“What is a meaningful business relationship to you?”
This was the question posed by long-time mentor and friend Susan McPherson during a recent professional event I hosted to introduce her and her new book. Susan knows how to get to the heart of an issue, and it was no surprise that her question helped us all to think in new ways about why we network.
Susan is a consummate communicator, self-described “serial connector,” and ally to all around her. Approximately 150 people gathered virtually to listen and learn about her newly released book The Lost Art of Connecting. Their answers to her opening question spanned from “common goal benefit” to “learning and adding value,” but nearly all the responses either explicitly or obliquely settled around the notion of trust. It was trust that immediately jumped out as the common theme and focus. Susan showed no surprise at this answer. She then added that trust is essential to moving beyond the level of a simple contact and into a deep relationship of reciprocity.
In her talk, Susan outlined her three-phase “Gather, Ask, Do” methodology, which, in short, is a service-oriented and humanizing approach to networking intended to produce more authentic and enduring relationships that can be readily tapped into for advice, support, and help. As she described the gathering phase of her methodology, I was struck by her advice on blurring the hard and pseudo sacred line between personal and business relationships. It seems many would demur to or reject this conflation of the professional and the personal, but as I thought more on Susan’s point, I realized I have formed a considerable number of my best and most vital career connections in non-professional and quite unexpected settings. After explaining the gathering phase, Susan went on to discuss the asking phase of her approach. She asserted that in order to build deep and lasting connections, we must relearn the art of the ask and shift our guiding question from “How can I get what I want?” to “How can I help this person?”. Susan is keenly aware of a concept so many commonly belittle or miss in the professional world—service. To develop and maintain any meaningful connection, an element of service and sacrifice must be present. I appreciate Susan’s help-first, receive later philosophy—one that acknowledges that the best fruits take time and care to mature—and over all my years of knowing her, I’ve seen her put this into practice without fail.
In the final phase of her methodology, we apply our chief differentiating factor—our unique combination of skills and knowledge—to add value or promote the interests of another based on the data we collected in the previous two phases. Her discussion of this doing phase illuminated a major principle in her methodology as a whole—communication is not an innate ability; it is a learned one. To me, Susan’s acknowledgement of the universality of communication is vitally important. She gives us a deliberate methodology aimed at creating more organic and dynamic relationships, which should be implemented on a daily basis and has relevance across all aspects of communication.
Early in her talk, Susan quipped about the irony of writing on connection in a moment of unimaginable disconnection. She called out with courage her own struggle with isolation during the pandemic, but also highlighted how she gained a deeper appreciation for the connections she had nurtured prior to being forced to quarantine and socially distance. As we have adapted to this new normal marked by an even greater dependence on technology, how do we continue to forge new relationships and grow existing ones in the absence of vital social hubs—professional conferences, worship services, sporting events, concerts, public transportation, etc.? How effectively can technological modes of communication replicate or act as an adequate substitute for in-person, face-to-face interaction?
Despite all of the disruptions it has caused—ranging from simple annoyances to dramatically life-altering crises—the COVID-19 pandemic has jarred us as a global family and opened a space to reflect radically and reclaim the human element in networking. Susan’s “Gather, Ask, Do” methodology stands as a shining intervention in the shift from the transactional, touch-and-go to a deeper and more robust touch-and-stay spirit of communication. It’s a spirit geared to developing trust by staying in touch, staying engaged, and asking and acting in a way that affirms another’s immeasurable worth and growing potential. Maybe, there’s no better time than now to rediscover this lost art of connecting as we work to define what we want and hope will be the positive parts of our individual realities.
