I Forget That Other People Exist

A senior engineering leader’s honest reckoning with the skill he kept avoiding.

I have a confession that anyone who has spent more than two decades treating deliverables as the centre of gravity will probably recognise.

I am terrible at networking.

Not because I lack access. I have been leading cross-geographic engineering teams for more than two decades. I have built strong working relationships at every organisation I have been part of. I am highly active in the IIM Bangalore Alumni network as part of IIMB Orators Club. I write in public. I can be warm at a gathering and hold a long conversation when someone calls. The surface conditions are all present.

What is missing is more uncomfortable to admit: I forget that other people exist.

I get so absorbed by my own tasks, priorities, and next steps that the person I spoke with at last week’s event becomes a blur. I do not remember their name. I do not remember what they were working on. I almost never follow up. And when I deliberately try to network, a different discomfort surfaces: I feel transactional. As if I am reaching out only because I might need something later. The feeling is immediate, and I retreat into the safety of the work in front of me.

This pattern has cost more than I can measure.

What My Friends Taught Me Before Any Framework Could

I have been fortunate. Some of my closest friends are natural networkers, the kind who could teach masterclasses on the subject. Watching them has been quietly instructive.

They remember names. They remember context: a daughter’s recital, the project that was stressing someone out, the book mentioned in passing. They follow up not because they need something, but because they were genuinely listening in the first place. And here is the part that took me years to understand: they do not experience this as work. For them, it is simply how you treat people.

I used to believe this was personality, extroversion, social fluency, some innate gift. The longer I watched, the clearer it became that the difference was not personality. It was orientation. They were oriented toward others. I was oriented toward tasks.

That distinction matters more than most leadership advice admits.

The Framework That Gave the Struggle a Name

A few years ago I saved a Harvard Business Review article by Herminia Ibarra and Mark Lee Hunter, “How Leaders Create and Use Networks” (January 2007). I only recently sat with it properly. It gave shape to something I had felt but could not articulate.

The authors describe three distinct forms of networking:

Operational networking is about the people you need to get today’s work done: your team, your stakeholders, your immediate collaborators. Most of us who survive in delivery roles become reasonably good at this.
Personal networking reaches outside the organisation to people who share interests, professional curiosity, or life stage. It is where perspective and personal growth often come from.
Strategic networking is the hardest and most neglected. It connects your work to the larger landscape of where the organisation or industry is heading. It is the network that surfaces opportunities and risks before they appear on any formal agenda.

Reading this, I recognised myself at once. I have spent most of my career almost exclusively in the operational zone. I know how to build working relationships when there is a shared deliverable. I know how to earn trust inside a team. The moment the task boundary ends, my attention often ends with it. The personal and strategic layers have remained chronically thin; not because I did not know they existed, but because I kept telling myself I did not have time for them.

One observation in the article stopped me cold: managers who neglect strategic networking often discover they are out of the loop precisely when the stakes are highest. I have lived that moment. Walking into a room and realising that decisions about my domain had already been shaped in conversations I was never part of. Not because anyone deliberately excluded me, but because I had never built the relationships that would have made my presence natural.

The Real Barrier: Confusing Service with Extraction

My resistance has never been primarily about introversion or calendar scarcity. Those are symptoms. The root is a largely unexamined belief that networking is fundamentally extractive; that reaching out is a form of taking, that the hidden transaction beneath every professional relationship is “What can you do for me?”

That belief made networking feel morally compromised. Every time I forced myself to “build a connection,” I felt like a fraud. So I stopped trying.

The opposite of extraction is not avoidance. It is offering.

What I missed, and what my friends have been modelling for years, is that the opposite of extraction is not avoidance. It is offering.

Look at nature. A tree draws nutrients and water from the soil and, in return, returns leaves, fruit, and shade that enrich the same soil and shelter other species. It takes carbon dioxide and gives oxygen. The exchange is so continuous that it becomes meaningless to ask whether the tree is primarily a giver or a taker. Water needs a path to flow; in flowing it creates the river that countless forms of life depend upon. Almost every living system survives through cycles of taking and giving that are difficult to separate.

What if I reached out to someone not because I might need them someday, but because I currently have something that might be useful to them? A perspective from a different industry. An introduction to someone facing a similar problem. An article that speaks directly to what they are carrying. A genuine question that signals: I see you, and what you are doing matters.

This is not a technique. It is a posture. The difference between the two is the difference between networking that drains you and networking that sustains you.

What I Am Committing to Do Differently

Reframing is necessary but insufficient. It needs concrete practice. Here is what I am committing to, publicly, because accountability helps:

Remember the person, not just the role. After every meaningful conversation I will note one human detail: what they care about, what they are struggling with, what lit them up. Not in a CRM. In a simple personal note. The goal is attention, not data capture.
Offer before asking. When someone comes to mind whom I have not spoken to in a while, my first question will not be “Do I need something from them?” It will be “Do I have something that might be useful to them right now?” An insight, a referral, a piece of writing, an honest observation. The offering does not have to be large. It has to be genuine.
Follow up within 48 hours. Pure discipline. The number of potentially valuable relationships I have allowed to wither because I did not send a short message after meeting someone is embarrassing. The follow-up is not the networking itself; it is the evidence that the connection was real.
Treat personal and strategic relationships as infrastructure, not luxury. I will stop treating non-operational relationships as optional extras for people with more free time. They are part of the work of leadership. I will allocate time for them the way I allocate time for delivery planning, as a non-negotiable commitment.
Stop scanning and start being present. The worst version of networking is scanning the room for the most important person while pretending to listen to the one in front of you. Presence is the foundation. If I cannot be fully present with the person I am speaking to, I have no business trying to expand my network.

The Seva Reframe

In Indian traditions, seva means selfless service. It is not charity, which implies hierarchy. It is not generosity that depends on having surplus. Seva is the recognition that what you carry: knowledge, experience, perspective, connections; none of it was entirely yours. It was shaped by teachers, mentors, colleagues, and circumstances. Offering it is not giving something away. It is completing a cycle.

This is how I want to practise networking from here. Not primarily as a career strategy. Not as a leadership skill to be optimised for maximum return. But as seva: the quiet, deliberate act of being useful to the people around you without keeping score.

I suspect the returns will take care of themselves. Even if they do not, the practice itself will make me a better colleague, a better leader, and a more present human being. After twenty-five years of being consumed by the next deliverable, that may be the most important outcome of all.

I am curious: what shifted networking from obligation to something natural for you? Was it a mindset change, a specific habit, or someone who modelled it differently? I would genuinely like to know.

The HBR article referenced is “How Leaders Create and Use Networks” by Herminia Ibarra and Mark Lee Hunter (Harvard Business Review, January 2007).

Life as Sakti