Networking Unleashed: Building Profitable Connections. An Interview with Marja Fox and Michael A Forman
Welcome to Networking Unleashed, Building Profitable Connections, the show where relationships create opportunity and cr- and communication drives results. I'm your host, Michael Forman. Most people think networking happens one conversation at a time, but what if the same skills that help you build trust with one person are the exact skills needed to lead a team, align an organization, and navigate complex challenges?
My guest today brings a unique perspective on communication at scale. We're talking about leading a team isn't all that different from building a network, why smart leaders know when to bring in outside perspectives, and why some of the biggest opportunities come to those who are willing to play the long game In a world that rewards instant gratification, this conversation is a powerful reminder that trust, influence, and meaningful relationships are built over time.
If you're looking to strengthen your communication, improve your leadership, and create relationships that produce lasting results, this episode is for you. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today Marsha Fox. She's an expert in everything I just explained, and I would just like to ask h- first of all, hello Marsha.
How are you? I'm good. How are you, Michael? Good. I would just like you to give us the CliffsNotes of how you got where you are today. You have no idea how difficult a CliffsNote version of my life is, because it feels like it was all over the map. But here's my best attempt. I now, as you say, facilitate executive team conversations, usually around strategy or big strategic questions, the things that are far in the future.
How I got here? Most recently I was a VP at Ecolab, so spent some time in a, kind of formal organizational executive leadership position myself, which gives you absolutely a great idea of where the real sticky points are. Prior to that, most of my career was in at McKinsey, so I was a management consultant doing similar kinds of work, right?
Tackling businesses' or organizations' biggest problems through a management consulting lens. Prior to that, though, I was a chemist, a PhD chemist, and and a theater nerd, all of which has actually come full circle. Standing in front of a room helping them have a conversation pulls on my theater skills.
Solving really hard problems pulls on my chemistry skills. So all of those things woven together to get me here, focused on areas where hard problems need to be solved, and they need to be solved with people. Very good. And I can't agree with you more since that's what I go across the country talking about.
So we're on the same line same level. Okay. So you say communicating with a team isn't all that different from networking one-on-one. What fundamental principles apply equally to both? Yeah. I like to think of two things, leading with two things whether I'm networking one-on-one or whether I'm dealing with a team, or especially when things get tough.
If you can fall back on two things, they've never failed me. One of which is curiosity. Just being curious about where another person is, why they think the way they think, why they're poking at you in ways that might feel irritating, but probably contains an important nugget of truth. And if you start from a position of curiosity, you're less likely to miss some of those things because of the pricklies that might otherwise be going on.
So that's one thing, and I think it's equally applicable one-on-one or in groups. And the second thing is generosity. It comes with listening with ge- generosity, and it comes with giving with generosity, your own ideas, your own assets, your own resources. I think, I'm su- I'm sure you've talked about it ad infinitum on this podcast, but the people who go out and network one-on-one in order to extract tend to do pretty poorly.
Same thing in a big group. If you go into a discussion ready to drag a group into your perspective or your preferred ways, you probably aren't gonna get very far. So how do you give? How do you give space? How do you give it insights? How do you give respect? So those two things, curiosity and generosity, I think really set people up to have great conversations in which, frankly, everyone wins There's an 80/20 rule with networking.
The other person speaks 80%, you speak 20%. And part of that 20% is asking questions. So you get to the root. And the other thing, y- you, you hit upon it, and you didn't actually go deep enough, because when I network, I do with what's called a servant's heart. All right? I look to give before I receive.
So if you go to a networking event or even one-on-one, and you're looking to say, "How can I help this person?" It takes all the pressure off your shoulders, but it makes you more memorable. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. So why do some leaders struggle to create alignment with their organizations even when they're communicating frequently?
Yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of directions one could go to that, but what I see very frequently is- A, a, a lack of the things we just talked about in how they engage their organization. And it comes from a good place, or it comes from an explainable p- place. Most senior executives have been rewarded over the course of long careers for knowing the answer, for telling people what to do, for standing firm in their beliefs, even in the face of winds that might be trying to push them around.
These are the things that got them where they are. As a leader who is trying to convince a team or an organization of a direction, and not just convince them on the level that they understand it, they heard it, but that they believe in it so that they will go do with heart and passion the things that need to be done, requires them to be involved in it.
So communication at that level, and when a leader is struggling, is usually because the communication was essentially one-way. It's, "Let me tell you the thing I've decided," rather than, "Let's decide a thing together," in the case of your top team. Or even lower in the organization when it's y- literally not possible or even not advisable to have 300 people involved in setting your strategy, there's still a difference in a conversation that says, "Here's the things we know and we're pretty clear on.
Here's some of the open questions that frankly fall in your sphere, in your lap, that we need you to help us with." And now you have a conversation. When you're, when you speech, when you have a speech, it rarely gets through in the way that a conversation does. You said it without saying it. You said the difference between being a leader and a boss.
You just, because you said everything but those words. A leader you get down into the trenches with everybody because you're teaching them how to lead. You're giving them responsibility. It's a give and take, and being a boss is just shouting orders, barking orders. So you said it without saying it.
So that was well done. You're absolutely right, though, and we see it all over, right? People who, especially in their early years of becoming a leader, think it means being a boss with a bigger capital B- ... when actually it's an entirely different set of skills. Absolutely. A, a different set of skills, and the person who is a leader will tend to go further than being a boss.
A boss will be middle management, not go any further, and not understand why he's not getting promoted, he or she. So yes I understand that. What can networking professionals learn from leaders who successfully communicate across large teams and div- a diverse group of people? I think the maybe two things that, that I can highlight that one will be very related to things we've just talked about.
One, one will take us in another direction, and one is just listening, right? You've already emphasized that 80/20 rule. Most of leadership and most of successful leadership comes down to listening. What I'll add on that point is listening can be mistaken for, I heard the thing, I waited for my turn to respond, and I said what I wanted to say.
That's a kind of passive listening, and it's unfortunate that we don't have a second word, because that's not what I mean. It's listening for what is unsaid in addition to what is said. It is listening for where the sticking points are. It's listening for where is the nugget of brilliance in something else that might be meandering or a little off base, right?
It is a far more active and engaged type of listening than the, "I gave you a turn, now it's my turn to speak." So that's- that's one direction I would think about. And the second thing that I would highlight is what I'll deliberately call preparation. Preparation over planning.
So many times we enter conversations without any kind of preparation or planning. Even in a formal meeting, we'll show up and we'll have an agenda, and that feels good, but that's sort of the limit of what we do. And if you think about so many other tasks in your life, you would never show up with so little forethought into what to expect, what could unfold, what might happen.
And I would say, whether it's a formal meeting or a more informal opportunity to communicate, you should be investing in some preparation. Now, I said I choose preparation over planning because... And the difference is this: because of everything I've said about listening and engaging, you cannot have a full script.
If you have a full script and you intend to stick with it, you are no longer listening. And planning to me, indicates that, right? I know what I'm gonna say at minute 32, and then at, at 47, I'm gonna say this, and that's not what I mean. But preparation in the sense of who is it that I'm going to be engaging with Who are these 12 people?
What do I know about them? Not just their roles, but where have they been? How do they think? What is the hardest thing that they've encountered in the last week or the last month? What is the thing that actually has nothing to do with what we're about to talk about, but probably is sitting on their brain?
This is what I mean by preparation, such that you can anticipate some of where the push might be, some of where the disconnects might be. That preparation sets you up to be the kind of communicator, the kind of network, the kind of leader that the most successful people achieve Absolutely. And I was thinking of so many things while you were talking, and as I was thinking about it, you would discuss it the ne- by the next sentence.
It you were so on point with everything. And all I can say is while you're listening, when you said "All right, you're only half listening because you wanna concentrate on the next thing that you wanna say," and that's the, the worst thing that you can do is figure out what you want to say next without listening to them.
Yeah. So the best thing is to reiterate what they said to you and say, "Okay, then you said this," and you're gonna respond this way. Yeah. And th- that was just so on point. And also, when you're preparing, and I'm a big believer in preparing, right? But the way that I prepare is really bullet points.
If this is discussed, I can bring up these points. If this is discussed, I can bring up those points. And if nothing is discussed, I have a few other bull- bullet points. So I have, basic knowledge, but nothing is set to time. I don't have to remember "Oh no, I have to do this one before I do..."
No, I just have to glance down, say, "Oh yeah and talk about it. Yeah. So I understand completely what you're saying with your preparation and with your listening skills because it is a skill. It is a skill because it's very easy for you to start to wander as the other person's talking- unless you really listen to them. So yes, that's- Yeah. I love the tip on bullet points. I think that's fantastic, right? And look, there's something a little funny about bullet points. The moment we write in a sentence, it becomes very static and chiseled in stone, and somehow bullet points trick our brains.
They just feel a little more loose and flexible. They're an outline, right? They're a symbol of an outline, and that helps us, I think, get our minds in the right place. One more thing I wanna offer that you prompted, which ties back to that theater background, and this might, this analogy might help for some of your listeners.
In high school theater, we had a script, right? Everybody line. Here's your whole script. But you get on stage and somebody misses a line. Now what? And the important thing to get to the end of the scene is to know what the scene was supposed to accomplish. You don't actually have to memorize the script, and you don't have to get there word by word the way the playwright intended.
If you know what the scene was trying to accomplish, you can pretty much work with the people around you to get there. So what I would add to your bullet points, and I think you probably do anyway, is what's the headline? What is it, what is the overarching objective here? Because if you can keep that in mind, then you're not so worried about, I need to say this thing.
You know where you're trying to get to, and if the people you're with kind of steer you this way, I need to go that way. But if they steer you this way, then you know you need to go left, right? So I think that's just keeping in mind the objective of the scene in addition to your bullet points is another good way to help you listen at the same way that you are leading towards the things that you think are right and proper and best.
Very good. Yes. I agree 100%, 110%. I, I absolutely agree. And when I said that you were on point before, I mean it now also. 'Cause you just brought it all together. You advocate for third-party support in difficult conversations. Why do leaders, why do smart leaders often bring in outside perspectives instead of trying to solve everything themselves?
Maybe two, two things. It seems like all my answers have two things these days. Two things. One of which is on big strategic questions- It is often useful it is blanket useful to have multiple perspectives. You are looking forward into uncertainty. You are dealing with usually a team of people who are somewhat committed, deliberately to past choices.
And so there are certain perspectives that become very shared within that group. And those were good, i- for what you needed to do yesterday and today. But as you think about the future, it is helpful to have people in the room who are not tied to yesterday's decisions. So that's one thing.
From a, it's called a content perspective, right? The actual decision or the debate you need to have benefits from perspectives that are somewhat untied to the business as it is today. But the second thing relates very much to all that we've been talking about. There is a lot to think about when it comes to helping groups of people have great conversations.
That's what facilitation is, right? Facilitation with a capital F. You probably, everybody on your, all your listeners have been exposed to philis- facilitation lowercase F, the way that I would call it, right? Somebody who stands up in the room, takes the notes, makes you do awkward trust falls, right? That person.
What I'm talking about is frankly a much more kind of intellectual and engaged type of guide through difficult conversations, and that is a full-time job. If a leader is trying to both participate in the conversation at the same time that they're trying to facilitate the conversation, that can be done on simpler questions, but it becomes very difficult to do either of the jobs well when you're trying to do both of them at the same time.
So for the hardest conversations, I selfishly out- advocate for outsourcing the ensuring of a great conversation, because that's something that somebody else can do for you that allows you and your team to really focus on the meat of the discussion. Now Steve Jobs comes to mind. Steve Jobs who was, an, an, a genius when it comes to Apple.
But when he started to develop his board, he knew what he does best, and he knew what he didn't do best, and he hired people for s- those things that he didn't do best. So he didn't have yes-men. He didn't have people saying, "Oh, that, that's a great job, Steve. Oh, Steve, that, that's perfect. Oh, Steve, oh, it's wonderful."
No, he said, "Whoa whoa. What about this? What about..." So he brought in those other perspectives right away. And so he knew what he was able to do, he knew what he was not able to do, and h- that brought forth. So that, I think animates your whole i- idea of what you just said. It- And it's perfect for what you just, what you did Yeah, it does.
It's, over the course of my work as an independent, as an executive, and as a management consultant at McKinsey, I must have worked with, I don't know, hundreds of senior executives. I have seen extraordinary ones. I have seen terrible ones. And, if you just look at them plainly, they fall all over the map, right?
There are big, bold, huge personalities. There are very quiet, almost mousy ones who, when they do speak up, you lean in, right? They're all over. But the thing that I think is most consistent across the extraordinary leaders is humility. It is self-awareness, and it is the humility to say, "I'm great at these things, and not so great at these things.
And if I'm humble enough to say that, then I can staff for it." And they do. Absolutely. Absolutely. In both networking and leadership, how do you create an environment where people feel heard- ... rather than simply managed? Yes. Oh my gosh, it's so important. All the things that we've talked about listening are relevant here.
Let me add a really simple tactic that I think your listeners can use. And I think it works, I'm just testing myself internally, but I think it works whether you are out at a networking event, you are sitting at a lunch across from somebody, or you're in a meeting. And that very simple and underutilized tactic is writing things down.
It is, s- something you used earlier around, "Hey, I heard you say this," and repeating it back. Great. Super valuable. But when I stand up at a flip chart with my smelly Mr. Sketch marker and write down the thing that was said, people really know that they've been heard. And I think you can do it in a notebook.
It's not quite as effective as visually seeing it, but I think it's massively underutilized. We've be- we've gotten used to putting PowerPoint presentations up in front of people at meetings or printing them out and everybody's just looking down. I'll tell you what, I don't use them at all, ever.
There is never a screen on in my meetings, because to really be heard and to really hear each other, we need eyes looking at each other, and we need-- I, I cover wall- the walls in flip charts of the important things that have been said and the ways that we're coalescing the early decisions that we've made.
So I think the verbal confirmation of listening, but the visual confirmation of listening is something that I think your listeners should probably consider adding to their toolkits. It, that's so true, and I'm a big one when it comes to follow-up, right? Because A, people A, either they don't follow up at all, or B, they follow up whenever they want to, or C, it's maybe I will.
May- maybe I'll follow up tomorrow or the next day or anything else." I run a business networking meeting every week, every Thur- Thursday evening, and they all know that my secret sauce is follow-up. And when you said about writing things down, whenever you go to a networking event or a meeting, you take their business card.
On the back of it, you write down the date, the name of the function, and something you spoke about. Because in two weeks, when you're looking at that card saying, "Who the hell is that? I don't remember that." You turn it over and say, "Oh, that's right, I know who that is." And you s- you continue with your follow-up.
So it's a learning device. I've always written things down to remember them, to learn them, but for somebody else, bullet points, writing it down it drives it home. It really does. That's a great one, and I love the, the addition of not just writing it down in the room, but writing it down after in your follow-up email.
Or, if a, an executive team has made a decision, they can feel great about it in the room, and it disperses the moment they leave the room, unless you have a mechanism by which somebody has recorded and written it down and given people another forum to digest it, right? You revisit things or a decision doesn't stick.
So I think exactly the same principle applies in both those kind of group settings and the individual ones. Yeah. That's why recording your meetings and doing things like that i- is so important because you don't remember everything. You don't. You'll pick up something different every time you listen to it.
So it... that all goes with it. Okay. Why are so many professionals impatient when it comes to relationship building, and how does the impatience limit long-term success? Let me first confess you're talking to somebody who's impatient.
Yeah ... okay, so it's true. I'm not lying. But s- jokes aside, I think many successful people are impatient by nature, and not even just about relationships, right? But about everything. We're driven. We like to see things happen. We like impact. We want what we do to matter. And so that impatience is really valuable in a whole host of places in our lives.
But if we then try to apply that or force that onto relationships, we pretty quickly find it doesn't work. Yeah. You- Relationships are not on a timeline. Yeah? Go ahead. Y- yeah. No, but it's a skill. Yeah. It really is. It- Yes ... you have to practice it. You can't just say you know what? I'm an impatient person, but now all of a sudden I'm patient."
Love it. It doesn't work that way. Yes. Yeah, it d- That's right. So there's this first step of sort of being aware that I- ... might need to add a different skill, maybe even an opposite skill, to my arsenal to be deployed in the right situations. And let me add, there are also business challenges that benefit from patience, so it is a good skill to be able to access, not just for relationships, for, but for a whole host of things.
And you go a- about deliberately building it. I think it's very much aided by thinking long term and what we talked about at the beginning, leading your relationships with curiosity and generosity. Then it's not an agenda, right? There's not, "I'm gonna meet this person because of this thing," but, "I'm gonna meet this person 'cause I wonder what they're all about, and who knows where it goes.
And I'm not just curious about them, I'm curious about the path that this relationship might take." And that only not, that not only helps you build patience, it helps you see things that might have been completely ancillary or way off with what you thought that relationship was gonna yield or had the potential to yield in the first place.
I have certainly engaged in partnerships or had clients that I never thought of in that way until it turned up. The, the other thing I think that, that helps is knowing that once you can get yourself in the mode of developing relationships patiently- The old ones pay off, right? So it doesn't feel so urgent when you're starting out, when you're really, like, learning the skills of being a network, or you're new to a job or a company, or you're new professionally.
There is such this "I need things to move now," that gets somewhat ameliorated once you have a body of momentum going behind you. Because the things you've invested in three, five, seven years from now are actually paying off now at the same time that you're investing in the things that might matter three, five, seven years from now.
N- networking is all about patience. Yeah. It's all about being patient, and you really have to realize that you're not just speaking to that person, but you're speaking to that person's network, right? Because let's say that person can't use your services, but they know of somebody who can. But if you're sitting there talking and not letting them talk, they'll never recommend you.
Yeah. So it go, it goes a long way. Okay. Yeah, one of my favorite closing questions is always, "Who else should I meet?"
Yes. Yeah. But you have to be confident enough to even ask that question. Yeah. Yes. So that goes, that's a whole nother conversation. Yes. How can someone balance short-term business pressures with- Yeah ... long-term investment required to build trust and meaningful relationships? Yeah Long-term business is not just for trust and meaningful relationships, but also for the health and performance of the business.
So I know there, there is a very common framing of a dichotomy between short-term and long-term, and I understand the tension that comes, having sat in an executive seat myself, so I'm not trying to downplay or invalidate that tension. But they're more aligned than we realize. If we can do the smart things to keep ourselves focused on the future, the short term just becomes easier.
It's hard to start, but if you can get it going it feeds itself. And this certainly is the space I sit in, not just from relationships, but from a business standpoint, right? I'm a strategist, so most of the decisions that I'm helping senior executives make together fall into this strategic area.
These are decisions that are-- you're trying to make for your organization that might come to fruition three to five years out, and I often have to give my clients a little pep talk on why are we even doing this, right? I've got this order coming across my desk now. This client or this customer is mad about this thing we missed.
There's so many urgent things flying around. So why do we even think about the long term at all is a common question But that the, the long-term thinking is not planning ahead for a decision I'm gonna make three to five years from now. Here's my planning versus preparation again, right?
That's not what we're doing when we're talking about strategy. It's not what we're doing when we're forming a new relationship. It is not so in three years from now I'm gonna make this decision, or in three years from now this person's gonna give me this thing. What it's doing is helping us inform the decisions we make today because we have a sense for where we want to be on the horizon.
If we didn't have that sense, if we never picked up our eyes and looked out at the horizon, we might just be wandering in circles dealing with all the urgent stuff that falls on our desk now or infor- bumping into people and building relationships somewhat haphazardly. So it's about a sense of where you wanna be, not a pinpoint destination, I'd rather be this direction than that direction that helps me think about what are the moves that are smart for me now?
What are the kinds of people that I might want to know? What are the things I want to know about them that, and the ways that I can help them? So it's that, it's a difference between a map and a compass. Your long term is the compass. It's giving you a rough direction, not a concrete path or recipe or set of driving instructions that will help you make really good business decisions today and will help you make good relationship decisions today.
A very good analogy, and I think I'm gonna have to steal that. You may. Thank you. Thank you. That, that's a very good analogy. Okay, let's bring this podcast full circle, and if a listener wanted to dramatically improve their communication, their relationships, and influence over the next 90 days, what's one habit would you encourage them to adopt?
I'm gonna go with something we've already alluded to. But when you as a senior leader, I'm gonna, I'm gonna f- and I'm gonna focus on teams 'cause since that's what I do. You're a senior leader, you're sitting with your team. When you feel yourself having the instinct to open a meeting or a conversation with a statement, I challenge you to turn it into a question That is going to fundamentally change the way those conversations proceed.
You're gonna get more information, your answers are going to get better, and your team is going to believe in those answers in a way you may not have experienced before. So it's a tactical, small thing that often has massive impact. So try it Wow, that was very good. Very good. Marja, this was fantastic.
I learned so much that I've- 'cause I, I'm gonna steal it and put it into my speaking times. If somebody wanted to get hold of you, either to hire you, to, for you to be their mentor, or just to say hello- Yes ... how can they reach you? Two, two options. First is to go to my website, marjafox.com. That's M-A-R-J-A-F-O-X.
There is not another one. And on there you'll find a co- contact form if you wanna reach out to me. There's a newsletter to subscribe to, there's blogs, there's things to look at. The second way that that I would encourage your listeners to consider, because it just puts us in an ongoing dialogue, is to find me on LinkedIn.
I post six days a week with all sorts of insights and nuggets and tips. You don't have to even let me know you're there if you're not ready for that, but it'll just keep us in the loop, keep me in front of mind for you, give you lots of additional ideas to think about as you're running your own meetings, engaging with your team.
That, again, is Marja Fox. Won't be hard to find me. You can connect or just follow if you wanna be on the down-low. Fantastic. This conversation is a reminder that the strongest relationships, whether in business, leadership, or networking, are rarely built overnight. The people who create lasting success understand that communication is an investment.
Trust is earned through consistency, and meaningful results often come from doing the right thing long before payoff is visible. Take one step this week. Invest in a relationship without expecting an immediate return. Send a note, make an introduction, offer support, or simply check in. The, the long game often produces the greatest rewards.
If you found value in today's episode, make sure you like, follow, and subscribe to Networking Unleashed: Building Profitable Connections so you continue the best insights on networking and communication, and share this episode with someone who understands that relationships are built one conversation at a time.
If you'd help strengthen your, strengthening your communication, building stronger professional relationships, and creating opportunities through meaningful connections, visit michaelaforman.com. So until next time, communicate with intention, think long-term, and build connections that become your greatest competitive advantage.
Marja, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You were a wonderful guest. Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here.
That's a wrap, 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, and 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
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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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