Chief Members: Dig deeper into intentional relationship-building with Susan McPherson during her virtual workshop, How to Meaningfully Connect in a World That's Gone to Sh**, on Thursday, July 16. RSVP via the Chief app.
I could go an entire week speaking only to my doorman and my super. And I'm supposed to be an expert on connection.
You check your phone roughly 186 times a day and still feel more alone than you did five years ago. You have 1,000+ LinkedIn connections and can't name five people you'd call if something went wrong tonight. Only about a quarter of Americans say they know most of their neighbors. Nearly half of adults under 30 don't feel part of any community at all.
This isn't a personal failing. It's the predictable result of 20 years spent removing every ounce of friction from human contact at the exact moment everything else — politics, the climate, the economy, the news cycle — feels like it's gone to sh**. We built technology to connect us, and yet it has delivered infinite ways to help us avoid each other while feeling perpetually overwhelmed. Post-pandemic, a lot of us simply lost the muscle memory for intentional connection, including, frankly, the professional kind that's used to build careers.
Here's what I've learned from building a 13-year-old consultancy, writing a book on connection, and watching rooms full of accomplished women nod along when I say this: Most of us know exactly how to network and connect, but we've optimized all the friction out of it and friction was the part that made it work, made it sticky, and made it meaningful.
The formula nobody can automate
The formula is simple to say and hard to practice: empathy plus friction equals connection. Empathy is listening to what someone actually needs. Friction is choosing to inconvenience yourself to support them and deliver it. An algorithm can process someone's stated preferences in a tenth of a second. It cannot notice what you didn't say out loud and act on it anyway. You can't train a platform to inconvenience itself for someone else's benefit. That's a human move, and right now it's a competitive advantage, because fewer people are bothering to make it.
This is the core of what I call Gather, Ask, Do, the framework I created after years of watching which relationships actually held up over time and which ones evaporated the moment they stopped being convenient.
Gather: Widen your table
Gather means resisting the urge to network only within your existing lane. It means opening your world to new ideas, new connections, and new opportunities. The instinct, especially in mid-career, is to deepen ties with people who already look like us, work like us, or sit at our level. That's comfortable, and it's also how networks calcify. The stronger move is to deliberately widen your table for a vendor, a junior hire, or someone two industries over, because those are exactly the connections an algorithm will never surface for you and exactly the ones that produce the unexpected opportunities down the road.
Ask: Get specific
Ask is the part of the framework most accomplished women skip. We'll do enormous favors for other people without hesitation and then go quiet when it's our turn to need something. Asking specifically, instead of vaguely, is what makes the ask usable. "Can you help me?" puts the burden of figuring out how back on the other person. Most people won't do that work, not because they don't want to help, but because the request takes too much translation. "Could you introduce me to someone on your team in finance?" gives them somewhere to start. Additionally, learning to ask meaningful questions of others opens doors for you to get to the next phase, the Do.
Do: Close the loop
Do is the follow-through, and it's where most networking quietly dies. Someone makes an introduction, you have a nice conversation, and then nothing happens for six months until you need something again. Closing the loop with a real update, a thank you that's specific about what came of it, an offer to return the favor, is what turns a one-time transaction into a relationship someone will keep investing in.
We're not choosing comfort, we’re defaulting to it
When connection was scarce — one phone line, a manual typewriter, an envelope you had to lick — intentionality was built into the friction itself. You couldn't reach 50 people by accident. Every gesture required effort, which is exactly what made it mean something.
Now that connection is frictionless, the intentionality doesn't show up on its own. We need to consciously and deliberately put it back in. If we don't, we default to the path every app is optimizing us toward: easy, shallow, and forgettable.
That's true in our personal lives, and it's just as true in our professional worlds. A LinkedIn message costs you nothing to send, so it carries almost no information about how much you value the relationship. The thing that used to separate the people who got remembered from the people who didn't was never charisma. It was who was willing to take on a little friction on someone else's behalf.
The 24-hour move you can make today
You don't need a five-year relationship-building strategy to start. You need to make one move in the next day. Not "How are you?" which forces the other person’s effort to answer and rarely leads anywhere. Try something specific: I've been thinking about what you said about X. Would it help if I introduced you to Y, or send you Z? That single sentence does what 1,000 passive LinkedIn connections can't: It names what you noticed, and it offers something that costs you a small amount of time.
Do that consistently for the people in your actual orbit, and something compounds that no platform will ever replicate. Not because the gesture itself is extraordinary, but because you'll stand out simply by being one of the few people still doing it.
In a world that's automating everything else, choosing to connect messily, slowly, and intentionally isn't a soft skill. It's the most durable professional trick you have left, precisely because it can't be scaled, faked, or delegated to a bot.