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Transcript
When I was young, when I was networking, I had this idea that the people who can help me are the people who are more senior than me; and that is pretty silly. If you think about it, now, I’m 30 years on. How many people who were a lot less senior than me, 10 years ago, are now more senior than me? A lot! You go up and down in your career; you find new paths for your career. So that’s the first thing to know. And they’ve noticed this about women versus men, that men are less, I’m going to call it “discerning” or “snobby” about who they connect with. And women have been, historically, they showed that women were more targeted at looking at people who they think are above them or could help them more, rather than just networking across the board. That’s the first thing to notice about yourself. Are you networking across the board? Are you just kind of looking for the people who you think right now have more status? Don’t do that, because your status changes over the years. That’s the first thing; it’s to network all the way across the board.
And again, I keep describing it as this “karma bag”, but that’s how it is. The world grows, and ecologies grow, and economies grow by mutual giving, not by mutual taking. Cultures are very different. You know, American culture has a very business-like attitude: okay, how can we do business together? How can we help each other? Other countries, there is much more flow between business and private. So both in Israel and Slovenia, there is not so much of a hard line between my business colleagues and my friendship colleagues. And even something like, “oh, I know a really good, whatever it is, restaurant”, or “I know a really good babysitter”; or, “when my son did that, this is how we handled it”. It may be appropriate in your culture. Again, these are culturally appropriate things.
To really look about how to help people, people have many interests. People have their personal interests, they have their professional interests, and almost everybody has some community interests. So volunteering for nonprofits, playing music, people have other interests. The key to helping other people is, get interested in other people. And just paying attention to how they speak, what’s going on with them, who they are. Right now, we’re in a really interesting situation where it’s incredibly international; and we’re not even meeting people in person. We’re just on this zoom thing, and people come from all over the place. You don’t get in the same visual cues and stuff like that. So sometimes when I’m networking with people, I will say something like, “in my culture, it would be impolite to not ask people about their family; what’s it like in your culture?” And then you know whether it’s okay. In my culture, if we disagree with somebody (I’m Israeli), we just say it! I know that nobody else does that, right? That happens to be quite unique to the New York and the Israeli cultures. Like, if we disagree, that’s good! We have a good argument, and then we go to lunch! but that’s not how other cultures work.
Sometimes just saying, “hey, listen, I have a comment about that. In my company, we usually tell each other if we have both positive and negative feedback”. So just tell people what you’re going to do and find out if that’s acceptable to them. And usually, if you say, “in my culture, we do this”, then it’s non-threatening. When I teach courses, sometimes I teach people about. I ask people, “what are you saying in your culture when someone says, how are you?” And in some cultures, you have to say, “I’m fine, thank you”. And in other cultures you have to say, “oh, don’t ask!”, because you don’t want to brag. And in other cultures you say the truth. And in other cultures you say the truth; and in other cultures you say the truth only if it’s your good friend. So it’s the simplest thing. What do you say if you disagree with an idea? In many American companies you say, “that’s interesting”; that means it’s not interesting. It’s really important when you’re talking to people from a multicultural background.
