People keep telling me I have a great network.

Friends, clients, hosts when they introduce me at events. “Jürgen knows everyone.” Every time I feel a bit awkward. I just know the people I know, and I stay in touch with the ones I like and whose work I’m curious about.

That doesn’t seem like a special skill to me. If you want to be successful in business, don’t you just need a lot of good and trusted relationships?

But it keeps coming up, and I still try to figure out what’s supposed to be so special about it. So here’s my attempt to unwind what I think good networking actually is.

A lot of what gets called networking is just selling with extra steps. Someone you’ve met for ten minutes asks for a call. The call begins with small talk and ends with a pitch. The relationship has a function from the start. That isn’t networking. It’s selling.

I never worked that way. My driver has always been curiosity about the person. Their interests, what they’re working on, what’s keeping them busy.

What I think I’m actually good at is seeing connections. I keep noticing two people I know who should know each other, because something useful would happen if they did. So I make the introduction. I’m the enabler.

I also often see something the other person doesn’t see yet. Once in a while I’ll send a link that fits what they were working on. Or I’ll point them to someone else I know who once dealt with the same thing.

The idea is to share ideas and to give for a long time before ever asking for a favor. I don’t expect anything to come back.

If you do that for years, you eventually get recognized as the person who builds bridges, the person around whom things happen that wouldn’t have happened without those bridges.

My biggest reward is when something actually happens after bringing two people together. Honestly, when it works, that on its own makes me happy.

I think I learned this without noticing. My father ran a restaurant in a big hotel. He gave as a host, every night, for decades. By the end he knew most of his guests well. When I worked there during school holidays, I was surprised that he just knew everyone who walked in.

I’ll dive deeper into this over the next weeks. If there’s anything around networking you’d like me to take a closer look at, let me know.