Making Networking Events Bearable as an Autistic
You’re good at networking within your comfort zone. You know who you need to at work to get your job done and you’ve got your system for building those important workplace relationships. It’s all going well until someone delivers the bad news: To progress further in your career, you need to expand your network.
Whether that’s internal networking events or attending conferences and industry conventions, networking events can feel particularly challenging for those of us who are autistic. They’re loud, there are big groups of people and the amount of energy it costs to just regulate through one means you’re going to need some recovery time afterwards.
In my last post we talked about the very basics of networking, why you need to do it and how to start networking at the most basic level. In this post we’re going to assume you’ve got the basics covered and it’s the networking events that are the problem. So let’s dive in: How do we make networking events bearable as an autistic?
Let’s make this seem a little less scary.
What is your Goal for Networking?
So the first thing you need to do for a networking event is to prepare. If you go in there with no plan and your mind already made up that you’re going to hate it, then all you’ve done is create a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re going to end up hating it.
So let’s talk about the preparation that needs to be done in advance, and it doesn’t have to be hours and hours of it as that just transfers the energy cost elsewhere, it just needs a few simple things in place and the first of those is to answer one question:
What is your goal for the networking event?
This goal needs to be something specific, it can’t just be “to meet new people”. To meet new people for what? Is it to connect with people in a specific department your team will be interacting with more in the near future? Is it to meet people who also work in your particular line of work at other companies? Is it to identify potential future sales opportunities?
Whatever it is, getting clear on the purpose of the networking going in gives it a sense of meaning. It becomes something to do, rather than something to be endured.
Note that your goal can’t be just to stay for an hour, see what happens and then go home. If you go in with that goal, all you will do is stand in the corner for that hour feeling awkward, overthink about how much people must see that you’re awkward, and then going home having had a horrible time and feeling drained of all your energy. Your goal is to find people you actually want to talk to.
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Who do you want to talk to?
The people at a networking event broadly fall into three categories:
People who are interesting to you because of what they know (their interests)
People who are interesting to you because of who they know (their connections)
People who aren’t interesting to you at all
You don’t know at the start of any conversation which group of people the individual in front of you falls into. Your goal for conversations is to find out that information as quickly as you can, using small talk as a way to get you there.
I know we often have strong feelings about small talk. It often doesn’t come naturally and can feel like a chore and that’s why the small talk has to have a purpose. Part of our goal with energy efficiency is to find out as quickly as possible whether the conversation is worth continuing so that we can expend as little energy as possible. The small talk is the way to get there.
The basic introduction is the starting point, finding out what someone does is the first bit of information you need to be able to assess. From there you can start asking questions to assess whether this person’s interests overlap with your areas of interest.
This is particularly important because it’s where the energy efficiency happens. If it’s an industry conference, for example, and your goal is to expand your network with others in your industry, a conversation about something you’re genuinely interested in, for example how AI agents are affecting your industry, is a lot more energy efficient than continuing a conversation about the weather, the decoration in the venue or the canapes, assuming none of those options interest you. Talking about things we’re interested in tends to be fairly cheap from an energy perspective compared to generic small talk.
The goal isn’t to steer every conversation to one particular area of interest, you can have multiple options for potential areas of discussion and you can also be flexible. If you meet someone who brings up something interesting that’s not on your list, it’s great to ask them questions and have a discussion about that instead. The goal is to talk to someone who is interesting to you because of the interesting things they know as the most energy efficient way to build a relationship.
While we do have to watch out for potential info dumping, things that make us look a bit more like this owl tend to be lower energy than continual small talk.
Who Do They Also Know?
Not everyone we speak to will have areas of interest that overlap with ours. Depending on how picky we are with our conversation topics, we might actually find the minority of people are. We need to know how to navigate conversations with people who don’t have areas of interest that directly overlap with our own.
I like to think of these people in two categories themselves. Some people are people who we genuinely have no overlap with. If you’re passionate about marketing and you end up in a conversation with someone who does back end software engineering all day, maybe this isn’t a person it’s worth building a relationship with, unless you uncover some other area of overlap, and in which case we’ll talk about moving on from those conversations in the next section. But there’s also another group of people here who are interesting for a different reason: Not what they know but who they know.
This is particularly important if you’re looking to make sales, talk to investors or even just find a way into an area you’re not already connected to. These people might not be able to jump into a discussion about your areas of interest but they’re still useful because of who they know.
Your goal with them is to build a connection to stay in touch with the goal of getting an introduction from that person. You might not get the introduction from this conversation, in all likelihood it’s going to be too early to ask for an introduction after meeting someone for the first time, but it is a worthwhile investment to build this relationship.
This conversation is likely to take more energy than something you’re interested in so it’s okay if this interaction is more high level. The goal is to find a way to keep in touch beyond the event so you can continue to build the relationship long term.
It’s also good to look out for opportunities to make an introduction for them as well. People tend to remember favours we’ve done for them, so if you can make an introduction that helps them meet their goals, it’s more likely that they will return the favour as well. The goal is for a relationship that is mutually beneficial, even if your interests do not align so obviously.
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Ending the conversations
It’s also important to prepare how to end the conversations as well, particularly for the third category of people who you aren’t interested in continuing the conversation with. If we’re talking about managing energy, then you really don’t want to spend long in a conversation that drains you because you’re just not interested, particularly if you’ve given yourself limited time to network. The goal here is to disengage from the conversation in a way that is warm and appreciative but frees you up to pursue a conversation with someone else.
And this brings me onto another important point: having social scripts. These are practised phrases you have to fall back on at the points of the conversation that are difficult: namely the beginnings and the ends. It’s worth spending a bit of time preparing stock phrases for a few scenarios that will come up over and over again, for example:
Your introduction of who you are and what you do - if you can link it directly to an area of interest this can help move the conversation in that direction quickly
Basic questions on your areas of interest, for example asking for opinions on industry or company news
Wrapping up the conversation, an option for people you do want to keep in contact with, another for people you don’t.
Particularly with wrapping up the conversation, make sure you have a plan for how you’ll keep in touch, whether it’s adding people on linkedin, business cards or noting down names and numbers, build a plan for how you’ll keep track of the people you spoke to and as soon as possible try and note down anything notable about the conversation.
LinkedIn is often a good way to connect as it means you have a reminder of their name, where they work and what they do, but it’s not the only way.
Approaching People for Conversations
One of the best pieces of advice I ever heard for starting conversations at networking events is to look for the pairs. An individual standing on the edge on their own might be tempting, especially because they might also be feeling as awkward as you, but that risks you both getting stuck in a conversation that doesn’t move either of your goals forward. It’s almost too safe for a step outside of your comfort zone.
Pairs are a better bet because you’re able to meet two potential people you want to talk to at the same time, there’s less pressure to stay in a conversation that doesn’t work because there is someone else to continue the conversation if you move on, and each person might have other people they know at the event who may join the conversation, making it easier for you to meet more people without having to approach more groups.
On the other side of this, big groups can be intimidating, harder to follow and harder to connect individually with people. So start by joining a smaller group and if the group becomes too big, it’s perfectly natural for it to split off into smaller groups according to interests as well.
After the Event
I’m not going to deep dive into after the event in this post but will leave you with two things to think about in advance to set you up for success after the networking event:
What is your follow up strategy?
How will you recover your energy?
It’s always better to have a plan for these things in advance rather than having to scrabble to put them together afterwards.
So that’s it for this post, my networking event survival guide for autistics. There is much more that we could talk about on this topic and I’m always interested in hearing more about the things autistic leaders are struggling with. Please feel free to get in contact with topics you’d like me to cover.
And if you’re an autistic leader finding the people navigation side a challenge as you progress in your career, this has become one of my specialist topics. Whether that’s navigating company politics, building executive presence or dealing with workplace relationships that have become challenging, I’m always excited to work with autistic leaders with interesting leadership challenges. Feel free to get in contact if you’d like to talk about what leadership coaching might look like for you.
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