What Does It Mean To Have a Network Perspective?
Networking for leaders is about intentionally developing the awareness of the informal, invisible structure supporting the organization and learning how to work through it. Network-savvy leaders use this perspective to create a more interdependent culture. Some take it even further, expanding their organization’s network across industries, geographies, and communities.
At the individual level, a network perspective allows you to move beyond the organizational chart to get work done through informal networks — knowing who has influence, where to go for information, and which relationships need investment before they’re needed in a crisis.
At the organizational level, network perspective is something they must take into account when developing leaders. The informal networks that make strategy executable and change possible don’t form automatically, especially in distributed, global, and AI-accelerated environments. Organizations that leave network health to chance are leaving some of their most critical infrastructure unmanaged.
According to our report on connection at work, the conditions that once allowed these networks to form naturally no longer describe most organizations. And many haven’t built a deliberate replacement.
Informal Networks Can Strengthen Your Organization’s Strategy
The patterns and quality of informal social networks connecting members of an organization greatly affect its ability to succeed in a competitive marketplace, as we note in our network perspective research. Suboptimal patterns of communication and influence may alienate critical future talent and lead to problems in strategy development and implementation.
Analyzing the networks of leaders at every level uncovers gaps between how communication and influence should ideally flow — and how they do in reality. That network analysis opens the door to building network connections that can improve retention of high-potential talent and optimize the development and execution of strategy.
Conversations among leaders in upper and middle management often determine an organization’s strategy and eventual success. Senior leaders should pay attention to their organization’s leadership networks and strengthen ties where they’re most important. Executives will want to ensure that high-potential middle managers are engaged and that their contributions are weighted appropriately by the top management team, which is critical to avoiding riskier, less robust, or ineffective organizational strategies.
Networks & Leadership: Why Leaders Need a Network Perspective
7 Reasons Network Perspective Changes How You Lead
Here’s why networking in leadership really matters.
1. Relationships shape what’s possible.
Individuals don’t exist in isolation. Their relationships provide opportunities, enable access to valuable information and resources, and also create constraints. The people who leaders are connected to influence their ideas, attitudes, and behaviors, making networking for leaders a direct driver of what they can accomplish.
2. Work often happens through informal channels.
Even after decades of restructuring, work activities often occur through interactions outside of formal reporting relationships. Understanding informal networks is especially important in flat, team-based, and agile work environments where formal structure provides little guidance about how to move things forward.
3. Leadership occurs through relationships.
Direction, alignment, and commitment are created through relationships between people working on shared challenges. Leadership and networking are inseparable in this sense: A leader who understands this doesn’t just manage their direct reports, they actively invest in the relationships through which their leadership will move.
4. Successful leaders develop strong, diverse networks.
Under-connectivity limits access to information and influence. Over-connectivity creates bottlenecks and insularity. Effective leaders work collaboratively across boundaries: hierarchies, geographic regions, functional silos, stakeholder interests, and demographic differences. They understand that the value of a network comes not just from the people they know, but also from the diversity of perspectives they bring.
5. Network knowledge is an asset in change efforts.
Relying on formal, vertical channels alone hinders the capacity to adapt. Change efforts accelerate when leaders activate and enhance the network’s capacity to span boundaries. This approach is critically important in cultural transformation, because organizational culture lives largely within the conversations between people. Understanding these relationships provides insights into subcultures, pockets of resistance, and hidden champions of the transformation.
6. Innovation networks can be identified and supported.
Innovation requires both new ideas and the ability to implement them — and the network structures that support each are different. Organizations need networks that support the creation and sharing of diverse thinking, as well as the collective action required to move ideas into practice. Leaders with network perspective can see where those structures are strong and where they’re missing.
7. The most important challenges leaders face are interdependent.
Complex challenges can’t be solved by individuals alone. They require groups of people across boundaries working together, sharing information, building on one another’s thinking, and committing to collective action. Networking in leadership is about building the organizational capacity to solve problems that no individual leader can solve alone.
Building Network Health at Scale
A leader who engages in networking and understands their informal network is valuable. An organization that actively designs for network health is different.
As outlined in our report on connection at work, the conditions that once allowed informal networks to develop naturally are stressed, and individual network perspective alone can’t compensate for that structural shift.
As AI absorbs more of the communication volume in organizations, the informal exchanges that once built networks between people stop happening naturally. Hybrid and distributed work models remove the proximity that once made those exchanges inevitable. And global expansion creates the appearance of a connected organization — a shared organizational chart and values — without the shared informal networks that make strategy executable across cultures and geographies.
Building network health at scale means asking different questions:
- Are leadership development programs designed to create cross-functional, cross-level, cross-geography relationships — or do they reinforce existing clusters?
- Are central connectors identified and supported before they burn out?
- Is network analysis being used to understand the gaps between how influence should flow and how it does?
- Are leaders who span boundaries recognized for the strategic value of that work?
These are leadership development design questions with a network perspective. And they’re increasingly urgent, as the conditions that once allowed networks to form naturally continue to change.
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Increase your team’s network perspective and leadership skills. Partner with our Leadership Analytics experts to better understand your organization’s network dependencies and strengthen your overall strategy and culture.
