Working the Favor Bank: Ten ways to grow your network and get things done

If you’d like to build a strong, productive network, start by making deposits in the favor bank. Robert L.Dilenschneider explains what this means, how to build up your balance, and why you don’t need a lot of money or power to get the ball rolling.

- Robert L.Dilenschneider

NEW YORK, NY, July 2023—“Networking” is a misunderstood concept. We tend to think of it in terms of small talk, faked enthusiasm, and self-serving schmoozing. Great networkers, we assume, are aggressive movers and shakers with a knack for selling themselves. Actually, says Robert L. Dilenschneider, they are heartfelt helpers who understand how the favor bank works.

“The most successful people I know have their own networks, which they cultivate like a precious rose garden,” says Dilenschneider, author of The Ultimate Guide to Power & Influence: Everything You Need to Know. “They do this by thinking first where they can do some good, knowing that later—sometimes much later—there will be reciprocity.”

Navigating this balance of give and take is what Dilenschneider calls working the favor bank.

“I think of networking in terms of ‘favor banks’— coined by Tom Wolfe in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities,” he says. “The book is satire, but Wolfe’s point about favor banks captures an essential element in how the world of influence works.”

It boils down to this: Help other people, and they will be more willing to help you. You make a “deposit” into the virtual favor bank, and later you will inevitably make a “withdrawal.” Just be sure when you make that withdrawal, you do so elegantly and graciously so that everyone wins.

While the concept is simple enough in theory, putting it into practice may require some guidance. You might say, “How could I ever help XX when I really need them to help me first?” But Dilenschneider says there’s almost always a way for you to make a deposit in the favor bank, and those deposits will almost always come around to help you in the long run. A few tips: