Executive networking runs on appraisal. Two people meet, each prices what the other might be worth, and trust accrues at the pace of the transaction. Joseph B. Diehl describes a room where that arithmetic never starts. “As a Rotarian, you already share a value system before the first word is spoken between members,” he says.
Diehl, a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and Juris Doctor (JD) who founded Diehl & Co. LLC in Seattle 29 years ago and has spent his career untangling corporate bureaucracy for companies in trouble, joined Rotary five years ago. He found the usual sequence running backward. Trust arrives first, and the relationship builds on top of it.
Membership Does the Vetting
Rotary rests on one idea, service above self, and Diehl treats the motto as a screening device rather than a sentiment. A person who commits time and money to an organization built on service has disclosed something that a dozen breakfasts would struggle to establish.
That disclosure solves a problem specific to senior people. The higher an executive rises, the harder it becomes to tell whether a new relationship concerns them or their position, since almost everyone who requests a meeting arrives with an agenda attached. A room where the shared activity is unpaid work for strangers removes the ambiguity.
Diehl’s fellow members include business leaders and civic leaders with substantial careers behind them, and they find the weekly connection serves those careers too. The reason it works is that none of them walked in looking for it. When you assemble people for advantage, everyone spends the hour appraising, but when you assemble them for service, the appraising becomes unnecessary. That also means the benefit resists imitation. An executive who joins to work the room will find the room performing exactly as advertised and producing nothing, because what they came for exists only as a byproduct of not having come for it.
A Network That Runs Local and Global
Diehl’s club meets weekly, adding Zoom alongside in-person sessions after the pandemic, and members gather several times a year for content sessions and to mark each other’s achievements. Rotary International extends the reach considerably further, keeping members current on work underway across the world.
Rotarians roll up their sleeves in the communities where they live, and some travel abroad to do the same. A senior executive ends up holding relationships across geographies and industries, none of them originating in a transaction, which is an unusual asset to accumulate late in a career.
Service Supplies the Structure
The service component drew Diehl in. He describes a question that arrives with age, about how to give back and what a legacy looks like, and he had been sitting with it for five to eight years before joining. What Rotary offered was not the motivation but the machinery. A member joining a project or committee finds leaders already in place to guide the work. Senior executives rarely lack the will to contribute. But what stops them is that starting something from nothing is a project of its own, requiring time they do not have. Rotary removes the setup cost entirely, so willingness converts into work in a single step.
His club’s projects show the output. Seattle Rotarians helped an organization build tiny houses, 300 or 400 square feet, set up in park settings and fully equipped with air conditioning, beds, and a small kitchen, giving people the benefits of a first home before nonprofits arrange transitional housing. The club also runs teen feeds, preparing meals for homeless teenagers in a city where a great many people are struggling to get by.
Shared values build trust. For an executive weighing where to spend scarce discretionary hours, the return is relationship capital that no networking event can manufacture, produced by a room where nobody is counting it. Membership costs little. Diehl’s advice is to find a local chapter and turn up. To learn more, connect with Joseph B. Diehl on LinkedIn or visit Diehl & Co. LLC.
