Written in 2014.
The world is an incredibly small place. I could tell you countless stories about running into people from one part of my life in another entirely.
My husband and I have never directly worked together, yet we’ve worked with many of the same people. I used to work with Finney; now I work with his wife, Becky.
The point being: don’t burn bridges. However upset or angry you are, keep building them instead. Relationships come back around.
Why the temptation is strongest at exits
It can be extremely tempting, when you’re leaving a phase of your life, to let people have it. Changing schools? Give the old administration a piece of your mind on the way out. Leaving a job? Finally say what you’ve been thinking for two years.
The problem is that people remember things, and they remember negative things most clearly. Which means it’s likely to come back to you later.
People go different ways in life. Sometimes they never cross your path again. Sometimes they do, and it’s five years later and they’re deciding whether to refer you.
What this actually looks like in practice
Here’s the concrete version from my own business.
My employees have largely come from people I know, or people they know. I found Becky through Finney. Alisa was one of my father’s caregivers. Christine I met through Girl Scouts. Many of our clients come from networking contacts we’ve built or people we’ve known for years.
That isn’t a happy accident or a nice story about karma. It’s how small businesses are actually staffed and sold, and it’s the reason the relationship you damage today has a cost you cannot currently see.
The one tip
Meet people face to face.
Coffee, lunch, dinner. Meet them where they are. Even if you work in technology and could quite happily conduct your entire professional life through a screen, go out to lunch with former colleagues. Meet new people. Keep watering the relationships you already have.
That’s it. It isn’t complicated and almost nobody does it consistently, which is precisely why it works.
The part I’d put differently now
I originally wrote that women frequently don’t spend time networking because they have families and other concerns.
That’s true in effect and wrong in framing, and it’s worth correcting.
It isn’t that women don’t prioritise relationships — plenty do it constantly, and often better than anyone. It’s that a great deal of professional networking happens at times that assume somebody else is handling the evening. Drinks after work, the conference dinner, the early breakfast, the golf. If you’re doing school pickup or you’re the one who has to be home, those events aren’t opportunities you’re declining. They’re rooms you were never really invited into.
So the useful advice isn’t “make more time.” It’s build relationships in formats that fit your actual life:
- Lunch beats drinks. It’s in the working day, it has a natural end, and nobody is more interesting at 9pm than at 1pm.
- One-to-one beats the event. A coffee with one person you want to know is worth more than a room of sixty, and takes less time.
- Use the commitments you already have. Some of my best professional relationships came from Girl Scouts. You’re already there; the people are already interesting.
- Regularity beats intensity. Four people you see twice a year outperform forty you met once.
What “don’t burn bridges” doesn’t mean
One clarification, because this advice gets misused.
It doesn’t mean tolerating bad treatment quietly. You can leave a job and say plainly why. You can decline to work with someone again. You can tell the truth in an exit conversation, including the uncomfortable parts.
The distinction is between being honest and being satisfying. Honest is stating what happened and what it cost. Satisfying is the parting shot — the email you compose in your head at 2am, the final word that makes you feel briefly excellent.
Honest is frequently useful to everyone. Satisfying only ever costs you, and the price arrives years later when you’ve forgotten you paid it.
Building relationships is worth it. So is being someone people are pleased to run into again.
What about you? Have you ever benefited from maintaining a relationship you could easily have let go?
