Heading to a party soon? Use it to your advantage! By knowing how to read a room, you can make the most of any social interaction and network. Here are a networking few tips for those upcoming holiday parties:
Excerpt:
Some people enter a room of strangers and glide along from one lively conversation to another, uncovering golden new business contacts.
How do they do it?
These people know how to read a room—a capacity that can be partly inborn, but also learned. From the barrage of sights, sounds and behavioral details, they extract clues about which people have the most to offer and which to avoid.
That energetic guy with the 1,000-watt smile, booming voice, ready handshake and a fistful of other people’s business cards might seem like fun, for example. But he’s moving too fast to connect with people in a meaningful way and is probably just trying to bag clients.
“You meet somebody at a business function, and five minutes later they’re slapping you on the back and calling you by a nickname, ‘Yo, Vic!’ Only my close friends call me Vic,” says Vickie J. Gray, chief marketing officer at Ober Kaler, a Baltimore law firm. Such glad-handers “give networking a bad name,” she says.
Read More: The Smartest Ways to Network at a Party | WSJ | http://on.wsj.com/2f9QSba