“The exchange of information or services among individuals, groups, or institutions.”
Or at least, that’s how Merriam-Webster defines the word ‘networking’. While that may seem a reasonable definition, I myself still have a few questions, namely:
- What kind of information?
- What kind of services?
- To what end are these individuals, groups, or institutions exchanging said information and/or services?
The issue that I have with the word networking is not just that it is ill-defined, but that it reduces complex social relationships into what seems like a series of formulaic transactions. If one were to further interrogate the meaning of the word, they would find definitions like: “the cultivation of productive relationships for employment or business,” and “a socioeconomic business activity, by which businesspeople and entrepreneurs meet to form business relationships.” Such ascriptions imply that we ought to treat one another as means to an end in the pursuit of individual gain. They sap the humanity out of authentic relationships, and teach young professionals that said authenticity never existed to begin with. But need this be the case?
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On this week’s episode of in[Tuition], Laila and I set out to answer this question. In so doing, we invited perhaps the most well-networked young professional that we knew – Forest Kong – onto the show to ask him if that was how he approached his day-to-day life. As is often the case, I went into our interview with a slew of pre-conceived notions about how Forest conceived of himself. Yet, I was shocked to discover that much of what he had to say ran contrary to my expectations.
Forest, too, hates the word networking, and the connotations that it carries. Though he started his nascent career by attending ‘business socials’, ‘mixers’, and ‘networking events’, he quickly realized that such events were unbearably superficial, and thus unappealing to him. What he found particularly frustrating was that he never felt as though his peers were actually paying attention to what he had to say, or to who he was as a person. As a matter of consequence, he immediately abandoned this style of communication in favour of what he calls the ‘authentic self’, wherein he simply says what he means and treats everyone with kindness.
So what penalties did Forest incur for challenging networking orthodoxy? Did he lose all of his job opportunities? Has he become a social pariah? Not at all. In fact, Forest is one of the most successful people that I know. He was the speaker at his graduation ceremony. He got his dream job right out of university. He is verifiably social-media-famous. Perhaps the authentic self approach smacks a little of inauthenticity to you. I know that it certainly did to me at first. But as I spoke with Forest more and more, I started to realize that he was truly one of the most genuine people that I had ever met – and I loved it. Forest has a way of making you feel appreciated, and comfortable. He follows up with you on things that you were previously excited about, and actively listens to your stories.
So, what was the moral of the story from this week’s episode? Was the most stereotypically ‘networked’ person that we knew a great big phoney, chiefly concerned with extracting utility from us? Quite the opposite. Forest built his network by being himself and by genuinely caring about people. Maybe this is just one of the many ways to network, but at the very least, it proves that there are alternatives to the robotic formula propagated by business magazines. And perhaps that’s the point: networking can be different things to different people, and you may be doing it without even thinking about it!
Do you network? Do you have an alternative to the authentic self? Do you think this is all a bunch of hullaballoo? If you have any input, we’d love to have it! So please feel free to comment below, or tweet us @UBCLearn to keep the conversation going.
