Aspiring Leaders, Don’t Just Network Up

Ambitious professionals are often encouraged to focus their relationship-building upward—to gain visibility with senior leaders, build connections with influential executives, and find a powerful sponsor. After all, senior leaders hold influence over promotions, strategic projects, and career-defining opportunities. But relying solely on these connections can limit talented professionals.

While relationships with senior leaders matter, a career-defining reputation is rarely built solely at that level. It is formed in a much broader ecosystem of professional relationships—with peers, team members, cross-functional colleagues, and stakeholders beyond one’s immediate role or even outside one’s organization. As organizations become more interconnected, reputation travels through networks rather than hierarchies.

Research in organizational network theory shows that individuals gain influence not simply through the number of connections they have, but through their position within the network, particularly when they bridge otherwise disconnected groups. In other words, influence grows through credibility across a network of stakeholders, not simply proximity to power.

When high potentials concentrate too heavily on impressing those above them, they risk building visibility without credibility: being known by senior leaders but questioned or resented elsewhere in the organization by those who collaborate with them regularly, who may be promoted alongside them, or eventually ahead of them. And in increasingly matrixed organizations, that imbalance can quietly stall a promising career.

Aspiring senior leaders need to develop a broad awareness of key stakeholders at all levels, both inside and outside their organization, shifting from a limited focus on decision-makers and, instead, developing strong relationships with people all around them.

Don’t Ignore People in Your Immediate Radius

Research on organizational networks has repeatedly shown that influence rarely flows purely through hierarchy. In their HBR article, “Collaborative Overload,” Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant noted that informal networks—the patterns of collaboration and trust that cut across reporting lines—often determine how work actually gets done inside organizations. In other words, the people who shape your reputation may not be the people you are trying hardest to impress.

This dynamic became clear during a session with one of my mentees, a senior manager who was facing challenges with key colleagues. In a pattern that repeated across successive roles, she was frustrated by what she perceived as colleagues’ jealousy, which she believed was preventing her from progressing in her career.

As it turned out, her record of quickly delivering exceptional results and being publicly praised by the organization’s chairman threatened her colleagues and boss. And her successful acquisition of key resources and recognition, such as increased manpower and promotions for her team, increased resentment.

She found out that team members had been making complaints about her leadership style, but the details were vague. No specific situations were presented, nor evidence put forward. The HR partner denied her access to details about who complained, so she sought support from more senior leaders. In one instance, she turned to the organization’s chairman for support. The chairman stepped in, instructing her manager and HR partner to support her development, emphasizing that he valued her and considered her an important player on the team.

In the short term, this helped, but it also created more resentment. The HR director complained that he had been bypassed. Team members supported her as requested, but the support was given reluctantly, and they continually tried to undermine her indirectly, including cancelling business trips and removing her from key committees. Her direct manager became distant and resentful following the chairman’s intervention.

As we unpacked the situation, it became clear that while there were a number of possible factors contributing to friction with her colleagues, part of the deeper issue lay close to home, within what I call a professional’s radius: the immediate circle of colleagues and stakeholders who experience their work most closely. Tensions had damaged trust with colleagues in that radius. Even though she had since built a strong, high-performing team, those earlier perceptions had not fully disappeared. Her reputation within her immediate professional ecosystem shaped how others spoke about her when she was not in the room. The lack of trust within her radius, caused by her focus on leveraging relationships with more senior leaders, impacted her ability to work in harmony with her team.

Research on workplace reputation supports this dynamic. Studies on sponsorship and career advancement consistently show that promotion decisions are strongly influenced by informal conversations among leaders and peers, long before formal decisions are made. In other words, the people who observe your leadership most closely often shape how others perceive you. Yet these are frequently the relationships ambitious professionals neglect.

Networks in 3D

Aspiring senior leaders need to think about their connections differently. Many professionals think about relationships in two dimensions: hierarchy and proximity. They focus on who sits above them and with whom they interact most often.

But influence in organizations rarely moves in straight lines. A more useful way to understand your professional relationships is to see them in three dimensions: vertical, horizontal, and external. Each dimension plays a distinct role in shaping your reputation. The challenges faced by my mentee illustrate what happens when those dimensions are misaligned.

Vertical: Advocacy Without Alignment

My mentee understood the importance of building relationships with senior leaders. But part of developing a strong network higher in an organization’s ecosystem is knowing when to leverage those key connections, and when to hold back. When she encountered resistance from her manager and HR partner, she escalated to more senior figures, including the chairman. That gave her advocacy at the top. But it came at a cost. By bypassing her direct manager and HR, she unintentionally weakened trust below and around her. Her vertical strategy was unbalanced: strong toward the top of the hierarchy, but fragile further down. And how her peers perceived her would affect how others on the team, including her employees, viewed her.

For senior leaders, the lesson is not simply to “build relationships up and down.” It is to ensure alignment across the vertical axis. Before turning to your more senior connections for support, ask yourself:

• Have you brought your immediate manager into the conversation?

• Have you sought to understand their constraints or concerns?

• Are you strengthening their ability to support you, or undermining it?

Advocacy from above is powerful and can help in a range of situations, not just dealing with conflict. But if it contradicts or undermines the experience of those below, it can damage your credibility more than it helps.

Horizontal: Where Reputation Is Formed

The real friction in my mentee’s situation came from her peers, team members, and HR partner. These were the people who experienced her leadership daily and who could shape the narrative about her when she wasn’t in the room. But her focus on upward relationships meant she invested less in managing perception across this horizontal network. As a result, a gap emerged. She saw herself as high-performing and deserving of progression. Meanwhile, others experienced her as bypassing processes, accumulating power, and creating pressure. Whether that perception was fair or not became irrelevant. It spread.

This is where most reputations are actually formed. For high potentials, the key question is not “Do senior leaders know me?” but “How do the people I rely on describe working with me?” So, it’s vital to invest time and thought in deepening relationships with the people you work with every day. Focus not just on your agenda, but genuinely engage with colleagues, seeking to understand their challenges and objectives and making sure you are aligned.

Ask yourself:

• Are there unresolved tensions within your immediate circle of colleagues?

• Do your team members feel supported and empowered?

• Do peers experience you as collaborative and reliable?

• Are there stakeholders who influence your success but sit outside your current focus?

Addressing these questions requires humility and curiosity. It means listening carefully to the perspectives of people who experience your leadership most closely and investing in relationships that may not appear glamorous but quietly shape your reputation.

External: Broader Networks Beyond Your Team and Organization

The third dimension is often the least visible and the most underestimated. Within your organization, there might be individuals in other teams, who don’t have a direct input into the outcomes you are trying to achieve but who can influence the environment in which decisions are made. Beyond your organization, though, there are other key stakeholders whose perspectives carry weight and can impact your reputation. How you carry yourself when engaging with clients, suppliers, shareholders, non-executive directors, and others can inform how people see you closer to home.

People who are not in the room still form and influence opinions through the conversations they have. You are probably familiar with the phrase, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Think more in terms of who knows you, and what they say about you when you’re not in the room.

Take some time to reflect on what you want people to say about you when you’re not in the room, not focusing on the typical “hygiene factors,” such as being professional, reliable and supportive. Instead, ask yourself:

• What would people turn specifically to me for help with?

• Where have I made the greatest impact on key stakeholders or within my own projects?

• What would I describe as my “superpower”—the value I bring beyond anything else?

• Based on their experience of me, why would others talk positively about me in conversation, and what would they say?

• When have I been too focused on my own agenda and ignored other people’s? How might that impact how they view and talk about me?

The Real Insight: Misalignment Across Dimensions

What held my mentee back was not a lack of relationships. It was a misalignment across the three dimensions. Senior leaders saw her potential, but her immediate circle, whose opinion carried a lot of weight and had a more direct impact on her success, questioned her approach.

Seeing your network in three dimensions is not about building more relationships. It is about ensuring that your reputation is consistent across them. Before seeking visibility at the top, ask: Am I aligned with those above and below me? Do my peers and stakeholders trust how I operate? And how is my behavior being interpreted beyond my immediate interactions?

Career progression rarely depends on a single powerful relationship. It depends on whether your reputation holds together across the system.

Copyright 2026 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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