I did 100+ 1:1s in 7 months and here is what I experienced.
I joined my current organization after world went remote. Meeting people isn’t a luxury anymore. I experimented on something completely new domain to me — People & networking and here is my experience from doing more than hundred 1:1s since April-2020.
People don’t bite.
For various reasons, I had fear of meeting new people. Fear of what people will think of me. I’m stupid in private what if everyone finds that out.
They will know that I’m not good enough and I don’t deserve to be where I’m.
I believe I’m just lucky to be where I’m today and it has very less to do with my abilities or talent but then one day before joining Atlassian I came across a Ted talk by Mike Cannon-Brookes about how everyone has imposter syndrome and it hit me hard. So I enrolled in donut sessions and started meeting people within the organization who were unrelated to my work/team. I met leaders, engineers, advocates, designers, event managers and people from very different workstream than what I do.
To overcome my fear. I made only one promise to myself, I won’t cancel connect from my side — no matter what. No other rules.
To my utmost surprise, people were more than welcoming. Almost everyone loved the gesture that I took initiative to set up the call. When I didn’t know what to talk, I tried being genuine to them by mentioning that I’m very new to habit of meeting new people and they helped me in having a good conversation. Many of them gave brilliant tips on what good conversation starters can be, which I started using in my upcoming connects.
Yes, few of the connects didn’t turn out well. There were awkward silences and moments when we both didn’t know what to talk but all this seemed very natural while I was going through it. The feeling of getting embarrassed was all only in my mind.
People are unique, not ill-intended.
We engineers spend most of life talking to engineers so much that everything becomes an engineering problem to us that can be resolved by applying some formula. Many times when I met people at work or outside work and things didn’t work out between us. It was very easy to assume that people don’t like me or they are just dumb. This was my formula for way out. Easy, quick and works every-time.
I started meeting people who did not understand technical lingo. I felt powerless. I felt like a frog who has been in a pond for so long that it thought that’s the all world there is. Listening to people outside my workstream started giving me perspective and gave me patience to listen to people, because I started realizing everyone has a vantage which I must be unaware of. This meant letting go of my engineering ego and start accepting ideas with wider horizon than I could ever imagine.
I started understanding that logic is not everything that there is.
Talking to people without agenda is okay.
I still fear that I need to have something groundbreaking to discuss to set up a call with someone high in the hierarchy. I’m working on it. Imagine a world where no-one talks to each other unless they have something “important” to say. When I started doing two-three 1:1s every week, the biggest worry I had was, what will I talk? What if I say something unimportant and that person feels that I wasted her/his 25mins? This thought was exhausting me and then one day I started experimenting on what if I assume that I’m not meeting someone for the first time? What if I speak just like I do with my friends over the weekend? How bad it can be! I started talking with no serious agenda and I started calling that out in meeting invite.
Hey XYZ,
Ajay here. Recently joined Atlassian and thought of saying hi. I don’t have any serious agenda for this meeting, feel free to reschedule or decline it. It is completely fine.
It took lot of pressure off me. Guess what? No one declined the invite yet.
Imposter syndrome is very real.
I noticed something weird but real in the rooms while I was meeting people, even they were more or less hesitant just like I was.
A percentage of people texted on last moment about why they can’t make it today with very similar reasons that I wanted to give in the first place. Now folks, there must be some genuine cases too, but it helped me understand that we all are humans. We all share same type of fears. If I think that I’m not good enough, I must not be alone.
PS: This is still an ongoing experiment for me. I’m far from done yet. I do make more mistakes in a day than Mr. Ambani earns dollars in that same amount of time. I would appreciate if you can pitch in and comment/message me something that you found valuable on this topic or just share your story.
Or let’s connect and I would love to listen to your story.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn.
