How to quickly connect at any networking event

For the next 5 minutes, let’s elevate your career.

In today’s email:

• How to quickly connect at any networking event

• Skip small talk

• Ask new hires about different ways

• The enormity of the night sky

• Richard Feynman as career coach

ON YOUR CAREER

How to quickly connect at any networking event

Most of us have arrived at a networking event or conference and not known many people. A simple technique to connect is to join a group with an odd number. If you join a group of three or five, it is likely that at some time you will be talking in a pair. And this is when you want to skip small talk.

COMMUNICATION

Skip small talk

Small talk is a polite bid to engage in conversation. Nobody enjoys it much. We can, however, skip small talk and progress to deeper, more enjoyable discussion. The key to doing so is asking good questions. You meet a new person at a Friday industry event…

PRODUCTIVITY

Ask new hires about different ways

A CEO I coach meets with groups of new joiners each quarter. He does this to connect with them, connect one another, and to gain their ideas on what the company could do better.

New hires bring fresh perspectives. After they understand how your team works, ask them what they did differently in their previous job that could make your team more productive. Ask, ‘what else?’ a couple of times in a friendly manner to further explore. You and the broader team can then weigh up the pros v cons of these ideas.

Embracing different ways renews the team. It helps future proof it. Small changes, like different meeting times, are easy to adopt. Bigger changes, like new software, initially may lead to a dip in productivity as they are implemented. Preparing for the dip makes you more likely to persist to get the productivity dividend.

1 MINUTE TO LOWER STRESS

The enormity of the night sky

Most of us juggle a lot: career, staying healthy, connecting to our friends and family. We can feel stressed. One technique I use when I want to de-stress is to look at the night sky. It’s liberating to see its enormity. It reminds me most of my problems really don’t matter in the big picture.

GET SMARTER

Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman (1918 to 1988) completed his undergrad at MIT, his PhD at Princeton, and was a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology. He jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of quantum electrodynamics. Feynman was a pioneer in the field of quantum computing and introduced the term nanotechnology.

In 1999, Feynman was ranked by leading physicists as the seventh-greatest physicist of all time. He was described as a brilliant teacher who could simply explain complex ideas. Some of his wisdom: