Awkward moments can be one reason why people shy away from networking altogether. Your networking was going fine until the unforeseen happened, and you didn’t know what to do and found yourself saying “well, this is awkward.” Here are some common awkward moments and some tips on how to deal with them.
Ending the endless conversation that just won’t end:
You are in an endless conversation with someone, it is not productive, the conversation has moved into a place where you feel uncomfortable, is too social, not business focused, etc. What do you do? Here are some ideas:
- Use body language to your advantage, move to a diagonal position to the individual to invite someone else into this mix. A closed conversation is when our feet are parallel to their feet, and we are eyeball-to-eyeball with each other.
- Look around the room for someone you know, and then say “Excuse me; I need to talk to so-and-so.” Then politely shake hands
and walk away. - The flip-side of this is “I really don’t want to monopolize your time, and I feel I’ve done that already; I’m sorry. We do need to chat further at another time to follow up.” Shake hands and walk away.
- If the person is just too talkative, but there is an interest to explore ways to do business in the future, then say “I will get in touch about ______ by _____ and we can talk further.” Shake hands and walk away.
- Look for someone in the room to introduce this person to, or look for a group of people to join. Say, “I want to introduce you to so-and-so; let’s walk over to him/her.” Or look for a circle of more than two people to join that seems engaged and say, “I wonder what’s going on over there; let’s go check it out.”
- The old standby for me is, “I’m sorry, I do need to excuse myself.” Then head directly to the restroom.
Excerpt taken from the book “10 Answer Keys, Effective Business Networking” available on Amazon.com
More about this topic next week!
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