Effective networking: Swallow your pride

This has been first posted at TheAsifKhanBlog.

A really smart person I had as a boss once told me that we should ‘network without any shame’. If we need to reach somebody, we have to keep on trying and be tenacious until that person bulges. I was too young at that time to realize the value of that statement. Now, after 5 years of job experience, I realize that he gave me one of the finest advice that I ever received.

When I started networking quite aggressively I realized that many people are not as forthcoming as I would have wanted them to be. Some of them could be downright rude. They will not pick up my calls or reply to my messages and emails. But I really couldn’t afford to stop trying. So usually, after a couple of attempts, I tried to use some sort of different approach.
The key theme of this post is not to talk about all the fancy techniques used to get a person to take an interest or wriggle information out of a person. The main idea is that if we want to network we really need to swallow our pride. There will definitely be people who would completely ignore us. And that’s fine. A person ignoring us will not make us smaller. We would only be ‘stupid’ if we stopped networking just because a few people chose to ignore us.

Finally, the best part comes when the very person who ignored us once later has to come to us for help. Should we give them the same treatment they gave us? Not really. That is the time to show who the greater man is.

P.S. I dedicate this post to Aminul Haque Bhai who was a great person and an even better mentor.

See more such posts at The Asif Khan Blog.