Networking 101 For Autistics
You’re good at what you do. You know how to do your job and can get on and do it to a high standard. The problem isn’t with the work itself, it’s with everything around it. The layers of interaction needed before you can just get on with it. Whether it’s asking someone for information you need to get started, locking down the stakeholder demands or even iterating with feedback, there are very few jobs in this day and age where we can just avoid the peopling demands.
The more senior you go in your career, the more important the relationship building side becomes. As a junior you might be able to get by with only speaking to your boss but by the time you reach head of department your job is almost exclusively navigating relationships.
I might be stating the obvious for some readers but for others it will be their first time hearing this: Being autistic is not fundamentally incompatible with navigating the people side of business. I have worked with so many senior leaders who have built fantastic strategies for moving in this world, but, like much of the workplace, we often need different strategies to work with our different brains so in this post we’re going to talk about them.
This is a beginner guide for autistic networking. We’ll start off by talking about why networking is so important for four different career reasons. Then we’ll move onto the real basics of how to approach networking so that it doesn’t feel quite so painful or cost quite so much energy. I’ll be following up next week with a blog post on how to tackle networking events themselves, but for now we’re covering the basics.
So with that in mind, let’s start by talking about why networking is important.
I’m sorry, I had to make a joke about networking.
Why You Need To Learn To Network
I alluded to it in the very opening of this post but the basic answer is that you don’t really have a choice. Yes, there may be some people who do get by even though they just sit down, ignore everyone and get on with things but those people are the exception and in all honesty their careers are limited. They might be perfectly content just working their hours, collecting the pay cheque and leaving it all behind at the end of the day and if so, this post probably isn’t for them. They’ve found a way that works for them and fair play to them, but that’s not the people I’m talking to in this blog post.
Instead, I’m talking to people who want to build their careers, whether that’s geting promoted, progressing into leadership, starting a business or just making their current working life a lot less frustrating. With that in mind, here are four reasons why you need to learn to network:
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It Makes Getting Things Done Easier
I’ve seen it happen countless times where someone has complained to their manager that someone else isn’t doing their job properly and it’s getting in their way. They need someone to test something, or give them a report, or finish off something, whatever it is, that person isn’t doing it and as a result the employee is complaining to their manager about it.
I’m sure I did this early on in my career as well but I learned fast that there are better ways of going about it and I will never forget something that happened in what must have been only my second year in my career. A senior colleague of mine with thirty plus years of experience was in this exact situation. He needed something from someone on another team, they weren’t providing it and he was ranting to my boss about it.
I don’t remember exactly why I was involved in the conversation, I think I was working on something adjacent, but what was important here is that I had worked with the person my colleague was complaining about. I’d actually worked with her quite a lot. I knew she had a bit of a reputation for being difficult but she was never actually difficult with me. So I asked her for the thing my colleague needed, on my colleague’s behalf. Guess who got a reply within the next hour?
Now you could argue maybe this was her problem, that my colleague was right that she should have replied to him straight away, but I actually think that’s an oversimplification of the problem. She was incredibly busy. Her inbox was probably rammed with emails all requiring her attention. I really don’t think she was ignoring my colleague in particular, I think she was ignoring her emails in general.
So why was my email different? Because we had a relationship. Because we worked well together. Because sometimes she needed things from me too.
When you have a good relationship with someone, you’re more likely to prioritise it, to make time to help them because you know it’s mutually beneficial long term. My colleague hadn’t built a relationship, he’d just asked for what he wanted and spent two days waiting as a result. I had built a relationship and got the information in an hour. Think about how much time and frustration this saves.
If you think of most of your frustrations with your day job, it’s often because you’re blocked by other people. So you have two choices. You can either complain to your boss that this person is not doing their job, which is pretty frustrating for your manager because they have bigger things to worry about than chasing up these kind of tasks. Or you can build a relationship with this person and unblock the task yourself.
And by the way, this isn’t just an individual contributor problem, I’ve seen this happen at senior levels as well, usually in the context of a relationship that has turned sour. I’ve already written blog posts for how to deal with challenging workplace relationships so I won’t dive into this here. So let’s finish with he first takeaway of why you should learn to network: It just makes getting things done a whole lot easier.
Being efficient at work isn’t just about how quickly you can do things, it’s about how quickly you can get things done and that is heavily influenced by how well you work with others.
It Opens Opportunities
I don’t think it comes to a surprise to anyone in this day and age when I say networking opens doors. We all know people who have managed to get new jobs based on who they know and I don’t think I need to belabour that this is a real phenomenon.
Often the argument against this is that our skills should speak for themselves, however the reality isn’t that simple. For one thing, interviews are a really poor way of assessing whether someone is capable of doing the job. You’re limited in time, you’re limited in what you can test and given the importance of working with people to getting things done, you can’t really assess how good someone is at that in a forty-five minute interview either.
If someone personally vouches for you then you become a known quantity, someone who is a much less risky decision than a complete stranger. Even if they still interview you, they’re already pretty happy you have the skills and the ability to work with others because you’ve already been recommended.
Networking is important because it’s not just the technical skills you need for your role, its the ability to work with people too. Networking is the proof that you can do that.
You might be tempted to conclude from this that a few very close personal relationships are enough to be able to fulfil the need for people to vouch for you, but actually the reality is counterintuitive. It turns out that weak ties, more casual relationships and acquaintances, are actually more valuable at helping with employment opportunities than people we know very well.
It is helpful to have career and workplace relationships that are deep and meaningful, but not every one has to be. There is significant benefit in having a wide network as well.
It Helps Build Your Career
This is very linked to the previous point but beyond just opening opportunities, networking builds your career directly as well because people will talk about you. In fact they’ll talk about you whether you build relationships or not, but once you put the effort in the talking is likely to be a lot more positive.
Promotions and performance incentives are often influenced by the opinions of people beyond your managers. If you work at a company that does 360-reviews then this is made even more explicit. How people feel about you and your work has an impact on how you are rewarded for it.
You might also be surprised at how much people advocate for others unprompted. Speak to any manager and you’ll hear stories of when people have come to them to tell them how well their employee has performed completely unprompted.
If we look at it for the other direction as well, an inability to build relationships with others is often an immediate disqualification for any leadership position. You can reach a certain level of seniority without networking, for sure, but eventually you’re going to hit a ceiling and it’ll probably come much quicker than you expect.
360 Reviews are often implemented by companies to help spot our blind spots, but they can also act as an indirect measurement of our network.
It Helps You Build Influence
Influence is one of those words that people feel a bit icky about but the higher you go in leadership the more important this becomes. Workplaces have built in corporate hierarchies. There’s a chain of management where the people higher up tell the people below them what to do. Except in modern workplaces, hierarchy doesn’t exactly work like this.
Modern workplaces are complex. It is impossible for leaders to be able to understand the big picture and all the details at the same time. A leader’s job is to be able to balance their understanding at the right level of abstraction and rely on the people around them to fill in the gaps they don’t have. They speak to their people for expertise, they consult their peers for cross-functional perspectives and they make recommendations to their management instead of just filtering down commands.
As a leader, the actual skill you’re using to make things happen is influence. If a department is planning a new process that would make things significantly harder for your team, you can’t tell them not to. You don’t have the positional power to. You’re a peer in the hierarchy, not their leader. You could escalate it to your boss but that puts us into the getting things done category we were talking about earlier (and also requires influencing up!).
Instead it’s about influencing people, using the relationships you have to get your voice heard and advocate for your team, to move people towards compromising on something better for both departments instead of improving things for one at the detriment of the other.
The wider your network, the better your relationships, the more people are likely to engage with your attempts to influence instead of viewing it as muscling in, undermining them or approaching things in bad faith.
So without networking, getting things done becomes significantly harder, your career progress stalls out and there’s significantly less opportunity available to you. So with that in mind, how do we actually go about building a network?
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How to Network for Autistics
So immediately when people think of networking they think of events, evenings spent crammed into a room of people you don’t know having superficial conversations after hours with pressure to drink thrown in as well. That’s one form of networking which we’ll talk about next week but that doesn’t have to be the only form of networking so let’s start with the less intimidating kind:
You interact with people at work regardless, therefore networking just becomes expanding out these interactions beyond just the functional.
There are two objections I can immediately see people having with this. The first is the complaint about how annoying it is when someone messages you to ask for something but instead of just asking for it they say: “Hi, how are you?” and then wait for you to reply with some back and forth without asking. I’m not advocating for that behaviour because, as you’re rightly thinking, it can make things worse, not better.
However, adding a personal question within the request is a good middle ground. For example, “hi, how was your weekend? I’m working on this report for finance and I need some numbers about sales for last week. Could you point me to the weekly report please?” gives them the option to respond to the question about the weekend if they have the capacity, and if they don’t then they can just ignore it. Adding on “thank you”s also can go a long way.
The second push back is that this is just small talk and yes, yes it is, but it’s important that it’s not just small talk, it’s small talk with a goal. Because your goal is to connect with someone and the way you do this is find a shared interest.
For example, maybe they do answer the weekend question and you find out they went to the cinema. If you’re interested in films, you can ask about what they went to see and whether they enjoyed it. You don’t have to have a full conversation about it, and you probably shouldn’t bombard them with questions unless they’re genuinely enthused by the back and forth, but asking a few questions and sharing a little about your own interest in the subject is enough to build a small moment of connection.
This then becomes a topic you can talk to this person about. For example, if you find out they’re a film enthusiast, your opening question can evolve from “how was your weekend?” to “seen any good films lately?”. The point is that you’re not creating pressure for them to respond to question after question, they might genuinely be too busy for that, but opening the door for opportunity to connect.
But note something important I said above. If you’re interested in films. If you’re not interested in films, don’t ask about them. The point of the small talk isn’t just to have small talk, it’s to find a shared topic of interest so that the small talk feels less of a chore and more like genuinely nice moments of connection.
It also doesn’t have to be about something external to work. For example, if they make a comment about a process change that they’re looking forward to or a tool they’re considering switching to then those are fair topics to ask questions about as well.
So the process becomes:
Include one question of small talk in the conversation to give them opportunity to connect
If they don’t pick it up, no worries, try again later (or give up if a few consecutive bids have not been picked up - you don’t have to connect with everyone)
If they do, look for opportunities to have short conversations about shared interest
Thank people for things they do for you and wish them a good weekend/evening or other pleasantries at the end of the conversation.
The point is to make it low effort experiments in conversations you already have regularly, rather than making it a big networking thing with lots of pressure.
I’m a big fan of running experiments with my clients whenever we try something new. That’s small, low risk changes we can make and assess the impact of before we completely switch up our way of working.
Beyond the Basics
Networking starts with the people immediately around us, but it doesn’t end there. If you’re actively looking to grow your career, you probably need to expand your network beyond just the people you talk to day to day.
One of the obvious answers to this is to attend networking events where people all get together for the goal of meeting and connecting with others. Some people genuinely love these activities, but for others they’re terrifying, so next week we’re going to talk about how to approach these events in a way that feels a whole lot less daunting and energy intensive.
In the meantime, if you’re an autistic leader finding the peopling a challenge, get in touch to talk about how my one-on-one leadership coaching can help you.
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