Quick gut check: when's the last time you really thought about your network? Not scrolled it. Thought about it.
If the honest answer involves the words "job search" or "I should probably accept that LinkedIn request," you're not alone. And you're also missing most of what a network is for.
Here's the mental model I think most of us are stuck in: a network is a favor bank. You make deposits (congratulate people, like their posts, show up at the reunion) so that someday, when you need something — a job, an intro, a reference — you can withdraw. It's transactional, it's a little uncomfortable, and it mostly sits dormant until you're desperate.
That's not what a network is. A network is a standing resource. It's there for the moment you're stuck — not just the moment you're job hunting. And the faster things move, the more that matters, because you cannot build a team fast enough to solve every new problem that shows up. You may not be in a position to build a team right then and there. You need to already know how to reach outside, on short notice, for the right kind of help.
I learned this in real time, years before "network" was something I thought about strategically at all.
I had been recruited to lead the digital transformation of Citi’s credit cards business, which back then dropped $5 billion to the company’s bottom line. Sandy Weill had acquired the bank and had his own ideas about how to embed digital capabilities into the business units. He quickly eliminated the corporate unit that had been tasked with supporting the BUs and put accountability back on them.
Not a bad idea, but we were left scrambling while the need to be experts in this space was accelerating.
This became my mandate: to build out our digital capabilities and deliver results. Pronto. A gap I quickly saw had to be closed: Our UX team — the people responsible for how customers applied for our products online, serviced their accounts and paid bills — had strong instincts. But they'd all come up designing for the physical world, and what they were doing, essentially, was cut-and-paste: taking print design that worked in direct mail, dropping it into a browser. It didn't work. I just couldn't articulate why, or what "right" would even look like instead.
Here's the part I want to be careful about, because it matters to the story: this wasn't a "my team let me down" problem. The people on that team were talented, and they were doing exactly what their training had taught them to do, with strong justification based on years of results. The gap wasn't a skills failure I could coach my way out of. It was a knowledge and lived experience gap — nobody on the team, and nobody around me either, had built a modern digital UX function before and delivered on targets. Banking, at the time, was trying to figure this out, so the models did not exist yet in the sector. Other sectors, like ecommerce and tech, were leading the way. The expertise I needed didn't exist inside my company. It might not have existed inside my industry.
And here's the thing I want to be honest about too: my colleagues weren't the answer either. Not because they weren't smart — because like me they didn't have direct experience in this specific problem. They came at it with their own priorities — protecting budget, protecting their own team's turf. I needed people who'd already solved the exact problem I had.
So, I went outside.
First move: personal network. I didn't know the people I really needed to talk to — leaders running digital or UX functions at companies outside banking, deliberately outside banking, because banking was behind and I didn't want banking's answer. I started to ask around. Who do you know who's building this kind of team? Would they take a call? A few "let me introduce you’s later, I had three conversations lined up.
Second move — and this is the part that solved the problem: those three conversations weren't small talk. They were compact strategy sessions. In each one, I walked away with something specific: how to structure the team. What core competencies mattered — not the resume keywords, the real capabilities. How to position the function relative to the rest of the org, so it didn't get treated as a support desk. And what these leaders had learned the hard way building their own teams, so I didn't have to relearn it the hard way myself.
Three conversations. A few weeks to schedule and sort what I had learned. And I had what I needed to rebuild the team.
I've come to think of that as two different networking moves stacked on top of each other, and most people only ever use the first one. The first is personal — the people who'll make an introduction because they like you, or you went to school together, or you've helped each other before. That's valuable, but it's just a door. The second is strategic — using that door to get to people who can help you think, who have the scar tissue from having solved your exact problem already. Who are not wedded to the practices of your sector. That second move is the one most people skip. It's the one that moves you forward.
There's a 2006 HBR piece — Ibarra and Hunter, "How Leaders Create and Use Networks" — that names this well: operational networks (the people who help you get today's work done), personal networks (the ones that build your own development and give you referrals), and strategic networks (the ones that help you figure out where you're actually going, with people outside your control). I've taught this model at Columbia, and almost every time, my students realize the same thing about themselves: they lean almost entirely on their operational network — the people they already work with — and barely touch the other two until they want to make a career move. The lightbulbs go off every time what I’m talking about here is brought into the classroom.
Here's where I'd push the model further, almost twenty years after it was written: it assumes you have an org chart to be strategic within. A lot of us don't, anymore. I don't. If you're a solopreneur, a founder, a team of one inside a bigger company, "strategic networking" isn't about internal politics — it's about knowing that when you're stuck on something nobody around you has solved, the answer usually isn't inside the building.
It's a phone call away, if you're willing to make it.
And sometimes — this is the part I want to say plainly — the team is the wrong room. Not because anyone on it is bad at their job. Because the knowledge you need simply doesn't live there. A team gives you people who share your goals and carry the work forward with you, day after day. That's real, and it's valuable, and I miss having it more than I expected to as a solopreneur. But a team can't hand you expertise — and offer the objectivity — it doesn't have. Only the right outside conversation can do that.
Next time you're stuck on something, and your first instinct is to grind through it alone, or wait until you're desperate enough to 'network' — ask yourself who's already solved this. Then ask who you know who might know them.
I'd love to hear this back from you: when's the last time you reached outside for help before you were desperate for it? Hit reply — I read every one.
Amy Radin is a strategic advisor, keynote speaker, and Columbia University lecturer focused on why transformation succeeds or stalls in large, complex organizations. Drawing on senior leadership roles at Citi, American Express, and AXA, including one of the world's first corporate Chief Innovation Officer roles, she helps leaders build the capabilities required to absorb, scale, and sustain change. Learn more at amyradin.com.