The other day, I was on my way to a work drinks party when I made an annoying discovery.
Scrolling through my emails to double check the address, I discovered that the date of the event had been changed, to the night before.
“Bullet dodged,” said a colleague who thought I’d be glad I’d wasted two hours of chatting with strangers over a warm glass of chardonnay.
How it happened, he was wrong. I was looking forward to seeing some guests I knew from overseas who would be hard to meet in person again. But in general he would have been right.
One of the darkest terms in the English language for many of us is “net event”. Among the few positives of the pandemic was the absence of such things. But now that they are back in force, my colleague’s reaction has reminded me that, before Covid, there were people I admired for being of master blenders.
They may not have been in the league of President Joe Biden, whose ability to work a room is formidable. But they knew how to get around gracefully, efficiently, and seemingly effortlessly. How did they do it? I called a few to ask and here are my conclusions.
First, the elite schmoozer is likely to be intelligent and innately outgoing, although these qualities alone do not explain their success.
Most I spoke to insisted they experience all the normal anxieties related to work events: being stuck alone in a strangers room; getting the cold shoulder when trying to gently butt into a conversation; forget people’s names.
The difference is that they do something most people never do: they get ready. They think about who will be there, who they want to see, and what kinds of things they can feasibly talk about once they start a conversation.
If this sounds calculating that’s because it is. But it makes it less likely that you’ll do what I once did at a corporate event where I asked a man I’d just met what he did at the moderately large company he told me he worked for. “CEO,” he said.
This is a reminder that successful shufflers take it upon themselves to introduce themselves, properly, to avoid such awkward conversation holes.
Of course, the question of the conversation itself is also important. Here it helps to be bright, charming, and well-read, but if you’re not, you can at least learn to avoid the more obnoxious habits of job function boredom.
One of the reasons I suspect there are so many editions of the American bestseller, How to work a roomhave been published since the first in 1988 is that its author, Susan RoAne, devotes an entire chapter to these people.
Among the worst are the self-absorbed braggarts who use every interval of conversation as a springboard to talk about themselves in a way that is, as RoAne puts it, “not only obvious but mildly offensive.”
Successful mixers are good listeners. They also avoid the boring behavior of the networker who ruthlessly scans the room for better options.
These people are best avoided, which leads to one of the more vexing issues of camerawork: knowing how to politely extricate yourself from a conversation without giving offense.
This is where the truly skilled shuffler stands out. None of the experts I consulted thought much about my preferred strategy of announcing a need to visit the toilet, a foolproof ploy with admittedly limited enforcement. Most endorsed another common tactic: ask if anyone would like another drink and head to the bar. This can cause a sharp break with those you wish to detach from and even if it doesn’t, it means, as one expert put it, “the seal has been broken” and detachment is more likely.
The most skilled speed up this process by grabbing onto passers-by and introducing them into the conversation, even if this requires attention and skill.
Ultimately, there’s a lot to be said for simple honesty. A work event generally involves an element of work, so it’s okay to say exactly what I’ve been told so often. “It was nice to talk, but I need to meet someone else before I leave. Let’s do it again!
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