How to Make Small Talk at Professional Events

Alexandra Roberts on executive presence and social protocol

Small talk has a poor reputation among clever people, who tend to think of it as the price of admission before the real conversation starts. I think they have it backwards. For most of an evening, the small talk is the conversation.

I learned this at a hotel front desk. At The Lowell, and later as a host at Four Seasons San Francisco, nearly every exchange I had with a guest lasted under two minutes, and in that time they decided whether they liked the hotel. Nobody was discussing anything of consequence. A guest would mention the rain on Madison Avenue, or the flight from London, and the job was to answer it properly. People can tell within a sentence whether you heard them.

That is the whole test.

Throw away the list of openers

Most guides to small talk suggest you arrive with three or four prepared conversation starters, and I understand the appeal, because a blank mind at a reception is a miserable feeling. In practice the prepared line is easy to spot. It arrives a beat too smoothly, and the other person can hear that you would have said it to whoever happened to be standing there.

The room gives you better material. The speaker who ran eight minutes over. The queue at the coat check, the waiter who has offered you the same crab cake four times, the fact that the museum has put the bar directly under the one painting everyone wanted to see. “Did you manage to get anywhere near the Diebenkorn?” is a better opening than anything you could have rehearsed in the car, because it proves you are present at the same event as the person you are talking to. Then give your name. I go further into the name itself in how to introduce yourself professionally.

Weather is fine, incidentally. People mock it. In San Francisco in July, when visitors arrive in shorts and stand shivering on the terrace, it is the most useful topic in the city.

Answer with one detail more than you were asked

The advice everyone repeats is to ask open questions, and it is sound, but it covers only half the exchange. The half people neglect is the answer. If someone asks whether you came far tonight and you say “Palo Alto,” you have closed the door they opened, and they now have to think of a second question with nothing to work from.

Add one detail. “Palo Alto, and I made the mistake of driving, so I have been in this building since six.” Now the other person has three directions to go in, and none of them require any cleverness. Small talk keeps moving when both people leave something on the table for the other to pick up.

One detail, though. Four is a monologue.

When to ask what someone does

Some etiquette writers treat “What do you do?” as vulgar and tell you never to ask it. I disagree, and on the Peninsula it would be absurd advice, since half the people at any event in Menlo Park came precisely to talk about work. The question is fine. The timing is what goes wrong. As an opening line it sounds like you are deciding whether this person is worth the next five minutes, and everyone who has been asked it that way, then watched the asker’s eyes drift over their shoulder, knows exactly how it feels.

Ask it third or fourth, after you have talked about something else for a little while. By then it sounds like interest in them. Earlier, it sounds like triage.

When one of you far outranks the other

This is the situation none of the standard guides address, and it is the one my clients ask about most. A founder at a company party is approached by an engineer who joined three weeks ago. A partner finds herself next to a first-year associate at the buffet. One person is relaxed. The other is calculating how many words they are allowed to say before it becomes presumptuous.

The senior person carries the conversation. Always.

I hold to this firmly, because I have watched the alternative many times: a chief executive standing pleasantly silent, waiting to be entertained, while a nervous junior employee throws out increasingly desperate remarks about the catering. The executive thinks they are being approachable by simply being there. The employee goes home convinced they embarrassed themselves in front of the CEO. The silence felt neutral from one side and like a verdict from the other.

If you are the senior person, ask something specific and easy that has nothing to do with performance. “Which team are you on?” is a quiz. “Where were you living before you moved here?” is a gift, because everyone can answer it well. Then listen to the entire answer without glancing at the room, which is harder than it sounds when people are waiting to speak to you. Remember one thing they said. If you can mention it to them again at the next company event, months later, they will tell people about it for years.

If you are the junior person, you have one job, which is to answer generously and not to apologize for taking up their time. They walked over. They chose this.

Subjects to leave alone

Politics and religion, obviously, though in practice the subject that causes the most damage at Bay Area events is money, whether that means who raised at what valuation or what somebody’s house in Atherton is supposedly worth. It feels like shop talk. To anyone in the circle who is between rounds or recently laid off, it lands very differently, and you will rarely know who that is.

Gossip about people who are not present is the other one. It creates a quick, warm feeling of intimacy, and the listener files you, correctly, as someone who will talk about them too.

At a client dinner

Seated small talk is harder than the standing kind, because you cannot drift away, and it may need to last two hours. The host sets the point at which business comes up, and as a guest you should wait for it, even if you came with a deal to discuss. I cover the host’s side in client dinner etiquette; for guests, the useful habit is to talk to the person on each side of you in turn rather than locking onto whoever seems most important.

Ending it

A good piece of small talk has an end, and the end is part of the courtesy. Close on something they said, give a plain reason, and go: “I hope the move goes smoothly. I promised I would find my colleague before the speeches.” There is more on the exit in how to leave a conversation gracefully, and if you have to start a fresh one with a group that is already talking, read how to join a conversation already in progress.

Why it reads as presence

Clients sometimes come to an executive presence engagement wanting help with the board presentation or the all-hands, and they are a little impatient when I ask how they handle the ten minutes before a dinner sits down. But that is where most people form their opinion of you. A person who can talk easily about the coat-check queue, and who thinks to hand a nervous new colleague a question they can actually answer, is showing that they are comfortable in a room without needing to dominate it. Rooms notice that long before they notice the slides.

Say something about the room. Then listen to what comes back.