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The Expert Detector

Posted 05-Jan-2009 by Robby Slaughter (@robbyslaughter)

Recently, I faced an everyday conundrum of modern life: a schedule conflict. I could either attend a small business networking function or socialize with others interested in foreign languages at a meeting of the local conversational French club. At the former, I might find exciting prospects or be forced to endure a droll sales pitch. At the latter, I could learn new words or could find myself embarrassingly inadequate. Each seemed to offer possible risk or reward. I chose the event where I could detect the experts.

Exactly Two Worlds

If you are the sort of person who willingly accepts classifications, you can cleanly divide the entirety of humanity into two decidedly unequal parts. Under one bracket are the teeming millions who speak French much better than you, and on the opposite side those whose français est terrible. Although I can survive a trip to le café, my own command of the language puts me slightly ahead of the average newborn Parisian baby. Your own two worlds of French speakers are undoubtedly distinct from mine. At best (or at worst), one of those groups has a population of zero.

With everyone neatly segmented, a conversation at your local French discussion group rapidly invokes feelings of self-confidence or self-consciousness. More amazing, however, is the nearly instantaneous nature of this assessment. No matter how well you know the language, within a minute of listening you can detect the expertise of the speaker. The shape of their sounds, choice of words and sentence structure tidily places them into one of your two worlds. Everyone knows more or less French than you.

Utility in Judgment

Obviously, knowing who speaks French better than you is useful at a conversational French club meeting. You can seek out the experts to learn new words or hone your accent. You can talk to novices to help them with rudimentary skills. Evaluation is automatic and unavoidable, but useful rather than problematic. Everyone in attendance has the same goal: practice speaking French. Self-organization into mutually beneficial pairings aids the larger mission.

A business networking event, however, is nothing like chatting in bad French with earnest strangers. Behind each adhesive nametag is a professional with a private agenda. Some have come to hawk companies or products, others to find potential business partners or employees and some just to make new connections. To achieve any success beyond trading business cards, people with complementary goals have to actually meet and evaluate each other. Unfortunately, valid judgments are nearly impossible in this environment. Networkers train vigorously to make perfect first impressions, practicing handshakes, rehearsing elevator pitches and memorizing taglines. There is no easy way to tell the genuinely brilliant from the brilliantly polished. The two worlds are hazy.

Attractive Mistakes

At French club, you can listen for a few minutes to determine whether you can even follow the conversation. This is a non-invasive and efficient approach, but it fails tremendously when applied at networking events. French speakers in a noisy bar are talking extemporaneously, just yammering back and forth as ideas enter their mind. The listener dreams of the same insouciant proficiency. The smartly dressed pitchman, however, is speaking from a script. Judging his monologue is only helpful if you are a high school drama teacher. Listening intently, ironically, is a counterproductive technique at a networking forum.

Likewise, asking questions sounds like a clever way to measure knowledge. Expert speakers at French club are usually happy to assist with a translation or explain some linguistic nuance. The pro beams like a proud teacher at such requests. Networkers, however, usually balk at pointed inquiries. If they have a good answer, you are wasting time and interrupting their spiel. If they don’t, their sudden ignorance belies the chocolate-coated promises from seconds before. Either outcome disrupts the formation of the relationship, which is an unquestioned fundamental of the handshake circuit. Good questions ruin everything.

No matter how terrible your French, you can always tear down the fourth wall and switch back to English. This break from the intense mental effort is more than a breather, it is also a chance to talk about the mechanics of the French language without the additional burden of speaking in French. The analogue at business networking events is to ask for a reprieve from elevator pitches and small talk starter phrases. An attractive mistake is to lay everything out. “Look, let’s get down to it. We are all here to promote something, so let’s just go around the group and have everyone say what they are offering and what they hope others will do in response.”

These words, while refreshingly honest, comprise networking group suicide. Everyone has refined their stock phrases and contemplative facial expressions far too much to toss them aside for the chaos of an actual conversation. Entrepreneurial meetings are more like well-armed nations than the agents of commerce. Everyone has suited up, loaded all weapons, and arrived with a plan of battle. This is not a drill. Nobody throws out the rules and still gets to play.

Rethinking Networking

It may seem a little cruel to describe professionals at networking events as single-minded automatons who dare not venture off script. Few actually meet this criteria, but it does seem that the stilted nature of undefined business interaction ultimately results in the animatronic salesman. This should embarrass. Companies profit from creativity and a willingness to take risks, not a tired replay of the machinations of Zig Ziglar.

Open, free-form interaction between people works great if there is exactly one common objective. Business understands focus in event planning. The sales conference exists to connect buyers and sellers, the training seminar to make novices into experts, and the press conference to release carefully worded announcements. Organizers of business events should abide this formula in all regards, and save the field of competing goals for the actual marketplace.

Networkers, too, should consider changing the rules of engagement. Instead of power suits and winning smiles, we should focus our conversation on real content. We need to be able to detect expertise in one another, not so much in our professed fields but in our ability to help each other with unique needs. We must forgo monologues and instead speak in the language. Our businesses exist to provide value. Let us work to ensure that unadorned, mutual benefit is our fait acompli.

Further Reading:

• The NY Times on Likemind, which is really networking
• White-Collar Prison Is A Great Networking Opportunity
• The Twelve Step Anti-Networking Programme
• Business Networking Stinks (ok, not really)
• French Words and Expressions in English
• Thanks to WebFX for the JavaScript slider

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