Important: This blog series was previously posted regarding our 2024 Conferences, but the information is still valuable! To learn more about our 2025 Conferences, held October 21-22 in Las Vegas, click here. There is still time to register – in-person and virtual options available!

 

Last week, I told the story of my decision to leave my “dream job” & how I began to think about what would come next. In this post, I’m continuing this series by tackling networking while unemployed.

I’m not going to sugar coat it, hitting the pavement without an affiliation was harder psychologically than I expected. Channeling my learnings from Ryan Holiday’s “The Obstacle Is the Way”, I committed to the process and became a better human in the undertaking.

After taking a month “off”, I was ready to put out feelers for any leads on new opportunities. This was in November 2023. I started doing soft outreaches to my closest contacts and touched base with recruiters. The concurrent goals for this round of conversations were to fill my cup and test my pitch with my network of former colleagues and to get market intel and plan next steps with recruiters. I also prioritized in-person meetups.

Key attributes of my closest contacts were that they knew me very well both personally and professionally and were important nodes to other connections. I met with a mix of friends and “weak ties”. Most were hearing that I left my role for the first time. I also prioritized folks that were my best chance to get an introduction to a company looking for a General Counsel.

During this period before the holiday season was full upon us, I planned two networking trips back to the Bay Area (since I live in Boise) with the goal of maximizing my funds and time away from family. I scheduled these trips around an anchor event (a law firm alumni dinner and an invitation-only networking dinner, respectively) and then reached out to folks in order of who I needed to see in person the most. I filled each day to the brim, traversing the Bay Area and taking friends up on using their guest bedroom.

The reconnection meetings were mostly easy; networking events with new people while unaffiliated and title-less were not. Whenever I RSVP-ed, I felt an existential crisis of “who am I now?” without an attachment to a firm or company. James P. Carse in Finite and Infinite Games articulated the underpinning for my crisis the best:

What one wins in a finite game is a title. A title is the acknowledgement of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. Titles are public. They are for others to notice. . . . The effectiveness of a title depends on its visibility, its noticeability to others.

For those first two networking forays, I stuck with “General Counsel (Former)” but didn’t love it, and it felt like a sign of failure. Couldn’t I just be Meaghan?! (or in the words of my forever cheerleader and father-in-law, “The Meaghan”). (Now, that’d be a gutsy name tag!) Little did I know that my father-in-law was onto something.

Over the past year, I’ve met a lot of what I’ll call “GCs in transition”, which helped to normalize my status and made me feel less alone and isolated. And after a time, I came to the realization that I had to own my transitory status. So, I did. It became a conversation starter and a way to connect to others on a deeper level. I enjoyed that and am so thankful to those folks (mostly strangers) that shared their stories with me. I’m a better person for hearing their experiences. Carse also addresses this journey of letting go of titling as a way of deeper connection:

Names, like titles, are given. . . However, unlike titles, which are given for what a person has done, a name is given at birth—at a time when a person cannot yet have done anything. Titles are given at the end of play, names at the beginning. . . . When a person is known only by name, the attention of others is on an open future. We simply cannot know what to expect. Whenever we address each other by name we ignore all scripts, and open the possibility that our relationship will become deeply reciprocal. . . . Our futures enter into each other.

So, if you’re faced with the challenge of networking unaffiliated, perhaps it’s worth considering just putting your name out there with a skill you bring to the table (e.g., “corporate and securities expert”, “tech lawyer”, etc.) vs. holding onto a remnant of your past life. You might find camaraderie, a fellow person in the trenches to swap strategies on new opportunities, or even someone who will refer you to an opportunity that’s not the best fit for them (but would be for you). Maybe you just have a nice conversation where you connect beyond the surface for a few minutes.

My next three blogs will be specifically focused on networking in connection with our “Proxy Disclosure & 21st Annual Executive Compensation Conference” next week. (It’s not too late to sign up!). Tomorrow, I’ll write about pre-conference prep; Thursday, I’ll share tips on in-person networking; and then next Tuesday, I’ll post about post-event networking. So, stay tuned!

– Meaghan Nelson