I Spent Years Networking Wrong and Called It Building Relationships

I had been in the consulting industry in Gurugram for three years and had developed, through the ambient culture of the sector and the active advice of people I respected, a fairly systematic approach to professional networking. I attended the right events, targeted the right connections, kept in touch with the right frequency.

I was building my network with the same structured intentionality I would have applied to any other professional objective. The results were technically measurable - my LinkedIn had expanded, I had a portfolio of contacts in relevant companies and roles, I could get introductions when I needed them.

What these connections rarely produced was anything that felt mutual. They were transactional in the specific way of relationships maintained primarily for potential utility, and the transactional quality was felt by both sides even when neither named it directly. When I reached out, people were courteous and appropriately helpful.

When they reached out, I recognised the same quality in their contact that I had in mine. It was a network of people doing the same thing to each other and calling it community.

At 26, a project brought me into sustained contact with a product leader at a partner firm who was easy to talk to in a way I did not initially attribute to anything except personality.

We talked about things adjacent to work as well as about work - about what we were reading, about failures we had learned from, about the industry in ways that were honest rather than curated.

The professional relationship deepened into something that I would actually call a genuine connection and that has produced more useful introductions, opportunities and honest counsel than every carefully targeted networking event I had attended combined. What was different about it was simply that neither of us had been treating the other as an asset.

We had been being interested in each other as people. The return on that was higher by every measure. I restructured my approach to professional relationships after that. Less targeting, more genuine curiosity. Fewer calculated follow-ups, more spontaneous contact when I was actually thinking about someone. The network is smaller now in absolute number.

The relationships it contains are real.