The Productive Networking Model is made of three elements: purpose, conversation, and relationships.
Purpose
Purpose is the single differentiator between socializing and networking. Understanding your purpose and letting it guide you has three ingredients:
- Intent: Why are you here today?
- Introduction: Framing your story in alignment with your intent.
- Permission: You belong here and by talking to others, you’re doing what you’re supposed to do.
Let’s look at an example of an international professional attending a career event in Groningen hoping to build a successful career in the Netherlands.
Intent
- ❌ Without purpose: No clarity on why you’re here or what you want to get out of this event.
- ✅ With purpose: You’re at this event with the goal of meeting other international professionals in the North and learning about what’s helped them.
Introduction
- ❌ Without purpose: Introduction covers your life story. Conversations don’t touch the core subjects that could’ve helped you.
- ✅ With purpose: You introduce yourself in the context of your career and your goals. Focused and memorable.
Permission
- ❌ Without purpose: You’re not sure if you should be there. You feel like you’re bothering people.
- ✅ With purpose: You understand that everyone here is investing in each other and you feel worth being invested in.
Intent, a clear introduction, and comfort being in the room are the foundation that have laid the groundwork for productive conversations. Next comes the actual conversation.
Conversation
Conversation skills come naturally to some, while being a challenge for others. But conversation skills are just that: skills.
Just as you once learned to eat a tompoes and ride a bike, you can learn how to have positive conversations. The art of becoming a great conversationalist is a subject with incredible depth in the subjects of psychology, sociology, and communication studies.
Rather than getting lost in the archives of research, I challenge you to practice these three habits (which are the mistakes I see made most often):
- Phone away: Your phone’s presence negatively impacts your social experience, even when it’s face down and on silent (Harvard Business Review). It also erodes the experience for your conversation partner (Virginia Tech).
- Active listening: Actively listening helps you absorb what people are saying and get to know them beyond the surface level. A simple framework for active listening is to receive information, process it, reflect it back to the speaker, and respond.
- Ask personalized questions: Respond to what you hear with follow-up questions. Asking follow-up questions increases your likability (Harvard Business School). It also helps you move past surface-level small talk.
The exception for your phone? At the end of a conversation, when you pull it out to turn a one-off meeting into a budding relationship.
Relationships
A one-off conversation does not automatically turn into a professional relationship — especially in the Netherlands. The “kennismaken” period differs between backgrounds, and it’s slower in the Netherlands than in many other countries.
This takes repeated contact over time, and it’s the step that most people skip when networking because they feel like they don’t know what to say. These steps help facilitate that:
| Follow up | Connect on LinkedIn right away and send a thoughtful message that reflects on the conversation you had in-person within 24 hours. |
| Stay visible | Comment on LinkedIn and post content of your own so people “see” you in the context of your profession. |
| Progress over time | Move from a stranger to a name that people know, like, and trust by showing up regularly over time. |
The “know, like, trust” principle is a marketing term that describes the process consumers go through with a new product, transitioning from not knowing what the product is to trusting it and its seller. The same psychology applies to people. Purpose, conversation, and relationships are the foundation of the Productive Networking Model.