Networking Unleashed: Building Profitable Connections. An Interview with Andrew Hinkelman and Michael A Forman
- mforman521
- 7 days ago
- 23 min read
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Welcome back to Networking Unleashed, building Profitable Connections. I'm your host, Michael Foreman, and today we're diving deep into one of the most overlooked truths in business networking. You can't connect profitably if you can't connect Authe authentically. In a world of constant noise, digital distractions, and AI generated everything, how do we keep our humanity front and center?
How do we actually listen, not just hear the people who are trying to build relationships with? My guest today has built his work around identity, authenticity, and empathy, the real foundations of connection. If you've ever felt like networking has become the mechanical or shallow, this conversation is your reset button.
So buckle up buttercup. This one's about stripping away the filters, turning it to what matters, and rediscovering what it means to truly connect. I would like to introduce my guest today to my wonderful podcast, Andrew Hinkelman, and he is a professional in everything. I just. Said Andrew, welcome to the podcast and why don't you give us a little bit about your background.
Thank you, Michael. Really appreciate you having me. I am honored to be here and I would love to make sure to impart a few tips and tricks along the way, but first. My background, I came up through IT organizations, driving technical teams. Went to school, university of Washington out here in Seattle, and did my engineering degree in master's degree there.
I wound up at Microsoft for a while. And for a long time that was, that's a tradition here. It's become Amazon lately, but it used to be a tradition to at least do a little bit of time at Microsoft. Done a lot of consulting work. I've found myself a little bit of a, at a transition, wondering what was next for me.
I got into more and more technical roles along the way. More leadership roles and eventually landed at a financial services company where I I worked my way into a chief technology officer role for this was a global asset manager offices in London, Singapore, Sydney, and had about 150 people in my organization at the time and really found that it was the people.
Along the way, watching people develop, helping people develop, and really getting them to the point where they were able to blossom and shine in their careers and those were the things that really moved me. Not all the meetings and the IT governance and the bureaucracy and all those kinds of.
Wound up burning out getting really tired of the routine and went into an executive coaching program. So today I'm six years into building my executive coaching business. I primarily work with tech CEOs, chief technology officers a lot of very senior leaders and founders.
On building their human skills. And by that how do they relate to people? How do they really truly connect with others? Sounds great. That real, that, that's quite an extensive background. Okay, so listen, I've developed about 10 questions and I'm gonna hit you with them if we go off script a little bit.
That's all right. Feel free, this is just a conversation between you and me. Great. In a world where everyone is curating their online identity, how can professionals reconnect with who they really are and lead with authenticity when networking? It's a great question. With all of the AI written posts and everything, it's funny I hear now people purposely putting in.
S spelling mistakes and misspellings. The big giveaway for a while was like the M dash, that was the thing that everyone joked around, right? And now people are purposely putting in mistakes. And I think that's a little window into who we are as humans, right? We're not this perfect political, presentation of a human being. And the people that are that way, we don't connect with right? We don't feel a warmth, we don't feel like they know us or that we can get to know them. So I really feel like one of the keys here is allowing yourself to make mistakes and being okay with it.
But you really have to get to that point yourself where you don't feel like you always have to be on. You always have to be super professional. People like them. Exactly. So it's an amazing, it's an amazing concept. They don't, they're not looking for you to be perfect.
That, that's so true. And I'm all about networking, communication. I have networking groups. I coach people on networking. I go and I do workshops for people. And one thing I'm always trying to have them do, and that's be their authentic self. Don't be afraid to make a mistake if you make a mistake.
Own it. Own it. Laugh about it, move on. Because everybody does it, everybody makes me. You don't wanna be as professional this is who I am. But you wanna be, because you're more personable. When you're more personable. That wall between you and your supposed client, it's coming down, right?
And that level of trust is increasing. So it just makes a better conversation, a stronger connection for sure. Good. Good. What's getting in the way of people forming real connections today? Is it fear? Is it fear of rejection, digital noise, or simply forgetting how to be human? Oh, I wanna, I'm gonna suggest something that for a lot of us, especially in business organizations, the corporate world, a lot of us were not very good.
At connecting with people, being ourselves. A lot of it was, Hey, we go to college and we learn something and we're trying to fit in and we think we want to be this person or this role, and then. There's a lot of learning and a lot of people, are just uncomfortable around people and maybe they don't learn that along the way.
They don't learn how to better connect with people, and then we introduce a lot of distraction. So in a lot of ways the past, say 10, 15 years have been a huge experiment with phones and social media and everything. So now you have a lot of people who wanted to be something when they went to college.
They maybe didn't learn human skills or how to relate to people along the way. And now you introduce this whole world of. Digital distraction. And alerts. And notifications and we're all, even those of us, even people like me who think, I'm a, I'm I don't do that. I do it. We all do it.
We're all swimming in the pool. And I think that becomes a real problem for people because they didn't have a baseline set of skills and now they're constantly. Not present in the moment. And if you're not present in the moment and paying attention, you're never gonna connect with other people.
I I can't agree with you more. Everything you just said is so impactful of the person just getting out and saying, who am I? Who are you? What what is everything? 'Cause there's so much. I listen I was in the Air Force, I was a police officer. I went through basic training. I went through the police academy.
I went through something called Air Base, ground Defense. They taught me everything, how to be a cop. And when I got to my first duty station the sergeant looked at me and said, okay, you went through everything. Yes. Forget it. Because now we're gonna teach you, and that's where my true.
Teaching began. It's something to be taught in school, but I think that's missing now in high schools and colleges, how to conduct yourself with another person. Being your authentic self being, get to be able to connect with them. Don't just go and party and everything else. You have to really learn how to, because in today's environment, when you leave school and everything, you're like faced with all of this.
Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. And what do you then, what do you do? I and I digress, oh yeah. Oh yeah. And one thing I'll add there, Michael, is that, there are people who get this, what you and I are talking about. It's not everyone, staring at their phone when they feel awkward in a group of people.
There are people who get it and they are doing it, and they're the ones that are making meaningful connections and. They're the ones that don't have to upload their resume to a bunch of companies when they want to change jobs because people know them and like them and trust them.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I couldn't have said it better myself. You're doing great. Okay, so let's do a little bit listening and hearing and a active listening. You talk about the difference between listening and active listening. How do you define the difference in today's distracted world?
A lot of times we think we're listening and there's this line that was made famous in Pulp Fiction about whether you're listening or waiting to talk. Exactly. Most of us are waiting to talk. Real active listening is where you're f. Both in the content of the conversation, but you're also in what might be called meta communication, metacognition.
Why is this story coming up and why is it coming up now? What's the story behind the story? Is this person sharing something with me because they feel uncomfortable about it, something they're processing, or are they trying to get me to buy something or think that they're really impressive and so I think active listening is.
It's not just body language or just the words that are being exchanged. It's everything and it, you can't do that unless you are truly in the moment and truly present. And 90% of what we experience just going through our days going to the grocery store takes us out of that. Like, when's the last time you were standing in line at the grocery store just looking around and able to smile at the person behind you?
It's it's almost unheard of. Sure. And so I think the real answer there is, listening's great. Step, but I would say active listening is really more about the whole three dimensional experience of being, in the company of another person. Absolutely. Absolutely.
And you brought up two very solid points. One is your active listening with the other person that you're sitting down with. And a little trick of mine when I active listen, because I never think about the next thing that I wanna say. I'm concentrating on what they're saying, so I repeat some of it back to them.
So in other words, I understand that you want. This, or I understand that you're talking about this and you go on repeat some of it and you continue on with it, so that shows them that you're listening to what they're saying. So it's very important. But I also, 'cause networking is such a broad and generic field that I tell people when they're online to grocery store, online at a department store, look around.
The person behind you may talk about mortgages, right? And I used to be in the mortgage field, so if you have something intelligent to say it. Turn back around if they're interested, then they'll tap you on the shoulder and say, excuse me, but could you explain a bit more about that? It's just, and you're all of a sudden now you're getting the recognition of everybody around you and everybody's listening, so it's amazing what type of networking you can accomplish.
One thing I'll add to that, Michael which I absolutely love, is that what we're really talking about here. Is practicing. Practice at the grocery store, practice at Starbucks practice. When you bump into your neighbor getting the mail, these are little moments that add up if you feel overwhelmed when you go to a conference and you're expected to spend that first hour networking, or what about when lunch gets served?
That's now, that's big time, right? If you don't know anyone and you have to find someone to eat with and you don't want to eat alone. That's the, it could be a lot of pressure, right? Absolutely. Start small, right? Do your reps, get comfortable with it in like your everyday places, and then it'll be much easier later on.
I, I tell everybody it takes three things to get good at networking as a whole. Practice and practice. Absolutely. Practice yourself. Practice in front of a mirror. Practice at the department store, practice at the grocery store practice because the more reps you get in, the more comfortable you will be, talking to anybody else.
Yeah. So remember those three things? Practice. That's what we all need. Yes, we do. Okay. As technology takes over more human touchpoints, where does empathy fit into the networking equation, and how do we keep it from being replaced by convenience? Interesting question, Michael. First I want to make sure that we talk a little bit about what we mean by empathy, because I hear this a lot that, empathy is a word that can confuse a lot of people.
And maybe we can broaden it a little bit and say. Caring about another person or caring about their experience or even acknowledging that they have a different experience than you. That's a little bit of, in psychology they call it a theory of mind. The ability to understand that someone else is going through something that, that, that is different from you.
Maybe just as or more important or critical in their life as what you are going through. So caring about the experiences someone else is having, I think is your avenue into making real connection because people, like people that are interested in them. It's the old how to win friends and influence people, right?
It's when I'm curious about you and I ask you questions about you, and I'm listening and if it's in a genuine way where I do affirm your experience and I say things back to you and I give you some indications that I'm paying attention. You're going to come away feeling like we'd made a connection.
And one of the things too that, that I want to come back to is this distraction and business and all that. And for a lot of people, they feel like it's work. Like I have to be on, I have to be available, I have to be, I have to answer emails at night and stuff like that. I wanna suggest that we all need to fight back a little bit.
We need to reclaim a bit of our own ability to just calm ourselves down and be present. And there again, we talked about practice. There are a lot of small turn the notifications off of your phone, right? Are you getting popups on every single email that comes up on your desktop or your laptop?
Pretty sure you don't need that 'cause you're gonna look at your email anyway. And if you're not, you're doing, hopefully you're doing valuable work and you shouldn't be distracted by that. So my point here really is that just the way that we practice having conversations with people in the grocery store, in line at Starbucks practice, reducing the noise.
And you can reclaim a bit of your own attention so that it's easier when you are interacting with other people. Absolutely. A absolutely. And that brings me to a point where, whenever I network, or I'm teaching people how to network, I say, go there with a servant's heart. Go there thinking, what can I do for them and not for me?
Because what that does is that releases all of the tension, all the everything off my shoulders. It's no longer a problem. So if I'm going there and I'm saying, okay, Andrew, you're tell you're talking to me or everything, I bring in something called FORM, family, occupation, recreation, and there's a message.
So I try to pick out one of those things and have you talk about it. Family, that's easy because everybody loves to talk about themselves or their family, or their kids or their grandchildren, whatever. If they talk about youth sports that I'm in like Flint because I was a coach, I was a mentor, I was everything.
And then it moves to occupation. And they start talking about what they do and how they do it and everything else. And I stop them and I say, you know something, Andrew, I like you. I like the way you do business. How can I make you more successful? How can I be a good referral source for you? And if I did my job correctly, you say, Mike, I don't even know what the hell you do yet.
And that's perfect. And the follow up is a whole nother conversation. That starts the whole thing because that shows them that I'm very interested in helping them and not just selling something. Yeah. And like you said, it takes the pressure off. I don't need to show up at this event and sell my thing.
I don't need to find five amazing clients or any of that. All I have to do is be curious. That's it. That's it. And connect. You're connect. I listen. I told in a mortgage mor firm. Big Bang. Big. I was high up, and I used to go to a networking event, and I used to come home with a shoebox filled with business cards.
I said, look how good I did. Did I do that? What? No, I didn't. Right? So now when I teach people, they go to a three or four hour event, you come home with 15, maybe 20 business cards, right? Because that means that you made a connection to all of those people. Then you follow up accordingly. But it's such a difference.
I went to the school of hard knocks. I learned how to do everything wrong before I did it correctly. But now I hope, I think I'm doing correctly because I'm teaching people and I hope I'm teaching them the correct way. Okay, so everyone says just be authentic, but those authentic mean, we've been constantly adapting to fit different professional circles.
Incredible question and let's just, let's call it like it is. I think as you are, especially if you're working in a corporate environment, working for a company. There is a bit of that. There's a bit of am I fitting in? Am I understanding what the rules of engagement are? Do I, am I tuning into the culture of the company, the subculture, the way real decisions are getting made?
There's a little bit of that, right? If everyone dresses in business casual and jeans on Friday, it would be in your best interest to probably do the same. Even if you're a sweatpants, you know the way people go to the airport, right? And they get on planes, right? Even if you're one of those people.
So authenticity doesn't mean, hey, I'm a cranky jerk and everyone just has to love me the way I am. That's not authenticity, right? Authenticity. The way we should think about authenticity is really that you have opinions and you have ideas, and you're able to talk about yourself in a way that. Is both affirming and also encourages input from others.
You're not inflicting yourself on others you're encouraging people to engage with you. I went through a lot of this myself as trying to be this sort of corporate. Executive and fit in a financial services company where, at the start it was like everyone was in suits all the time.
And that was as far away from my world as I could ever get. And, you gotta just figure out the stuff that doesn't matter and use genuine one-on-one conversations to get to know people and build strong connections with people. I that's perfect.
I could have said it better myself. Because it's not a matter of you trying to fit in. You're trying to make yourself well, fit in. But have everybody else acknowledge the fact that you, what am I trying to say? That you are part of the group. Let's call it the group, and you wanna be a part of the group.
You don't want, you don't wanna speak at people, you wanna speak to people and have them respond to you. And it's how you respond to the responses that help you fit in, right? Yes. And fighting against. Things that don't really matter too much is really just gonna set you off to the side. The things that matter are speaking what you feel like is truth.
And, sometimes you suffer the consequences of it. But a lot of times, honoring your own ideas, that builds real authenticity. Yes I couldn't agree more. Okay, so we're surrounded by constant noise, content, opinions, updates, notifications, as you said before. How do you personally cut through that and stay connected to people who matter most?
It's a great question, Michael. For me staying connected with people takes effort. I'm not gonna tell you that, I call my mom every day. Okay. I it does take effort. And I'm I'm, as I like to say that I'm a lot more present or I can be present in situations, and I think that's probably true a lot of time.
But, in a lot of ways I'm I'm swimming in the pool with everyone else, i'm distracted too. So you know what? Sometimes I put it on my calendar, call dad, yeah. My son has been in the Bay Area for a long time now, and we used to purposely have a biweekly meeting where, we would just chat and it was great for his schedule.
He was super busy. It was great for my schedule. There's nothing wrong with that, what you don't want is to be walking around feeling bad that you haven't reached out to people or talk to people and sometimes to be fair to ourselves, sometimes we just forget or we're just not in the mood.
You go out, you take your garbage cans out to the curb, your neighbors are there chatting, you're like, head down, pull the baseball cap down. Not available. It's okay. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You yourself afraid? Yep. Yep. You can do that. You could just say, I don't want any of that now because I'm just not in the mood.
However, sometimes you have to open yourself up to that, you have to say, look out the window and see your neighbors talking. You'll not take the garbage out for 10 minutes because that means that both. Disperse. But otherwise, you take 'em out now and you go out and say, Hey, what's going on?
And talk with them. So you really, you make that de decision. But don't be pressured into going out and being open and talking to everybody because we're not built like that. We need our alone time, but we don't want to take that too far. Okay. So as AI starts to handle more of our communication, emails, social posts, even introductions, where do you think human connection still has an irreplaceable edge?
I think what we're gonna find and maybe this is happening now, is that. There is some sort of surface level interaction going on with ai and you see it you I see it on LinkedIn. It's so incredible what has happened on LinkedIn in the past five years, maybe eight years now.
But, i'm, I don't wanna wax too philosophically about LinkedIn, but that's it's a fascinating thing to watch. And so you're right AI content creators, people managing your social media for you, all those things are happening. But I think. For one thing, the really generic stuff is never gonna get picked up on.
It's the posts or the interactions that actually have some meaning behind them, some genuine opinions. You, I think as humans, we are good. We're good at that, and we can tap into, a million years of trying to figure out if that's a tiger or whether it's just the wind blowing outside the cave.
We're pretty smart when it comes to, whether we're talking to a stereotypical used car salesman or an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, right? We can tell so I think at the heart of your question really is like, where does this lead? And I think there we're in a world where all the surface interactions are probably gonna be, formulated.
They're gonna be mechanical and the people that are able to break through that have a real message, have a genuine message, be of service to your point earlier are gonna break through it. And really beyond that. I don't want to talk to an ai, like I want to talk to a real human who's, who has, lived experience and is willing to share the ups and downs of their life with me.
I think the humanity is going to actually become more and more important. The more that there's going to be a a subset of our of our sort of coworkers in the world that are okay with ai, I think the success and the fruits are gonna be with the people that are willing to break through it.
Yeah, that's, one thing that I try to keep in mind. Another thing that I coach people about is that, this Zoom calls going all the time, but you have to remember one thing. There's a person on the other end of that call, right? It's not AI generated, it's not anything. You're talking to him one-on-one.
So you have to think about the person who is behind the Zoom call, not just. Zoom call. So listen, if you can meet 'em one-on-one in a coffee shop or whatever else, that, that's terrific. But if you can't and you're talking to them over Zoom, you have to remember there are people too. They're a person.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's one thing that I try to coach with. Okay. So can you recall a moment. When you realized you weren't showing up as your true self in a professional setting, and what changed after that? There's been a lot of moments like that, and I mentioned having this executive role in a financial services company.
And for me. I'm a little bit more of I want to go dig in the dirt, I like to be on a mountain bike. I like to be outside. I have a couple apple trees. I'm like, I like to be outside. And I always felt a little bit like, Hey, I have to play a little bit of this game here and fit in.
Because I've invested 20 years into my career and a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in CERT cybersecurity certifications and IT trainings and all that kind of stuff, and I it can feel like a machine that you are, you're at the front of, but you're not necessarily like really steering.
And there have been plenty of moments where I felt like I am getting into something that I don't care too much about. And one of the big moments in my career was burning out really badly and I didn't even know that I was in burnout. People I. Seven, eight years ago would say things like burnout and it was just like, oh, take the weekend off and rub some dirt in it, by the way. And, real burnout is elusive because suddenly you start to care a lot less and the when you used to reply to your boss's email within 10 or 15 minutes, suddenly you're going like a day and you're caring less and less, and.
The thing that changed for me was that, I knew I had to make a change and that was the, that was one of the big catalysts for me for doing the work. What do I want? What do I want to do with my life? What do I want to be in five years? What are the big, what would be fulfilling?
For me as I go into the next phase of my career and it really drove me to start my coaching business. Wow. That's good. That's great. We all have that. We've all come from corporate. We all began our coaching journey and we've also felt that bit of burnout. When you're used to answering those emails almost on the spot saying, oh yeah, I'll be right there, or whatever else, and it starts taking you longer and longer, if you can self realize what's going on, you'll make that decision either to.
Time to change ships or let me just figure out something and continue on my way, yeah. So you have to make that distinct decision. Okay. If someone asked your closest friends or colleagues, what makes you a great listener, what would they say and what do you hope that they'd notice?
I think that they would say. That I ask a lot of questions and that's probably not surprising since I'm an executive and leadership coach. But in third grade, I won a pro an award for most inquisitive. So I haven't changed that much in that respect over time. So I like to know a lot about people.
Like I want to know like where in Georgia are you? I've been there. I have family there. Maybe you live near them. I'd love to hear about the military like I have. I have 50 questions about you, Michael, that I haven't asked. 'cause I'm super curious about people. So I think it's the question part.
But actually the second part of your question is what would they, what would I want them to take away? And I think it would be the presence I want. I want to be in conversation with someone where even if I don't say a word, they can feel that I am there. I'm not wondering what's for lunch. I'm not wondering like why my phone is buzzing in my pocket.
I'm actually there with them, human to human and that it's, and that it's important to me what you just said. It should resonate so, so much with each person, but having that the phone in your pocket, that takes away the majority of your distractions when you're with a person, right? That's one of the first things I coach.
Put the phone away, turn it off, turn the buzzer off, turn everything off, and just be with the person. So by you doing that instinctively and you being. Present with the person that you're speaking to. How else would they describe you? They would say no, Andrew listens to me. Nobody listens to me.
Andrew does, he gets me. And that is probably the most important thing that I think that anybody would say about me is that he gets. So that, that goes on from there. Yeah. So let's bring this podcast full circle. Looking ahead five to 10 years, as technology evolves and attention spans shrink, what will authentic connection look like and what habits should we be building now to prepare for it?
An incredible question. I'm gonna approach that with some of the themes that, that we've been talking about. But one thing that, so I've coached people at a lot of different companies. And not just engineers, a lot of engineers, a lot of very senior engineers which is a direct connection back to my corporate background in engineering.
But I want people to understand that it's highly likely that the person you're interacting with is incredibly lonely and anxious. The pandemic did a lot of things and we could argue the pluses and minuses of the pandemic. But one thing about a lot of people is that they got used to being by themselves.
Being at home and like remote work hasn't, it's not a great fit for a lot of people. People complain about this return to the office stuff, right? Yeah. That, that seems really heavy handed. But on the other hand, working from home alone day in, day out is not real healthy for a lot of people.
So I think you have to assume that the person in front of you is incredibly lonely and incredibly anxious because the speed of our world, our devices, our notifications, things are speeding up our, the way that we process things in our minds. Wouldn't it be amazing to be the person, even if it's for five minutes, that could actually listen to that person and almost be the one, maybe the one person in the week or the month that is actually there in that moment, looks them in the eye and smiles, affirms what they're saying, says it back to them.
Connects, like you could probably change someone's day with just being present, looking them in the eye, nodding and smiling in a genuine way. And the speediness, the ai, the technology that's not going away. There's too much money in it, right? It's not going away. But we're definitely. Po we're definitely in a situation where we can be the person that, that provides a little moment of peace and connection to someone else.
That's great. That's perfect. That's a perfect answer to the question. Andrew, this was a great podcast. I thank you so much for coming on. If somebody wanted to get hold of you, either just to ask you a question or to ask you about coaching, where can they reach you? Yeah, A great place to reach me is on LinkedIn.
You can find me. It's just Andrew Hinkelman. And one thing that I'll say is I do a lot of what I might call pro bono coaching. If someone wants to just see what coaching is I take an hour with tons of people week to week, just to do. A real conversation, not unlike the conversation we're having right now, it's just what's going on?
What are you working on? What's, where's the friction? That's something that I do with people frequently. We just take an hour and you can, get a feel for what a real coaching session is like. So that's something that I'd offer to any of your audience. On my LinkedIn, there is a link to book time with me that's a great way to connect.
Great. Andrew, thank you so much and I hope people will take you up on it and they will all contact you soon. Absolutely. Thank you Michael. Appreciate it.
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Folks. A huge thank you to our guests for sharing such incredible insights today, and of course, a big shout out to you, our amazing listeners, for tuning in and spending your time with us. If you're interested in my digital courses being coached or having me come and talk to your company, just go to MichaelAForman.com and fill out the request form.
Remember, networking isn't about being perfect. It's about being present. So take what you've learned today, get out there and make some meaningful connections. If you've enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to subscribe. Leave us a review. Share it with someone who could use a little networking inspiration.
Let's keep the conversation going. You can find me on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, or my website michaelaforman.com/podcast.
Michael is a business networking expert specializing in enhancing professionals' networking and communication skills to drive profitability. As a leading authority in this field, he is highly sought after for his dynamic presentations and workshops. His extensive experience has consistently led to significant improvements in corporate profitability by empowering individuals and organizations to connect more effectively and efficiently.
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