Writing is Networking for Introverts

This resource first appeared in issue #83 on 17 Jul 2021 and has tags Managing Your Career: Other, Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing

Writing is Networking for Introverts - Byrne Hobart

This is an older (2019) article that recently started circulating again, and I really like it.

Relationships are a key part of being an effective leader, and for building your career. Trust speeds collaboration, and we trust people we already know and have interacted with.

Increase the circle of people who trust you (and you trust) so you can have more effective and frequent collaborations requires building your relationship network. “Networking” has come to sound like a suspiciously disreputable process, especially to people like us in research, but it needn’t be. Meeting and interacting with other people who share our interests, and in doing so building professional relationships, is a good and healthy thing.

It’s also super hard to start doing if you’re an introvert, which many of us at the intersection of research + computing are.

Hobart encourages those of us who find in-person networking uncomfortable to think of writing as a way to build our professional network; as he points out,

You don’t have to introduce yourself to anyone.
You don’t have to conversationally grope around for something to talk about.
Your conversational partners are pre-selected for having shared obscure interests.

As an example, you might want to start a blog or a newsletter. You know, hypothetically.

I’d add that in our work, giving a talks at conferences is another great way to speed networking for introverts. Once you’ve given a talk the rest of the mingling events at the conference are way easier to navigate. People come to you to ask questions about something you were interested enough in to give a talk about.