The art of engagement (or how to network properly)

November 20, 2013

Photo by Ged Carroll, under Creative Commons license

I recently joined 85 Broads, and earlier today I was on a so-called 'jam session' they arranged online called The Art of Engagement: How to Network Your Way to the Top. OK, I thought, hyperbolic title, but I'll sign up. Because, when it comes to networking, despite being fairly outgoing, I identify with the cringing attendee Kimberly Weisul outlined in this piece on Lifehacker.

Perhaps I'm about to change.

The excellent speaker was Mary Kopczynski, CEO of 8of9 Consulting. I'll highlight some of the most useful takeaways for others who may find networking tough or distasteful:

She started out by telling a great story of a crisis point in her life when she needed to work out what she wanted to do next. She flew home to Seattle, having emailed a whole bunch of friends and family, friends' parents, even an old teacher, saying she'd like them to book time slots with her in a local cafe where they could "tell me about what you do for a living, how you got where you are, what you like and dislike about your industry." She quickly realized even her closest network was powerful - a lot of people showed up, even Bill Gates's father, Bill Gates Senior. That success gave her confidence and a bit of audacity, and she amped up her networking efforts afterwards. 

Networking "is not meeting people", she said. "Networking is the process of turning a relationship with a stranger into a strategic partnership over time." I think women find this idea tough to come to terms with because we tend to view networking as somewhat icky, as using people - we don't view it as 'real' relationship building in the way we like to think of relationships (solid, meaningful friendships). We need to re-frame it a bit, to see it as a situation where we can potentially help the other person as well (more on that below).

If you go to an event, such as a conference, and collect a bunch of business cards, don't follow up for at least a week. People have taken time out of their busy work schedules to attend these things, Kopczynski said, and they need some time to settle back into their routine. So wait a while. You may have to remind them of who you are and how you met in the first line of the email, but that's fine. However, do follow up. She said she often leaves a conference having given out her card and never hears back from anyone she's met. 

Quality over quantity: she aims to meet one good person at each event. But that doesn't mean you should spend the whole event "looking over your shoulder to the next person" while you're talking to someone. 

Once you have made a connection after the event, stay in touch, even if it's just twice a year, or less, to let the person know what you're up to. For women this may involve getting over that feeling that you're "bothering people" (I know it well) but it's actually a way of keeping your network alive. 

She realizes not everyone is as bold as she is. On overcoming shyness at events, she reminded us there are probably plenty of other people feeling just as uncomfortable, "So when you make the first move, it relieves other people." Also, don't feel bad inserting yourself into a conversation where two people are talking to eachother (this came from the Lifehacker piece) - they probably just met and they may need an out from eachother. Go ahead and butt in.

On approaching people you don't know/have not actually met, she had a good story.  (I also recommend reading this 99u piece and this blog post by Mike Collett on email introductions.) She said it's all about "creating the right relevance" - for example, she wanted to get in touch with the US Trade Representative to ask a little career advice. She'd never met the man, but found out he had spoken at Rutgers at some point in the not too distant past. She had not attended the talk. But she approached him via email saying she knew he'd spoken at Rutgers (without actually saying she'd heard him) and that she was hoping she could talk to him about X...it worked. Then, years later, she approached him again, seeking an introduction to someone at the FDA, reminding him of their earlier conversation ("You once gave me some great career advice.") People are actually willing to help you if you strike the right tone of politeness and flattery, and remind them of who you are.

"It's not about who they are, it's about who they know and who they will become." At one point she was approached by an administrative assistant in a networking capacity, and initially thought, "Hmmm, I wonder if there's really anything in this for me." But it turns out there was. Later on this same assistant was able to provide multiple introductions to Kopczynski for a project she was working on.

On how not to come across as aggressive, something women worry about a lot, she simply stuck to the idea of being polite and friendly, and always respecting people's time (a stellar saleswoman friend of mine reminded me of this earlier this week as she taught me how to approach strangers via email - acknowledge in the email that you know they're very busy). She said one of the most aggravating things that happens to her is "the intro bomb" when someone e-introduces her to someone else without asking her permission first. "It's super-exhausting to get those emails," she said.

I think 'the art of engagement' actually turned out to be a perfect title for this session. A lot of women, myself included, tend to think of networking as somehow fake, and hard to pull off well. Being good at this involves quashing some typically female tendencies (i.e. assuming you're a pain in the ass rather than someone who could offer something - or is that just me? Also, caring too much about rejection) - but judging by Kopczynski's stories, it's worth it. 

Is modesty a virtue at the office?

November 13, 2013

An image from the 1939 film 'The Women'. Not much self-deprecation there.

I've often joked that being British and female is a double-whammy. You have two cultures essentially telling you be nice, modest, and self-deprecating. The British, after all, are known for their propensity to apologize, usually when there's no need. And many women, wherever they grow up, tend to be self-deprecating. This is certainly part of my makeup. Moving to the US has been good for me in that I've had to learn how to sell myself, how to talk myself up without, I hope, coming off as hideously obnoxious. So I was interested to read this piece by Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times that starts out by questioning why women use so much self-deprecation, but then switches tack:

"So long as there is no doubt about the status and superiority of the person using it, self-deprecation is one of the most effective tools there is. It disarms other people, makes them forget you are scarily powerful and lulls them into liking you instead. The only boss I’ve ever had whom I truly adored self-deprecated constantly.

Between women friends it acts as a non-compete clause...what I’m actually saying is: I’m not dangerous. Come closer."

Yet some research suggests that self-deprecation can fail women badly at the office. Within the next week or so I'm going to be talking to Dr. Judith Baxter of Aston University in the UK, a linguist who studies the intersection of language, gender, and leadership. Dr. Baxter has done research into the use of language by women in the workplace, and according to her findings, the women who joked about themselves in a self-deprecating way came across as "contrived, defensive, or mean." I want to get to the bottom of this, because I tend to agree with Lucy Kellaway that on the whole, doing yourself down paints you in an agreeable light. Dr. Baxter found that when women joked during a meeting, 80 percent of their jokes were greeted with silence. In men's case, 90 percent of jokes were met with instant guffaws. Baxter says that with men, joking is recognized 'tribe' behavior that calls up an instant response (whether genuine or not is another question). With women, joking isn't recognized in the same way by the tribe.

I think there's a fine line here, as with so many things women-and-work-related. If you use self-deprecation too much, it gets tedious. No one believes you're genuine (frankly, you often aren't). But women are judged by centuries-old norms, and modesty is one of them. What do you think? Is self-deprecation a must for women, or can it backfire?

Anne-Marie Slaughter, care, and men

October 31st, 2013

"Care is socialized out of men. We don't value men as caregivers. We value them for the amount of money they make." - Anne-Marie Slaughter

I just got back from a panel on women and work held at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. It starred three big names in this arena, the biggest, in the US at least, being Anne-Marie Slaughter of Why Women Still Can't Have It All fame, accompanied by Alison Wolf, who appeared in my penultimate show, author of The XX Factor: How Working Women Have Created a Far Less Equal World, and Debora Spar, president of Barnard College and author of Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection. If you come here at all you'll either have heard the podcast featuring Alison or read about her, so I'm not going to repeat her points here, although I do recommend her book - it's a fascinating read. I haven't read Debora Spar's yet but I'm keen to interview her.

L to R, Merit Janow of Columbia University, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Alison Wolf, Debora Spar

It was Anne-Marie Slaughter whose ideas I found most compelling today. She talked about how the response to that piece in The Atlantic in 2012 took her completely by surprise. "I did not choose to devote my life to this issue," she said. But as a result she was flung into the world of gender politics, and has come out the other side with a completely different view than the one she went in with. (One audience member called her "the chief gender strategist", to which Slaughter responded half-jokingly, "I'm going back to foreign policy." "It would probably be easier," said the woman.) Anyway, she's come away from her "130 talks" to various types of women's group with the firm belief that American society doesn't value care. 

"I now see this [whole issue of trying to balance work and family] as a problem of not valuing care. We as feminsits were taught to de-value that." She said her generation of highly educated women would never have given up a top job, like her old one in the State Department, just because they had kids who had to live in a different town. No way. (Slaughter eventually did just that, as she famously described in the article.) She now spends a huge amount of time thinking and writing about our caregiving culture in the US, and particularly how men play into it. She talked about the pretty pathetic family policies that exist here, and the fact that maternity leave is barely existent here, let alone paternity leave. Yet in Norway, where men get two months' leave, Norwegian company heads are starting to look on men who don't opt to take their leave as the kinds of people they may not even want at the company. There is pressure to take that leave. Here, as The Wall Street Journal described fairly recently, it's quite the opposite. Take it from someone who moved here in her twenties: American culture values work above all else while giving much lip service to family. Or, as I sometimes think of it, the US still thinks of family as the thing from the 1950s, run entirely by the woman while the man went out to work. It hasn't yet come to terms with the fact that's not the way things are any more.

Slaughter talked about how great her husband is with their two boys and how close they are to him. She's written elsewhere about this too. And she made an excellent point that can sometimes get forgotten in all the focus on women's progress, or lack of it. 

"If I had daughters I would be raising them with more choices than my sons," she said, i.e. in today's culture women are told they can be anything, stay-at-home mom, professional woman without kids, professional woman with kids. "I'm basically raising my sons to be breadwinners. In terms of social norms it used to be girls who couldn't have choices, but now it's boys who are only socialized that way."

Men are always approaching her saying, basically, "this conversation is all about women, but we [men] feel we can't see our families", because, essentially, their role in society is to work, work, work. Caring? To many, including plenty of women, men who do it are slightly suspect - not quite man enough. Jennifer Siebel Newsome, who made Miss Representation, is making a film about attitudes to masculinity and the pressure to be macho. It's called The Mask You Live In. 

Both it and Anne-Marie Slaughter's book on America's work and family dynamic come out next year.

In search of executive presence

October 31, 2013

Joanna Barsh fought perceptions of being 'young and bouncy'

"I tried for many years to be taller, more serious, having gravitas as if I’d just come from a funeral…but that’s just not who I am.” - Joanna Barsh

Last week at the Working Mother conference, I was in a session on women in leadership and found myself in a small group discussing the idea of ‘executive presence’. We’d just heard a lively presentation by Dana Vandecoevering of Intel. She mentioned that Intel has a program in place for its women employees to essentially coach them so they stay on an advancement track and don’t ‘fall out of the pipeline’ as so many women do, leaving us with the sparse population of women at the top we’re all so used to hearing about. I was fascinated to hear that one of the things Intel coaches its women on is how to develop executive presence, that elusive quality you need to convince others you’re ready to lead – that you’ve got the goods in the form of your persona, your bearing, your appearance, and so on.

Executive presence, though, can be subjective. It’s something other people see in you, and it’s a lot harder for women to be seen to have than men, simply because as a society we default to seeing men – usually white men – as leaders. One woman at my table told the story of someone she knows who went grey early, in her twenties. The woman’s mother begged her to dye her hair but the woman, who was ambitious, refused, as she was on the fast track at work and felt that as she was young, she very much needed that grey hair to be taken seriously. We then got into a conversation about how you develop executive presence (see this Harvard Business Review piece for one author’s take) and how you even start that conversation with someone in whom you see potential.

One of my favorite interviewees on The Broad Experience was Joanna Barsh, a long time senior partner at McKinsey and Company and an author of much of their respected research on women in the workplace. What I loved about talking to Joanna last year was that she was open and willing to talk about herself and how she’d either been let down at work or let herself down. Going back over my notes, and my tape, I found a part I didn’t use during the show she appeared in, where she talks about ‘senior presence’:

“I happen to be incredibly short…I’m also an incredibly bouncy, energetic person and despite my old age I don’t have any grey hair…so here I am bouncing through as a senior consultant and there were many, many times where the organization in evaluation meetings said, ‘Does she have…senior presence?’…I tried for many years to be taller, more serious, having gravitas as if I’d just come from a funeral…but that’s just not who I am.”

Joanna let herself age into her gravitas, and it worked. She recently retired but is still very outspoken on women in leadership.

Of course this entire conversation gets us back to a question many women ask all the time: why should women have to be anything other than themselves? Why should they have to change their voices, their posture, their hair, anything, in order to fit in? Why can’t the corporation meet women where they are instead?

All I know is that because we still live in a world, and particularly a work world, that defaults to ‘male’, women still need to fit into that world to get anything done. Only when more women are running things will we skew more female in our thinking. But to get there, those women rising up the ranks today still need to work with largely male groups, and that means going at least some way to communicating in a way men understand.