How to strategically build your network when you despise networking

Plus some truly terrible PowerPoint graphics. A picture is worth a thousand words, which is the approximate number of expletives I used while ‘designing’ these. 🫣🤬

Hello and welcome to Academia Made Easier. I am so glad that you are here. 

Do you hate networking? My own feelings about networking were cemented early in life when I saw a Kids in the Hall sketch in which businessmen (yes, men - it was the late 80s) shake hands, exchange business cards, and make painful small talk. As one explains to the other, “The name of the game is networking: businessmen meeting other businessmen for the purpose of meeting again at a later date.” Yuck. I had no desire to ever be involved in such an activity.

Jump forward in time. As a grad student, I found my introverted self at conference receptions and workshop dinners. I would awkwardly try to join discussions. (Why why WHY do people have to talk about sports?!?). I would accept business cards (yuck) and give business cards (double yuck). I would hover over the snack table (that part was okay) and sneak out of the event as soon as I could. 

Jump forward to now. I still find my introverted self at events and I still do all of those awkward things, except the business card part. I have gotten better at it (hot tip: if you don’t take a coat, it is much, much easier to sneak out) but I am still a networking disaster.

And yet despite the fact that I would rather hide in my hotel room reading than attend a reception, despite the fact that I think socializing past 9 pm is inhumane (early to bed, early to rise!), and despite the fact that I would rather jab myself in the eye with the toothpick from that yummy bacon-wrapped mussel than discuss the Canadian Football League (Go Riders! Seriously: Go. Go away.), I have a pretty damn good network. 

In fact, my network is awesome. And yours can be too - even if, like me, you hate networking.

And that’s what today’s small thing to try immediately is about.

One Small Thing to Try Immediately: Embrace Strategic Networking

Your network is simply your combination of professional relationships. There are three basic categories in your network: people you know pretty well (close ties), people who are familiar with you (weak ties), and people who are not familiar with you (no ties).

Building your network is all about strengthening relations to move people closer to the centre. When you meet someone and make enough of a connection that they will remember you in the future, they move from the outer “no ties” circle to the middle “weak ties” circle. When you get to know someone over time to the point where you are friendly acquaintances, they move from the middle “weak ties” circle to the inner “close ties” circle. Network building thus looks like this:

The point of networking is to establish relationships in key areas before you need them. If you are strategic about networking, you think about where you might need future connections and build those relationships deliberately. In academia, a strategic network includes people across three professional categories:

• Institutional. People who work in your university, be it in your unit, other units, administration, IT, the ethics office, the library, the career centre, facilities management, or the campus cafeteria. In the words of Bob from Sesame Street, these as “the people in your neighbourhood - the people that you meet each day.” 

• Disciplinary. People who work in the same area as you at other institutions. Other biologists, computer scientists, graduate deans, educational designers, career councillors, ethics officers, librarians, economists, department chairs, [insert your area here]. 

• External. People working outside academia in areas that touch upon your work. These include granting agencies, government, media, industry, the non-profit or social economy sector, and other realms. 

Building your strategic network thus requires establishing, strengthening, and maintaining relationships across all three categories, rather than just one or two.

So how do you embrace strategic networking to build this strategic network?

One relationship at a time.

Make a point of interacting with others across the three categories. Look for opportunities to engage with people across your university, within your discipline, and externally. Attend things. Participate. Show up.

As you do, see all of your professional interactions as “networking”. Treat everyone you interact with professionally - regardless of their career stage - as part of your network. You will want to be deliberate:

• When you interact with a new person, make it a goal to move them into the weak ties category. You want them to remember your name and have positive feelings about you. 

• When you interact with a familiar person you don’t know very well, make it a goal to move them into the close ties category over time. You want them to connect with you. 

These goals can be achieved easily with modest effort. Show up a bit early for that committee meeting and make a point of chatting with another committee member. Send a short friendly email to the person you met at a conference thanking them for their great question about your paper. Aim to remember personal details that people share with you and ask non-intrusive questions when you see them next. (“How is your new puppy?” “Did you enjoy your trip to Australia?” “Have you finished watching Stranger Things?”) 

Be interested in other people, even - indeed, especially - if you see no direct benefit to doing so. Without the artificial nature of networking spoiling your connections with others, over time your relationships will develop and strengthen, and your network will become awesome. 

“Wait a minute, Loleen,” you might be thinking. “After giving me a series of PowerPoint graphics that look like they were designed by a precocious eight-year-old, is your strategic networking advice basically to get out there, connect with people, and be nice?!?”

Yup. 

No business cards required!

Chipping Away: What I Have Been Up To

A quick update on some of my own activities since my last newsletter, since I have your attention:

• I had the pleasure of meeting with the University of Saskatchewan’s medical graduate students and working through career planning concepts from my book, Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD (2018; coauthored with Jonathan Malloy). While I have been leading these graduate workshops across Canada for years, I had never led a session specifically for medical graduate students and I was pleased to learn the concepts we outlined in Work Your Career resonated with this audience. To access the worksheets for yourself or your students, please check out this Doc. 

• I have been reading a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction. A few weeks ago I read Severance by Ling Ma (2019), which inspired me to read Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (2017), which then led to The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey (2015). I enjoyed all three books. Severance was particularly good.

• Daylight hours in Saskatchewan are growing shorter so I have had to move my running time to later in the day. It is much less convenient but the autumn colours are so beautiful.

Until next time…

There are a number of new followers to Academia Made Easier and I wish all of you a special welcome. 👋 If you have yet to check out the archive, I encourage you to do so. At this point in the semester, you might be particularly interested in “how to write strong student reference letters in (much) less time", “how to reduce decision fatigue by eliminating decisions” and “how to use strategic procrastination to spend less time on email and other low leverage tasks". And to my longer-standing readers, thank you for continuing to allow me to be part of your inbox. It is a true pleasure. 😘

Stay well, my colleagues. 

P.S. You deserve some more Kids in the Hall goodness, so be sure to check out the close ties and weak ties in “The Daves I Know.” I have been singing this song in rooms with multiple Daves for decades now.

Want to help support my chocolate habit? You are very sweet. Buy me a coffee is a site that allows readers to show their appreciation for the unpaid labour of writers, artists, and other creatives. Check it out!

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Loleen Berdahl, Ph.D.: I am a twin mother, wife, runner, cat lover, and chocolate enthusiast. I spend far too much time on Twitter and binge-watching television, and my house could be a lot cleaner. During the work hours, I am the Executive Director of the  Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. I am the author of University Affair’s Skills Agenda column and my most recent books are  Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD and Explorations: Conducting Empirical Research in Canadian Political Science.

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