Whether you like attending them or not, conferences offer great opportunities for networking. At conferences, you can extend your network by meeting new people, including potential employers or employees, and you can catch up with and get updates from those you already know.

In fact, networking has become a key factor for professional advancement and career success. Whether you’re an extrovert who fits naturally into any situation or someone who has a hard time chatting with new people, networking is a necessary skill if you’re looking to get ahead. But while a lucky few clearly have a natural talent for developing business relationships and reaping the resources that come with them, most people find networking uncomfortable, stressful, and even manipulative. I have studied why people have these feelings and have some suggestions for how to overcome them.

In research I conducted with Tiziana Casciaro (of the Rotman School of Management) and Maryam Kouchaki (of Kellogg), we examined how people react to the prospect ofpersonal networking in pursuit of emotional support or friendship and instrumental networking in pursuit of professional goals.

In one experiment, we asked 306 adults to remember a time when they networked. One group was asked to recall a scenario in which their goal was to form one-sided professional contacts  — that is, instrumental networking. People in the other were asked to remember an attempt to form a more natural, personal connection with people in their industry — that is, personal networking.

Next, the participants did a word-completion task in which they were given word fragments such W _ _ H, S H _ _ E R, and S _ _ P. These puzzles could be filled in with words related to cleanliness like wash, shower, or soap. But they could just as easily fit words unrelated to cleanliness such as wish, shaker, and step. The participants who’d been asked to recall the situation where they’d engaged in instrumental networking were about twice as likely as those who engaged in personal networking to fill those puzzles in with cleansing-related words.

We concluded that instrumental networking, but not personal networking, makes people feel not only anxious or inauthentic but also physically dirty. The metaphorical link between feeling morally and physically pure, or clean, is a powerful one. In previous research, my colleagues and I found that feeling morally tainted increases our desire for cleanliness and find ways to be helpful to others in order to reduce such strong feelings.

Because professional relationships formed primarily for the purpose of getting ahead tend to be more one-sided and selfish than other relationships, a transaction in which reciprocity is a secondary concern feels a little immoral. Why is this a problem? Because your performance will suffer if you don’t engage in networking. In another study, we asked 165 lawyers from five offices across North America how frequently they networked and how they felt while they did it. The lawyers who did more professional networking performed better (in terms of billable hours) than those who didn’t. Interestingly, the more powerful the individual was at his firm, the less likely he or she was to report feeling dirty about networking.

In another study, we asked students to think of someone they’d like to know better. One group was told to think of a person they’d like to know better socially; the other group was told to think of a person in a professional context. Those in the “social” group were told to send a message to the person through Facebook; those in the “professional” group were told to send a message to the person through LinkedIn. After sending their message, the participants indicated how they were feeling. Once again, the people in the professional networking group reported feeling physically dirtier than those in the personal group.

Given the benefits of networking, how can we get around the uncomfortable feelings it triggers? The answer is to reframe the way you think about what you’re doing. Networking rooted in a motivation to benefit others and an authentic desire to grow diminishes feelings of moral impurity, we’ve found. With that in mind, here are four recommendations:

Think about what you can give, not just what you can get. When you network to extract benefits without considering what your counterpart’s interests, needs, and desires are and how you can meet them, you make yourself vulnerable to the insidious psychological burden of inauthenticity and moral impurity.

Think broadly about what people value. As you focus on what other people value, you probably tend to think very narrowly about their obvious interests (e.g., earning more, having a higher position) and much less about what is unique about that person and how that relates to what you might be able to provide  him or her that others can’t. You must consider much more broadly and creatively the resources that can potentially flow through a relationship and appreciate the entire range of what the other person may value at any given point in time.

Build relationships based on substantive shared interests, and do your homework.Much too often, people confuse networking with simple extraction of value from others. But networking must be mutually stimulating and  valuable to be sustainable. Networking driven by substantive, shared interests and based on thorough research into others can be highly effective and won’t spark negative feelings. 

Think of networking as an act of discovery and learning. Approaching networking as an opportunity rather than a necessary evil can also be an effective strategy. It can lead you to view networking with excitement and curiosity. If you are open to learning from people around you, you will begin to view networking as a gift, and one that is totally clean.

This blog first appeared on Harvard Business Review on 10/12/2015.

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