I just came back from California and couldn’t wait to tell everyone about this terrible networking experience I had.  When I decided to attend the National Speakers Association conference in San Diego, I also decided to go visit my parents in the Palm Springs area beforehand. 

My father, Ralph Tash, is so cute.  He cut out an article announcing a group that was meeting the following morning.  I will not mention the town or the date in order to protect the guilty parties.  The time of the event in the paper was 7:00 am, so of course I arrived at 6:45.  No one was there.  The hostess of the restaurant was very nice and I sat down and waited.  7:20 people started arriving, and I soon found out that the meeting started at 7:30.  OK - I can accept a typo or a mistake.  No big deal.

I met some nice people that morning.  Unfortunately when I said I lived in Chicago, there was not much interest in talking to me, but I tried an interesting experiment.  I then said my parents live in the area and the interest level went up.  Not from me, but from them.  My purpose for being there, as I told them, was to watch their group dynamics.  As a professional speaker on the art and skills of Boomerang Networking tm, I like to visit different groups and gather ideas I can use in my speeches to help other professionals that understand strategic relationship networking.

There was a business professional talking about their business.  The “infomercial” as many of you know.  Unfortunately this person made deragatory comments about the competition.  That made me very uncomfortable.  Didn’t our parents once tell us that if we don’t have something positive to say about someone we shouldn’t say anything? 

The second thing that bothered me, and this bothered me more than anything else, was that the leader of the group, who had a profession I may have introduced my parents to, did something REALLY rude.  When the group member was doing their infomercial, the leader got up from the table and started talking and showing something to someone else at the table.  So here is the image - you are giving your presentation to your networking group and the leader gets up and walks over to another member and shows them an article and starts talking about it.  How would you feel?

I no longer would introduce the leader to my parents because of their actions at the group.

My question to you is this - are your actions preventing you from getting referrals?  Are you doing something that is rude to others?  Are you truly listening to what people have to say and share?

What rude behaviors have you seen in networking?