Imagine that you’re attending your first international conference. You’ve signed in at the welcome table, dutifully affixed your name tag to your shirt, and stepped into the ballroom designated for the evening’s networking event. You are all set to meet new global colleagues in your industry, but as you linger hesitantly by the punch bowl, you realize that there’s just one problem: You aren’t sure how to strike up a conversation with a stranger from a different culture.
How to Make Small Talk with Anyone from Anywhere
Five tools to help you mingle at international events.
February 28, 2024
HBR Staff; kosmozoo/Getty Images; Pexels
Summary.
Meet-and-greet conversations can be uncomfortable. And they can feel especially daunting when you’re paired with strangers from different cultures, like when networking in a global business context. In this setting, light and introductory-style conversations (what some of us know as “small talk”) can be very helpful, and even necessary. Small talk is a quasi-universal tool for initiating conversations with strangers from different cultures, for building a quick rapport, and for planting the seeds of deeper relationships — but how do you actually do it?
To help you more effectively master the art of small talk, we’ll present in this article a mindset for how to think about small talk and a series of behaviors for how to do small talk. The key is to frame your task as getting acquainted with people — and you can do that by focusing on similarities, sharing something about yourself, noticing something about the other person, asking open-ended questions, or even simply saying hello.