The development of a network of useful connections, or networking, is incredibly popular in the West. Why do we treat this occupation with prejudice? What prevents us from reaching out for an acquaintance? Opinion of business coach Violetta Abramova.
In Russia, the recommendation program does not work well, according to Kaspersky Lab, which operates in 200 countries.
We are talking about a form of loyalty to the employer, when employees of the company recommend their friends or acquaintances for open vacancies. In the event that the candidate successfully passes the interview and goes to work in the company, the person who recommended is paid a bonus: it can range from 30 to 100 thousand rubles, depending on the company.
According to the recommendation program in Europe, it is possible to hire up to 20% of the staff, in America — up to 40%, and in Russia only 9% of new employees get to work in this way.
In Russian culture, the word «blat», meaning acquaintance and useful connections, has always had a negative connotation.
Why do we have such statistics? Perhaps this is due to our attitude to networking — a network of connections or contacts. In the West, networking is an important tool for professional advancement and development. There are special training courses and seminars at which everyone from the student’s bench is told how to set a goal: why make the right impression, where and how to meet the right people who will influence their career in the future, and so on.
Western experts recommend dividing networking into two circles. The first circle is professional: these are connections that will help you advance in a profession or business. The second is personal, related to hobbies, hobbies and private life.
The main thesis in teaching networking in the West is “First give, then ask”. That is, when establishing a new contact, you should try to do something useful for your new acquaintance, at least a very small favor — in the future this may become a guarantee that your request will not be denied.
What are we afraid of
I would explain the low statistics of the “recommendation program” given by Kaspersky Lab by the fact that a Russian person has a slightly different attitude to the formation of a network of contacts.
Firstly, it is difficult for us to get acquainted out of self-interest. The thought of exchanging business cards at an event and using this communication in the future makes us remorseful and prevents us from reaching out for acquaintance. In Russian culture, the word «blat», meaning acquaintance and useful connections, has always had a negative connotation. We are ashamed to get acquainted only for the sake of profit.
Secondly, if you look deeper, for Russians, networking is not really about “a social circle that we purposefully form from the student bench in order to use it later.” The key word in Russian networking is trust. It can arise spontaneously and then either receive confirmation in communication or not.
A trusting circle of communication cannot be formed by making acquaintances at the conference and by exchanging business cards
Trust can appear in general “business hangouts”, in business schools or at work — when we see a colleague in different situations and understand whether we can rely on him, whether we will take him on a complex business project, invite him to work with us, or no.
For the person whom, in turn, we recommend — whether it be an employee, a doctor, a tutor or a nanny for a child — we mentally take responsibility. It is a trusting circle of communication based on Western technology that is difficult for us to create, it cannot be formed by making acquaintances at a conference and by exchanging business cards. Remember, as the King from the play «Cinderella» by Yevgeny Schwartz said: «No connections will help you make your foot small, your soul big, and your heart fair.»
Will work become friendship?
Does this mean that the «golden rules» of effective networking do not apply to us? Not quite so, because most of them are reasonable and practical. They can and should be adopted to solve problems in the business world — such as advice about going beyond the usual communication, expanding the circle of contacts by attending events, the condition to always do what we promised …
And over time, it will be possible to understand whether our new contacts have become trustworthy, whether some of them helped form a circle of friends and whether they brought (mutual) benefit. In many ways, this transition depends both on your common goals and values, and on external circumstances. Or maybe a few years will pass, and communication with one of your networking contacts will imperceptibly develop, as Mikhail Zhvanetsky wrote, “into a normal friendship”, the value of which is that “both do not need anything.”