The Key to Networking

This article was written by , Dr. Ivan Misner of Entrepreneur.com

When you tell entrepreneurs that relationships are the key to developing a personal and professional network, they often smile and acknowledge the concept without fully appreciating it. Let me put this notion into perspective.

Imagine you're standing in a large room full of people, and I ask everyone to pull out their key rings. Visualize everyone holding up the keys to their house, their office and their car as I ask everyone to show them to the room.

Now here's my question: Would you hand over your car keys to a perfect stranger? What about those to your office or home? Of course not!

Now instead of a key to a car or a home, imagine you have a key that opens the door to an important relationship with a colleague that another person would like to connect with. Let's say you hold the key to this relationship, but you don't know the person who's asking for it. Would you give it to them? Of course not! Why?

Because when you give a referral, you give away a piece of your reputation. If it's a good referral, it helps your reputation; if it's a bad referral, it hurts. Intuitively, you'll only hand over the keys to someone you know and trust.

What I love about this metaphor is how it works on two levels. First, you're not going to hand over the keys to a relationship until you know a person well. But more important, others don't even know what keys you actually have until you trust them enough to tell them.

It's not just you; nobody is willing to hand over the keys to important relationships until they know and trust the person asking. Unfortunately, when networking, some people expect perfect strangers to hand over the keys right away.