Managing Up with Emotional Intelligence With Melody Wilding

I want to touch on this question from Molly, who is specifically asking about

networking and networking

events.

And I'm assuming, Molly, like emotional intelligence around these situations.

But she asked, what is a good generic question to use at a networking event when you don't know anything about the person?

Mm, love this.

I usually default to something like, what are you excited about at work right now? Because it's positive and it gets at a little more emotion than another question may get at, which reveals a bit of something about the person.

What do they value? And also you get some actual information.

Like if they say, oh, I'm really excited about this new course just going to go back to like this AI technology rollout.

Okay.

I can guess maybe you're in engineering or product.

Tell me more about that.

Is that correct? Oh, what have you found most challenging or easiest about that? It opens up this whole world of other questions, but Kim, I'm, I'm, um, interested in what that is for you, what question you go to?

Yeah, it's definitely one of my go-tos.

What's exciting you lately? What has you kind of jazzed up? I think even if it's something that's not work-related, World Cup or AI or some big announcement that's been happening, I think that that's always fun to kind of leave it open-ended.

I also think it's very interesting to see how people answer the question.

So when I keep it really general and say like, well, what's, you know, what's been exciting you lately or what, what are you really jazzed about? It's interesting to see, do people go in a work direction? I mean, again, I think Molly probably depends on where you are, you know, the context of what event you're at.

If you're at an AI conference, then chances are people will launch into, you know, have you tried the fable 3.2 model? And it's so great.

You know, they're going to launch into something that's work related, but yeah, Also just leaving it generic because somebody might say, I'm so excited.

I've been following this Germany guy who's exploring America via Twitter on the World Cup as he travels around.

And it's been so entertaining.

And you can kind of get, I think, a little nugget about their life that you can follow back up with.

After the event, you could say something like, oh my gosh, I saw that your team won.

It's been a week later or something.

Because that's one thing that I'm always looking for at networking events is how can I follow up with this person in a way that is sort of classy, sort of natural.