My friend Mary is a consultant -- she travels the globe helping clients sort out their quality and process-control issues. She left a great comment at the bottom of my last post, talking about the very-much-not-networking things that non-networkers do to consultants like Mary and me every day.
In that earlier post, I was writing about some of the most unfortunate miss-steps that people make when they're out on the networking circuit, looking for a job. Of course, job-search networkers are relative pikers in the gasp-inducing bad networking department. Would-be consultants, seekers of free services from perfect strangers, and other coat-tail-hangers and nonexistent favor-call-inners are a hundred times worse!
My friend Nancy says to me every so often, "Oh no, not another synergy person." She's referring to the people who write to us out of the blue, saying "I have a new business that I'm so excited to tell you about!" (Ninety percent of the time, it has something to do with women, passion, purpose, or all three.) "My new business is X, it's Y, it's the coolest thing in the world, and I'm dying to tell you about it and have you introduce me to everyone you know! Let's have lunch at a spot one inch from my house and thirty miles from yours, and I've helped you out by picking the date. I can't wait to tell you all about what I'm doing!"
Mind you, you've never met or heard of this person. Nancy calls these forward lunch-seekers synergy people because they always, absolutely without fail talk in their email overtures about the supposed synergies between your business (which exists) and theirs (which doesn't, except in the tape they're replaying in their heads at fifteen-minute intervals; the one where they're explaining to Oprah exactly how they overcame obstacles to get their tush planted on that famous couch.) A variation on the synergy person is the one who writes to say: "You don't know me, but I heard about you from so and so. Let's have lunch, and I'll pick your brain about my new business." Oh joy! I can't wait to have my brain picked by you, Miss Thing, who's happy to spend eleven dollars on me but hasn't a clue what I do all day.
When I write to ask, "Out of curiosity, what was it that prompted you to write to me?" the brain picker says either, "You know a lot of people," or "You could help me." She hasn't been to my website, naturally. That would take time. Anyway, what does she care about me? She's in love with my Rolodex.
Mary gets it right -- bad networkers in the consulting world are some of the most tiresome people on earth. Here are ten more examples of activities that one might wish were networking, but which just simply aren't, by any stretch:
- Writing to a stranger to say, "Let's meet -- you can refer your clients to me!" is not networking.
Can we agree on a standard rejoinder to use when parasites show up at our doorstep? What about "As painful as it is for me to decline your generous offer, I fear that circumstances compel me to do just that."
Too subtle?