Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash
Once upon a time, there was a Miser who used to hide his gold at the foot of a tree in his garden; but every week he used to go and dig it up and gloat over his gains. A robber, who had noticed this, went and dug up the gold and decamped with it. When the Miser next came to gloat over his treasures, he found nothing but the empty hole. He tore his hair and raised such an outcry that all the neighbors came around him, and he told them how he used to come and visit his gold. "Did you ever take any of it out?" asked one of them.
"Nay," said he, "I only came to look at it."
"Then come again and look at the hole," said a neighbor; "it will do you just as much good."
Wealth unused might as well not exist.
When I work with people to help them improve their networks, I often hear them tell me they don't like to network because they hate asking for help from other people. They feel like they are taking advantage of other people or inconveniencing them.
In many cases, when people are networking, they are asking someone to help them find a new job. They envision themselves asking people in their network to give their resume to someone or to introduce them to the person who is making the final hiring decision.
They are hesitant to ask for help because they put themselves in the other person’s shoes and know if someone was asking for their help, they would feel uncomfortable, even burdened by the ask.
When someone asks us to do something for them, it can often feel like we are doing all the work for them. We resent being asked to do one more thing. We feel taken advantage of. We find excuses not to help them.
When we need help we remember that feeling and don't want to saddle people with our problems.
There is a way to approach networking to help alleviate the feeling of taking advantage of people.
When someone asks you for help, who are you more likely to help? Someone who has helped you in the past or someone who hasn't?
If someone has helped you or given you something of value, aren't you more likely to help that person? Don't you feel a certain sense of reciprocity toward them? Don't you want to return the favor to them?
The principle of Reciprocity is the first of six principles discussed in Robert Cialdini's book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. On his website influenceatwork.com, Cialdini summarizes this principle by saying,
"Simply put, people are obliged to give back to others the form of a behavior, gift, or service that they have received first."
He then goes on to explain experiments in restaurants where some customers were given a small gift, a fortune cookie, or a mint, with their bill. Those who were given the gift gave higher tips than those who were not given the gift. My wife, a singer, and actress who used to supplement her income waiting tables confirmed this finding with her personal experience. In some restaurants she worked in, the owners gave away desserts and other gifts to customers while other owners had strict rules against giving anything away.
The restaurants that gave food away made the customers feel special and inspired them to not only spend more but to keep coming back and to tell their friends about how great the restaurant was.
The restaurants that didn't give anything away were places where customers came in one time and never came back again.
Cialdini explains,
"The key to using the Principle of Reciprocity is to be the first to give and to ensure that what you give is personalized and unexpected."
If you lead with giving, people will want to reciprocate and give back to you. You don't even have to ask for help. People will ask you what they can do to help you.
The next question that comes up is: "What do I have to give?"
You have much more to give than you know. You are unique. You have a unique set of knowledge and perspectives.
To you, what you know is ordinary because you spend all day knowing the things you know. You are like the Miser and his Gold. The ideas in your head are your gold and if you dig them up and look at them without ever sharing any of them, they do you as much good as if you never had them at all. As in the fable, you need to share what you know with the world in order for it to have any value.
This is what you can give when you are in a conversation with one of your professional connections. When you sit down in a face to face or voice to voice conversation with a dormant tie or a new connection, you are already listening to what is going on with them because you have asked them to tell you about themselves. Think about what you can give to them:
Advice
Recommendations
Introductions
Remember, from The Bundle of Sticks fable, one of the reasons to network is knowledge and authority. Sharing your knowledge and authority can help your connection solve whatever problem he is working on.
You may have an idea your connection has never heard.
It's hard to believe that everyone doesn't know all the same things you know. This is called the "curse for knowledge." Once we learn something, we lose the perspective of being a beginner and the feeling of what it was like to not have that knowledge. Because we lose that, we can't imagine what it is like to not know what we have learned and we assume everyone else knows the same thing.
A 2006 Harvard Business Review article explained the curse of knowledge by describing an experiment using well-known songs:
"In 1990, a Stanford University graduate student in psychology named Elizabeth Newton illustrated the curse of knowledge by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tapper” or “listener.” Each tapper was asked to pick a well-known song, such as “Happy Birthday,” and tap out the rhythm on a table. The listener’s job was to guess the song.
Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly: a success ratio of 2.5%. But before they guessed, Newton asked the tappers to predict the probability that listeners would guess correctly. They predicted 50%. The tappers got their message across one time in 40, but they thought they would get it across one time in two. Why?
When a tapper taps, it is impossible for her to avoid hearing the tune playing along to her taps. Meanwhile, all the listener can hear is a kind of bizarre Morse code. Yet the tappers were flabbergasted by how hard the listeners had to work to pick up the tune.
The problem is that once we know something—say, the melody of a song—we find it hard to imagine not knowing it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. We have difficulty sharing it with others because we can’t readily re-create their state of mind."
Share the knowledge you have even if you think everyone already knows it. You'll be surprised how often you give your connection something of value when you share the nuggets of your personal wisdom.
Besides sharing knowledge and authority, we can provide recommendations. These might be books or articles your connection can read or videos and speeches she should watch. This is similar to knowledge and authority, but recommendations are more tangible because you can share a link or a specific source outside your own knowledge.
In some cases, your recommendation may be another person your connection should meet. In this situation, you can introduce your connection to the other person you know. This allows your connection to grow his network.
For introductions, I advise people to handle them carefully. If you are going to introduce your connection to someone you already know, you need to be sure that the person you already know is open to connecting with new people.
The best way to find this out is to ask the person you already know if she would be open to meeting your connection.
Let's look at this using Susie and Bob. Susie is the person you would like your professional connection, Bob, to meet. As you are talking to Bob you think of Susie as someone to introduce him to. You tell Bob about Susie but say, "I like to respect the time of my professional connections, so I am going to ask Susie is she would be open to an introduction. If she is, I will connect the two of you."
When you connect with Susie, you describe Bob and explain why you think it would be mutually beneficial for her to talk to him. Ask permission to connect the two of them via an email. If she doesn't answer or says no, respect that decision. Go back to Bob and explain the situation and then try to provide another idea, recommendation, or introduction.
If she says yes, send a simple email that says, "Susie, per our earlier conversation, I wanted to introduce you to Bob. Bob is a connection of mine looking to grow his network and I thought you would be a great person to connect with. Bob, Susie is a person you should connect with. I'll let you two take the conversation from here."
You could add more context to the email about Susie or Bob's background and why they would be valuable connections, but it doesn't have to be verbose. Don't overdo it.
What if you are having a conversation with one of your networking connections and you can't think of anything to give? If all else fails, you can give them something everyone has: your attention.
When you are sitting in a conversation with another person and you feel like you have her complete and total attention, you feel good. You feel heard. You feel connected to the other person. You like them. You want to build a relationship with her.
That's how other people feel when you give them your attention. They want to create a deeper professional relationship with you. They want to find ways to help you, and when that happens, you remove the awkwardness most people feel when they are networking and asking people to help them.
Having a giving mindset in professional networking and trying to help other people first makes everything about networking easier and more comfortable.
But most people think about networking the way the Miser felt about his gold: they want to keep all of their resources, all of their knowledge and all of their attention buried in a hole. They want to hold onto it and not share it with anyone else because they are worried that if they give their ideas and their knowledge away, other people will take them and use them for their own purposes. They are afraid they won't get the credit or benefit of their thoughts.
If you don't give away what you have to offer, your gifts do you as much good as the gold in the hole. As in the story, they are as valuable as not having them at all.
You need to give what you have to other people, especially to people you are building a relationship with. The best part about what you have to give is it is likely better than the gold in the fable. That is, a gold coin can only be given away one time, but your knowledge and attention can be given away over and over to multiple people. They can be spent multiple times. However, if you don't give them away, their value will never come back to you.
Other people will never come back and give to you if you don't give to them first.
When it comes to professional networking, don’t be a Miser.