Networking Done Right: Why Most People Get It Completely Wrong
By the OneGizmo Team | Money & Business
The word "networking" makes most people uncomfortable, and with good reason. The conventional image — working a room at a conference, collecting business cards, asking what people do and mentally calculating their usefulness, delivering an elevator pitch — describes a social performance that feels transactional, inauthentic, and vaguely manipulative. Research supports this discomfort: a 2016 study by Francesca Gino and colleagues at Harvard Business School found that engaging in instrumental networking — building relationships for strategic career purposes — made participants feel psychologically dirty, an effect that was stronger among people with a strong moral identity.
And yet the importance of professional relationships in career outcomes is not in question. A classic study by sociologist Mark Granovetter at Harvard, published in 1973, found that more than half of job openings were filled through personal contacts, and that the most valuable contacts were not close friends but "weak ties" — acquaintances and peripheral connections who were more likely to have access to different information and opportunities than one's immediate circle. "It's not what you know, it's who you know" is a cliché, but it reflects a robustly supported social reality. The question is not whether professional relationships matter but how to build them in a way that feels genuine rather than transactional.
The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything
The fundamental problem with conventional networking is its orientation: it approaches relationships as a resource to be extracted rather than a connection to be built. The person working the room is focused on what they can get — introductions, opportunities, information — which other people sense and respond to with wariness or disengagement. The alternative orientation — genuine curiosity about the other person, interest in what they are working on and what challenges they face, a genuine desire to be useful — produces a completely different dynamic, and one that, paradoxically, is far more likely to produce the career benefits that the transactional networker was pursuing.
Adam Grant's research at Wharton on "givers" and "takers" in professional networks found that people who approach professional relationships with a giving orientation — looking for ways to be helpful without immediate expectation of return — are, over time, both the most professionally successful and the most valued members of their networks. The transactional orientation produces short-term reciprocity and long-term wariness. The giving orientation produces long-term goodwill and, eventually, opportunity.
Weak Ties and Why They Matter More Than Strong Ones
Granovetter's "strength of weak ties" hypothesis — that peripheral acquaintances provide more novel, career-relevant information than close friends — has been validated and extended by subsequent research. Close friends and colleagues typically inhabit the same professional world you do, know the same people, and have access to the same information. Acquaintances in different fields, industries, cities, and social circles are more likely to have access to information, opportunities, and perspectives that are genuinely new to you.
A 2022 study published in Science, using LinkedIn data from 20 million users across five continents, directly tested Granovetter's hypothesis at unprecedented scale and confirmed it: weak ties — specifically, connections that span different clusters in the professional network — were significantly more likely to lead to new job opportunities than strong ties. The implication for networking strategy: the value is not in deepening connections with people you already know well but in maintaining and gradually extending your network of acquaintances across different domains.
Maintaining a Network Without Feeling Mercenary
The most practically challenging aspect of professional relationship building is the maintenance of connections over time — particularly with people you do not see regularly. The conventional approach (reaching out only when you need something) is the one that feels most transactional, because it is. The alternative requires a different habit: periodic, genuine engagement that has nothing to do with your immediate needs.
Sharing an article relevant to someone's work, congratulating someone on a visible achievement, asking a genuine question about a project they mentioned — these require almost no time but maintain the connection in a way that means the contact feels like a relationship rather than a dormant resource being activated. Researcher David Burkus, who has written extensively on professional relationships, recommends what he calls "pinging" — brief, low-effort, high-authenticity contact with peripheral connections on a semi-regular basis — as the most sustainable maintenance strategy for a broad professional network.
The Best Networking Events Are Not Networking Events
The most reliably productive professional relationship-building happens not at designated networking events but in the context of shared work, shared learning, or shared interest — conferences in your field (where shared context exists), professional development courses (where relationships form through the experience), volunteering or community involvement (where shared values create connection), and even social events around genuine hobbies or interests. The common factor is that the social interaction is not the explicit purpose — it is a byproduct of shared engagement in something else, which removes the transactional awkwardness and allows genuine connection to form more naturally.
Final Thoughts
Professional networking, done correctly, does not feel like networking. It feels like being genuinely interested in people, being helpful when you can, maintaining contact with people you find interesting, and occasionally meeting new people in contexts where shared interests already exist. The career benefits — access to information, opportunities, and introductions — are real and well-documented. But they are the byproduct of genuine relationship-building, not the product of a social performance. The person who approaches professional relationships with authentic curiosity and a willingness to give before receiving will, over time, build a network that produces opportunities and support that the card-collecting room-worker will not. And they will feel considerably better about themselves in the process.