Twenty-five years ago, a Harvard Business School case study featured the exceptional networking practices of Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist. This was before the rise of online social networks and the ubiquity of social media. But today, Roizen says that those developments have not fundamentally changed how she builds and maintains strong personal and professional relationships.
HEIDI ROIZEN: It’s an interesting question because I think first of all, people conflate being an extrovert with being good at building a network, and I don’t think they need to be the same thing. I think in fact, sometimes that person who’s an extrovert who wants to be the center of the room and is always talking and all of that, those aren’t necessarily the best skills to build a relationship with someone else. I have always been a person who’s been interested in other people.
HEIDI ROIZEN: So when I was first approached about the case, they told me what they wanted to write the case about, building business relationships. And I said, “Well, isn’t that just kind of common sense?” And they said, “Well, common sense is not that common. Trust me. It is not that common.” And so one of the things that I tell people over and over again is trust your common sense. Would you ask someone for a favor the first time you meet them in a social, in just a normal situation? No.
HEIDI ROIZEN: Because you do need something and there’s no problem with reaching out to someone and giving them the reason why if you don’t have a relationship with somebody. You can start a relationship with someone by saying, “I’m reaching out to you because I’ve identified that you are a person who could help me with this. And so I’m reaching out for the specific help, but also I believe we could be helpful to each other in the future as well.
HEIDI ROIZEN: And by the way, don’t reach out to me and ask me to forward something to Bill Gates when you don’t even know me. I mean, these are kind of the rules of the road sort of thing. I see this all the time in emails, right? Here’s an email that I would like you to forward to someone else, or even worse to three other people. And then the requester is expecting me, the favor giver, to spend time working on those emails or changing them or accommodating the fact that it’s supposed to be for three people, but you can’t send one email to three different people, especially when they’re competitors.
HEIDI ROIZEN: There are certainly relationships where I may not have spoken to someone in years and I can text them one sentence and they’ll be responsive and vice versa. Somewhat, it’s a judgment call on how well do I know that person. I also think there is a great value in being personally consistent. I have a very consistent communication style. So if I reach out to someone, they kind of know what they’re getting with me, which is I think a helpful attribute.
I think it’s a really nice gesture to send them an email just saying, “Hey, I just read about this. Congratulations.” Not because I have an intent with that, not because I’m expecting that whatever, they’re going to let me in their next round or something. It’s just because they took their time to… For example, on the pitch thing, they took their time to pitch me.
HEIDI ROIZEN: I do. I do. AI is a double-edged sword. AI is a tool. You can use it well or you can use it poorly. And I think that people use it poorly when they substitute their own effort and creativity for that of AI, and it will show in the result. I still do not think AI captures your unique human personality. Maybe it will in the future, but right now that is far afield. And that is the thing that I think we look for in communications from other people.
CURT NICKISCH: I read that one thing that you recommend to people trying to build their network and build relationships is controlled randomness. Can you explain that? CURT NICKISCH: So people are going to listen to this, and they’re going to turn around and be like, “I need to do a better job of building relationships, maintaining my network, getting back in touch with people who I think can be valuable or just people I care about.” They’re going to listen to the conversation. They’re going to have a little more motivation to sort of do it right and be consistent.
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