understanding what’s going on in the heads of customers.  Likewise, in relationships it’s only when you put yourself in the other person’s shoes that you begin to develop an honest connection.

The second ability is being able to think about how you can collaborate with and help the other person rather than thinking about what you can get.  We’re not suggesting that you be so saintly that a self-interested thought never crosses your mind.  What we’re saying is that your first move should always be to help.  A study on negotiation found that a key difference between skilled and average negotiators was the time spent searching for shared interests and asking questions of the other person.

Follow that model.  Start with a friendly gesture and genuinely mean it.  Dale Carnegie’s classic book on relationships, despite all its wisdom, has the unfortunate title How to Win Friends and Influence People.  This makes Carnegie widely misunderstood.  You don’t “win” a friend.  A friend is not an asset you own; a friend is an ally, a collaborator.  When you can tell that someone is attempting sincerity, it leaves you cold.  It is like the feeling you have when someone calls you by your first name repeatedly in conversation.  Novelist Jonathan Franzen gets it right when he says inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity.