I was the Computer Operations Director at Trader Joe’s, running the systems for a multi-billion dollar company with a skeleton crew, because corporate policy kept headcount tight.
Then on a Friday night everything crashed. Not a minor glitch. A complete failure, the kind that could cost the company millions if it was not fixed by Monday morning.
I spent hours trying everything I knew. Then I started calling vendor numbers. Most did not answer after business hours. The ones who did treated me like any other customer who could wait until Monday, which from their side was entirely reasonable.
I sat in that empty office surrounded by broken computers and worked something out. Twenty years in the industry, and I had built exactly zero meaningful professional relationships. There was nobody I could call.
Why had I not built any?
Because I thought networking was for other people.
For most of my career I kept my head down, did the work, and avoided the social side of business entirely. Networking was for slick salespeople and smooth talkers. I was an introverted computer person and it was not for me, and I said that to myself with a certain amount of pride.
That worked, in the sense that nothing forced me to reconsider. I was good at the technical part and the technical part was what I was paid for. There was never an obvious day when the absence of relationships cost me something, which is precisely how you arrive at twenty years without noticing.
The bill does not arrive gradually. It arrives on a Friday night.
What does a network really do?
It gives you somebody to call, and that is nearly the whole of it.
People discuss networking as though it were about opportunities, or visibility, or a larger contact list. Those are side effects. The function is that when you are in trouble, at an inconvenient hour, there is a person who picks up and who knows enough about you to help.
What I had instead was a list of vendor support numbers, which is a commercial relationship, and commercial relationships operate on business hours. Nobody on that list owed me anything or knew my name. I had been perfectly professional with all of them for two decades and it bought me exactly nothing at eleven at night.
The crash eventually got fixed through determination and sleepless nights. It got fixed the hard way, and the hard way was available only because it was a technical problem. Plenty of problems are not.
Does technical skill protect you?
Up to a point, and the point is closer than most technical people believe.
Being genuinely good at something is a real asset and I would not argue otherwise. What it does not do is create the conditions under which you get help, get considered, or get told things early. Those all run on relationships, and skill does not generate them as a by-product no matter how much of it you have.
That was the harsh version of the lesson. Technical skill had carried me from the beginning of my career to a director’s office at a company doing billions in revenue, and it could not get one person to answer a phone.
The book on this: Networking Without the BS is 32 chapters on building professional relationships when you are not a natural at it, written by somebody who had none after twenty years and had to start.
How do you start with nothing?
Not by walking into a room full of strangers, which is the advice that puts most quiet people off permanently.
You start with the people you already know and have let go quiet. Former colleagues. The vendor rep you dealt with fairly for years. The person you helped once who would be glad to hear from you. That list is longer than it feels when you are convinced you have no network, and reaching out to somebody you have already met is a completely different act from introducing yourself to a stranger.
The second thing is to make it ordinary instead of transactional. A relationship you activate only when you need something is not a relationship, and everybody can feel the difference immediately.
What does this look like for an introvert?
Depth instead of volume, which turns out to be the better strategy anyway.
The extroverted model is a large number of light connections. It works for the people it works for. For somebody who finds the whole business draining, it is both unpleasant and inefficient, because it produces the exact thing I already had: a lot of names and nobody to call.
Ten people who genuinely know your work and would answer the phone will do more for you than four hundred who recognize your name. Ten is a manageable number. It is roughly one new relationship every few weeks for a year, built through ordinary conversations instead of events.
I would have rejected this advice for most of my career on the grounds that I was busy and it was not my sort of thing. Both were true. Neither helped on Friday.
What would I tell the version of me in that office?
The absence costs nothing until it costs everything. There is no warning and no gradual signal.
Start with people you already know. The neglected list is the easiest and it is where the real relationships already are.
Ten is enough. Stop imagining networking as a numbers exercise you would be bad at.
Do it on ordinary days. Relationships built when you need something are not available when you need something.
Being good at your job is not a substitute. I believed it was for twenty years and it was the single most expensive assumption I have made.
I fixed the system that weekend. I also stopped being able to tell myself that the social side of business was for other people, which was the more useful outcome of the two.
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