Networking Strategy for Leaders Who Want to Grow

I'm Kurt Schmidt, founder of Schmidt Consulting Group and host of The Schmidt List podcast. The single question I get most often from founders and agency owners who've grown past ten people is some version of: "Why is managing people so much harder than I thought it would be?"" The answer almost always traces back to the same gap. They built their networking strategy around clients and revenue, and never built one around leadership growth.

That gap costs them. A lot.

Let me explain what I mean, because networking strategy for leadership is about deliberately building the relationships and feedback loops that make you better at the hardest part of running a services firm: leading other humans.

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Why Do Leaders Struggle Even When They Were Great Individual Contributors?

Leaders who were strong individual contributors often plateau fast once they're managing people. Lawrence J. Peter identified this active in The Peter Principle back in 1969, and five decades later it's still the most accurate description of what happens when you promote your best salesperson into a sales manager role. They were great at the craft. They didn't necessarily have the tools for leading other people doing that craft.

I lived this. My first leadership role, I assumed that being everyone's friend would be enough to get people to follow my direction. It was not. That was a painful and very educational failure.

The deeper problem is structural. When someone gets promoted, the organization often stops developing them. Attention shifts to the struggling new hires at the back of the bus, and the newly promoted person is assumed to be fine because they're hitting their numbers. They rot on the vine, as I've heard it put. And because the water doesn't flow uphill in most organizations, no one tells the leader what they actually need to succeed.

The EQ four-box model, which maps self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and relationship management, gives a useful frame for understanding why smart people still struggle here. Self-awareness is the starting point: knowing how you show up. But awareness alone doesn't change behavior. Self-management is the harder discipline: filtering what you say before you say it. How many times have you said something to a colleague or a family member that you thought they needed to hear, and it went sideways? That's a self-management failure, and it happens to virtually everyone. The empathy layer asks what the other person needs right now, in this moment, before you deliver any feedback or direction. And the relationship management box is where the actual partnership gets built over time.

Most organizations hand people a StrengthsFinder report or a DISC profile and call it leadership development. I've been through Myers-Briggs cycles more times than I can count, and while those assessments can identify problems that need addressing, they're diagnoses without treatments. They don't change behavior. What changes behavior is working through that self-management discipline with someone who holds you accountable to it.

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What's the Real Role of Networking Strategy in Leadership Development?

A deliberate networking strategy for leadership fills the gaps that internal HR programs can't. I had a boss early in my career who handed me books. Awaken the Giant Within, things like that. Read this, go figure it out. That was my leadership training. The rest was two decades of mistakes.

What actually moved the needle wasn't the books. It was the mentors. Finding people outside my organization who'd already walked through transitions I was facing, and being vulnerable enough to ask for their honest read on what I was doing wrong. That's a hard thing to do when the prevailing leadership culture told you (as it told most of us in the Jack Welch era) that showing uncertainty was a weakness that would get you eaten alive.

The shift I've watched happen over the past decade or so is real. Vulnerable leadership, the kind where a leader says "I don't know, can you help me figure this out?" is now producing better results than command-and-control ever did. I've seen it across dozens of client engagements. And the leaders who make that shift fastest are the ones who've built a networking strategy that gives them people they can be candid with.

I recently talked through this with Peter Bailey, a leadership consultant with forty years in the field, and the framework he uses to think about mentors is one you'll want to steal. He describes the servant leadership model as an inverted pyramid: put yourself at the bottom, and ask everyone above you (meaning everyone who reports to you) one question: "What do you need to do your job well?" When you ask that question sincerely, the information flows down to you. People tell you what's actually blocking them. You become an advocate for what your team needs rather than a person who presumes to already know.

That question, "What do you need to do your job well?", is simple. But it completely rewires the communication active in a team, because it signals that you're there to remove obstacles rather than to demonstrate authority.

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How Do You Build a Networking Strategy That Actually Develops Your Leadership?

The tactical version of this breaks into four areas.

Start with mentors who are a level or two ahead of you and willing to give you an honest read. They don't need to be in your industry. In fact, cross-industry mentors are often more useful because they see your situation without the assumptions your industry carries. The key is that you ask them good questions and that you're willing to hear uncomfortable answers. You're not looking for validation. You're looking for the perspective you can't generate from inside your own head.

Second, find a peer group of people at roughly the same stage of leadership. What I'm increasingly seeing, especially as people work through the return-to-office transition and the general disorientation of the last few years, is that leaders are forming small informal pods: four to six people who meet regularly to work through real problems together. Not networking events. Not panels. Actual working groups where people are honest about what's hard.

Third, read with intention. Books provide models. Patrick Lencioni's work on team forces, Bill Bridges on managing transitions, the EQ literature from Daniel Goleman, these give you language for what you're experiencing. But the model has to connect to a real conversation with a real person before it sticks. Reading without application is just collecting ideas.

Fourth, invest in one-on-one coaching at transition points specifically. Promotions, acquisitions, rapid headcount growth, these are the moments when the leadership backpack gets tested hardest. A B2B services firm I work with waited until they were 35 people before getting any structured leadership support, and by that point they had two years of accumulated team dysfunction to unwind. Bringing in coaching at 12 or 15 people, right at the moment the founder stops doing the work and starts leading the people doing the work, is dramatically cheaper than the cleanup.

This connects directly to agency leadership transition and the specific challenges that craftspeople face when they move into management roles.

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How Does COVID and the Return-to-Office Shift Change Leadership Networking Needs?

The last few years broke a lot of organizational trust that was already fragile. Teams that hadn't done the foundational work of forming properly (in the classic Tuckman forming-storming-norming-performing sense) got exposed fast when everyone went remote. The accountability structures that existed only because people were physically visible in an office dissolved overnight.

What came out of that period, though, was useful information. A lot of people discovered that they were actually more productive in environments where they had control over their time and space. That's not a small thing. And now mandating a return to five days in-office without addressing why people thrived in different configurations is just creating a new version of the same trust problem.

The leaders I've seen handle this best used it as a deliberate team formation exercise. They didn't just announce a return date and move on. They built a process where people at different ends of the introversion-extroversion spectrum had some ownership in what the return looked like. An extroverted person and an introverted person have genuinely different needs around re-entering a shared office environment. A kickball game in the parking lot lands very differently for those two people.

This matters for networking strategy because it points to a broader principle: the way you structure connection and communication in your organization has to account for the actual humans you're working with rather than the average human you've imagined. A good leader's networking strategy, internally, is an ongoing practice of understanding what each person on their team needs to be at their best. That's a relationship.

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What's the One Networking Strategy Shift That Changes Everything for New Leaders?

Ask better questions. That's it. That's the whole shift.

The leaders who struggle most are the ones who walk into a new role trying to demonstrate that they deserve it, that they know what they're doing and have the answers. The leaders who grow fast are the ones who get curious fast. "What do you need to do your job well?" is a better opening than any speech about vision or strategy.

In my experience working with agencies and B2B services firms, the single highest-return networking investment a new leader can make is finding two or three people who've already made the transition from individual contributor to manager, and asking them to tell you candidly what surprised them. What did they wish someone had told them at month three? What did they do wrong that took them eighteen months to undo?

That conversation is free. It's available to almost anyone. And most people never have it because they're too proud or too scared to admit they don't have it figured out. I spent years avoiding the executives in my office who'd said things that made me feel exposed. That was expensive avoidance.

Laura King, a well-regarded leadership voice here in the Twin Cities, puts it cleanly: it's about what you can do for others. Lead with service. That's the orientation that makes a networking strategy for leadership actually work, because you stop collecting contacts and start building relationships where value genuinely flows in both directions.

The table above isn't an argument for coaching over everything else. If you're a solo operator or a team of five under a tight budget, a peer group or a well-chosen mentor is a better starting investment than formal coaching. The goal is to get into some kind of honest feedback relationship, in whatever form that takes.

This connects to and the specific development needs at each stage of scaling a services business.

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Key Takeaways

• Networking strategy for leadership means building deliberate relationships for growth, separate from the networks you build for revenue.
• The EQ four-box model (self-awareness, self-management, empathy, relationship management) gives a practical frame for understanding where your leadership gaps actually live.
• The servant leadership inversion, asking "what do you need to do your job well?" down through the org chart, generates more honest information than top-down communication ever will.
• The Peter Principle is still accurate: your best individual contributors need the most support at the moment of promotion, and most organizations do the opposite.
• External mentors and peer groups produce faster leadership growth than internal programs because honesty is easier outside the political forces of your own organization.
• The return-to-office transition is a leadership test. Leaders who treat it as a team formation exercise will build more trust than leaders who treat it as a policy rollout.

I covered related forces on The Schmidt List, including how founders at services firms work through the shift from doing the work to leading the people who do it.

The question to sit with: who in your life right now is giving you honest feedback on how you're leading? If you can't name someone immediately, that's the gap your networking strategy needs to fill first.

leadership development for owners