Improving your social skills is very important in a corporate environment. In this post I’ll make some recommendations for how to socialize in office and make friends.
The best way to build up confidence when speaking to others is to start small and work your way up. You can start off by just nodding your head and smiling when you walk by others. Once you get good at that, you can improve to telling people “good morning” when you walk by them in the morning. After that, you can ask people how they are doing. The more comfortable you get, the longer the conversations you can try to have.
People really like to talk about themselves. Ask people about themself and let them talk about themself. They should be talking about themself for more than half of the conversation. Also show that you are a good listener and care about what they are saying.
Another thing that is good to do is to say the person’s name as you are talking to them. People like to hear their name. You can say “hey __ how are you doing?” followed by “that is very interesting __ .” This will also help you remember the person’s name after you are done talking to them.
The easiest way to end a conversation is to just say something like “I gotta run, it was nice talking to you.” If they ask where you are going, it is completely fine to just make something up.
If you went up to talk to someone and they had to stop what they were doing to talk to you, then you can end the conversation by saying “I’ll let you get back to ___ . It was nice talking to you.”
If you are in a meeting and a lengthy silence appears out of no where, you can say “looks like we have said everything we have to say about that. So did you hear ___ .”
When it comes to networking, most people do not attempt to network with others until there is something they need. This makes you less likely to get help from others because it looks to them like you are only talking to them in an attempt to receive something from them. What you want to do is start networking with people well before you need help from them. In fact, you should attempt to help these people before attempting to get help from them. This approach will help you get a much bigger network than you would otherwise be able to get and you would also have each individual in the network more likely to help you.