The Case for Strategic Networking When Nobody Has the Answers

Most leaders are networking. But if you are a more task-focused leader, are you possibly prioritising getting things done over having networking conversations that challenge your thinking? In a period of rapid change driven by AI, that distinction may matter more than ever.

In coaching conversations with task-focused senior leaders, a revealing question can be: in your network, who is challenging your thinking right now? The question tends to land with more discomfort than most leaders anticipate. Not because they lack networks, most senior leaders are extensively networked, but because when they examine those networks honestly, much of the activity is about stakeholder management, operationally focused, or transactional rather than strategic. That distinction, between networking that sustains the work you are doing and relationships that expand and challenge your thinking about where things are heading, is what this article is about.

The pattern behind the blind spot

Leadership research has long recognised that leadership behaviour lies on a spectrum between task focus and relationship focus, and that what we prioritise on that spectrum shapes how we lead, how we allocate time, and, crucially, how we build and use our networks. Managers who rise through strong delivery tend to remain anchored toward the task end of that spectrum, and research suggests they consistently underinvest in the strategic relationships that become increasingly important as they rise through the ranks. The pattern is self-reinforcing. Results build credibility, credibility brings more responsibility, and more responsibility narrows focus further still. The networking approach that served a leader well in earlier roles fails to evolve as the role itself demands something different.

What makes this particularly costly is that task-focused leaders tend to assume results alone will drive visibility and influence. Research suggests that leaders who actively bridge different groups and communities, connecting perspectives that would not otherwise meet, tend to gain earlier access to emerging information and carry greater strategic influence than peers of equal capability who remain more operationally embedded. The conclusion that surfaces consistently is that results establish credibility, but the quality of your networks creates influence. In relatively stable conditions, conflating the two may be a manageable blind spot. In uncertain times, it tends to become something more consequential.

The world for which execution skills were built

Task-focused leadership was largely calibrated for a world in which the problem was reasonably well understood, and the goal was to move faster and more efficiently than the competition. In that context, staying close to operational relationships made sense. The challenge facing many leaders right now, however, is not primarily one of execution. It is one of interpretation.

Consider a leader who enters a peer conversation confident in their read of where their market is heading, and leaves it no longer sure. Not because they were given better data, but because someone operating from a different context asked a question they had not thought to ask themselves. That kind of conversation does not just add to what you know. It changes the lens through which you are interpreting everything else. That is the kind of intelligence that does not arrive through dashboards, analyst reports or internal team meetings. It travels through relationships, often those that fall outside the operational circle.

Part of what makes this difficult is that we all tend to assess situations through existing mental models, the beliefs we hold about ourselves, others and how things get done. For task-focused leaders, reliance on established mental models is often a genuine asset, enabling fast, confident decisions based on what has worked before. The current context, however, demands something different. Navigating the possibilities that AI creates requires leaders to fundamentally interrogate those models rather than operate within them, and that kind of interrogation rarely happens alone or within familiar networks.

The signals coming in right now are ambiguous, contradictory and moving quickly, and no amount of operational excellence reliably answers the question that arguably matters most: what does this mean for us, and where might this be heading?

Why AI raises the stakes

AI is a particularly demanding example of this challenge. It is not simply a trend to monitor or a capability to acquire. It’s reshaping business models, talent structures, consumer behaviour and decision-making simultaneously, at speed, and without a clear playbook. The position for most leaders is one of genuine uncertainty, and that uncertainty creates its own pressure. For task-focused leaders, that pressure can trigger a familiar and understandable response: accelerate rather than pause, default to action rather than sit with the discomfort of not yet knowing.

One of the more underacknowledged dynamics in leadership right now is the temptation to rush toward certainty to manage the pressure. When the environment feels unclear, there is a very human pull toward prematurely deciding where things are heading, to reduce the discomfort of ambiguity and move forward. That instinct is understandable, but in a landscape shifting as rapidly as this one, premature certainty is its own form of risk. The leaders who tend to navigate this kind of uncertainty most effectively are not necessarily those who arrive at answers fastest. They are often those who can hold multiple possible futures in parallel for long enough to see which signals are meaningful.

That capacity, the ability to think in scenarios rather than collapsing prematurely to a single view, is significantly easier to develop and sustain in conversation with a network who are navigating the terrain in different ways. A diverse network does not just provide access to more information. It provides resistance to the echo chamber effect that makes premature certainty so seductive, and it creates the conditions for the kind of thinking that genuinely uncertain situations require.

Sensemaking as a leadership practice

Organisational researchers describe this process as sensemaking, the work of interpreting a shifting environment and constructing a workable understanding of what is happening and what it means. It is distinct from analysis, which assumes you already know what to look for, and from strategy, which assumes you have already made sense of the situation.

Sensemaking is what happens before both, and it happens most effectively in conversation, through the friction of genuinely different perspectives that surface assumptions you did not know you were carrying, in conditions where people are thinking out loud, in conditions that are not performative.

This points to something worth sitting with, specifically for task-focused leaders. There is a tendency to listen in order to solve a problem rather than to understand their perspective, to move quickly toward a solution rather than remain with someone else's perspective long enough for it to land. In operational contexts, listening to fix is often a real asset. In strategic peer conversations, it can be a limitation, because the value of those conversations lies precisely in what emerges when you stay curious rather than move toward resolution.

The most generative conversations tend to be structured around questions rather than positions, and they require psychological safety that takes time and intention to build: What are you uncertain about? What are you seeing that surprises you? Where do you think the conventional wisdom in your sector might be wrong? Those questions require a different quality of listening that task-focused leaders don’t always practise, especially under pressure, and developing that quality of attention is often where the real value of strategic networking begins.

Reframing the activity itself

One of the most common blockers I encounter in coaching is that strategic networking feels contrived or inauthentic, particularly for leaders who are more at home in the concrete world of delivery than in what can feel like the less defined territory of relationship-building. That response is worth taking seriously rather than simply overriding. It often reflects a discomfort with activities that lack clear outputs or immediate returns, which is an understandable response for someone whose professional identity might be built around measurable impact.

The most useful reframe is not about networking for career advancement or social performance. It is about recognising that in periods of uncertainty, the quality of your thinking is arguably inseparable from the quality of your relationships. A deliberately cultivated network of peers across sectors and roles, chosen for the diversity of their perspectives and their willingness to think out loud rather than bring certainty. This is less a networking strategy and more of thinking partners. Advisors and board members selected for cognitive diversity rather than domain familiarity serve a similar function, bringing the kind of challenge that helps leaders see their own context differently, rather than simply validating what they already believe.

The cost of opting out

It is worth pausing on what remaining under-networked at a strategic level might mean in practice. Leaders in this position may be making consequential decisions from inside a narrower picture of the world than they realise, one that is more operationally focused and less future-oriented than the current moment requires. Weak signals that peers in adjacent sectors are already responding to may not be reaching them. Perspectives that would enrich their thinking may simply not have a relationship through which to travel.

In a relatively stable environment, that is a suboptimal but manageable position. In an environment shifting as fundamentally as this one, the compounding effect of that narrowness is worth taking seriously.

A reframe, not a to-do list

The intention here is not to add strategic networking to a list of things you already know you should be doing. It is to suggest a more fundamental shift in how it is understood. The most valuable investment a senior leader can make right now may not be in executing the current strategy with greater discipline. It may be in building the relationships that help them see what the next strategy needs to be before the need for it becomes obvious.

In a period of ambiguity, the ability to think clearly about possible futures, to resist premature certainty, and to be challenged by perspectives different from your own may be among the most strategically important capacities a leader can develop. And those capacities are, to a significant degree, a function of who you are in conversation with and the quality of the relationships that make those conversations possible.

The question is not whether you have a network. Most leaders in fast-moving sectors do. The question is whether the relationships you are actively investing in are expanding the quality of your thinking, or whether they are quietly reinforcing what you already believe. That is not always an easy question to answer honestly, and it is rarely best answered alone.

About Andrew

Andrew Sherman is an executive coach who works with leaders in media, tech, and founder-led businesses. His work focuses on helping leaders find better ways to lead as growth, pressure and technology change what’s required.

If this article reflects opportunities you’re navigating right now, you’re welcome to get in touch or follow along for future editions of Find a Better Way.