The purpose of this series of posts is to provide you the reader with advice as to how to enter the social flow in the context of being new and relatively junior in a corporate environment. Doesn’t matter whether you work in consulting, in banking, in an industry role or for an investment firm—if you work for a professional organization, soft skills matter. They’re not all that matter, but they matter.That said, this series isn’t a guide about how to advance your career—for that you’ll need other resources that can be found on this website to complement this one. This series will not address things like technical skills or how to prepare for an interview. It is designed specifically for junior people that wish to hone their ability to deal with other human beings in their organization.The series will be presented from the perspective of a new intern entering a firm and follow the first six to eight months of her experience to trace the relationship-building process. The perspective utilized in this manual notwithstanding, the information can be applied to more senior positions also. It is relevant to anyone trying to get involved in the social game of people senior to them.Ultimately, regardless of where you are, if you’re in a corporate environment, there will always be someone more powerful than you. Even if you’re the CEO, you’ll have shareholders to whom you report, you’ll have board members that are more influential than you in decision-making processes. If you’re a controlling shareholder of a private business, you’ll have to deal with politicians that decide on policy matters potentially destructive to corporate growth, and so on.My intention is for these words to deepen your sense of self-worth, and provide you with some practical advice, so you can bring your a-game to the workplace to beat the shit out of the corporate ladder because you deserve to be successful. You don’t deserve to associate your identity with the position that succeeds your name on a business card.So relax, put your work down, grab a beverage and enjoy the material. May it guide you to the realization that what you seek is already within you. The rest is easy!Before going on, a word about my experience:I grew up between New York, Moscow and London. My life put me in situations requiring me to build up my social network from scratch often. I graduated from a small liberal arts school in New York.Out of college, I was flying in and out of Sierra Leone, working on a gold exploration project for a small London-based private equity fund before joining KPMG’s corporate finance division. KPMG wouldn’t take me as a full-time analyst because I didn’t know finance that well—in college I studied economics and in Africa I was in the jungle looking for gold. During my last round interview, the partner asked me to write down the key lines in the P&L and derive EBITDA. I told him I’d need to review and come back to him. In hindsight, I can’t believe he took me after an answer like that.I must have been astoundingly charming.I joined KPMG as an intern and within 3 months, I was having lunch and going to drinks with colleagues ten years my senior in corporate terms. This was partially a derivative of the fact that I was a bit older than the analysts, but mostly it was a function of my superior soft skills. In all honesty, I rarely meet people with soft skills that near mine. Ask anyone who has worked with me or that knows me well, and they’ll tell you the same thing—that I stand out as an outlier in this realm. That’s why I chose this topic—because I’m naturally good at it, and I wanted to share with you what works for me.