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Leaders may prioritize executing strategy and driving organizational performance, but they are also responsible for developing the next generation of leaders. Traditionally, leadership development has focused heavily on performance — an understandable emphasis, given that leaders themselves are evaluated and rewarded based on execution and results.
However, as organizational strategies increasingly rely on cross-functional teams and external partnerships, employees’ success increasingly depends not only on technical capabilities and performance but on the ability to navigate relationships, influence stakeholders, access information across boundaries, and build credibility beyond their immediate roles. Yet many organizations still develop high-potential talent primarily through experiences that advance performance — that is, the ability to execute tasks. They overlook the importance of providing development experiences that help individuals develop a critical asset for leadership effectiveness and advancement: social capital.
In organizational settings, social capital reflects the trust, goodwill, and credibility that shape how individuals are perceived, influence how contributions are interpreted, and enable the support and advocacy required for advancement. It determines whether performance stays where it is produced or travels across teams, functions, and decision makers, translating into broader visibility, advocacy, and opportunity.
Yet, despite social capital’s influence, few professionals are explicitly taught how to build it, convert it into opportunity, or use it to sustain their career mobility. Rarely explicitly discussed and seldom incorporated into development, it often operates as an invisible system governing how individuals advance within organizations.
Social Capital in Practice
Social capital determines whether performance stays where it is produced or travels to where opportunity exists. To better understand professionals’ perspectives on how it shapes career mobility, I interviewed 21 people representing a range of functions and career stages, from just a few years of experience to more than four decades in the workforce.
While we might expect networking activity to be at the heart of developing social capital, participants in my research rarely discussed it solely in those terms. Instead, they saw it operating in the practical realities of organizational life: who is trusted, who is sought out for advice, whose judgment carries weight, who receives advocacy, and who is afforded grace when mistakes occur. As one research participant put it, “Social capital is the amount of blind faith that someone will give you based on how they feel about you and their prior experience with you.” While formal organizational structures define reporting relationships and responsibilities, participants consistently emphasized that many opportunities, decisions, and career movements are enabled by less visible relational dynamics.
Several interviewees described social capital as influencing how performance itself is interpreted. Strong performance may establish credibility, but credibility alone does not guarantee visibility, advocacy, or advancement. Rather, social capital shapes whether accomplishments remain confined to an immediate team or become recognized across functions, business units, and decision-making circles.
This dynamic becomes particularly important when individuals pursue movement across organizational boundaries. These shifts across teams, functions, or business units are what the study refers to as zigzag moves, in contrast with progress up a traditional, defined hierarchy. Unlike advancing within a familiar environment, making zigzag moves often requires individuals to establish credibility with stakeholders who have little direct knowledge of their previous work. In these situations, social capital — reputation, relationships, and advocacy — provide signals that reduce uncertainty and increase trust. In this way, social capital serves as a mechanism through which performance becomes portable.
As high-potential individuals ascend the ranks of leadership, their social capital becomes increasingly important to how they are evaluated. Their work is unlikely to be directly observed by those considering candidates for advancement, and decisions about opportunities (especially emerging opportunities), promotions, and leadership potential are increasingly informed by reputation, trust, relationships, and the perspectives of others. In these situations, social capital often determines whose capabilities are recognized, whose ideas gain traction, and whose name surfaces when opportunities emerge.
Interviewees suggested that social capital is commonly accumulated through everyday work interactions: moments where credibility is reinforced, trust is established, and relationships are strengthened. It is accumulated in meetings through thoughtful contributions, collaborative problem-solving, and consistent follow-through — small but meaningful social capital deposits that compound over time.
Social capital is also seen as fragile, reflecting the old adage that reputation can take a lifetime to build but be lost in a minute. Trust, credibility, and goodwill can be diminished quickly through poor judgment, broken commitments, lack of reciprocity, or misaligned relationships.
To that point, social events such as company “happy hours” that might be seen as prime opportunities to build one’s network were viewed with caution by participants. One noted, “Social events are always weird. There’s always weird power dynamics. There’s already cliquishness. That social capital has already been established. It’s easy to lose social capital at a social event.”
For Black professionals, these dynamics carry additional significance. Across interviews, participants observed that social capital comes with different risks, scrutiny, and rewards for Black employees. While all professionals are expected to build trust and credibility, participants noted that the same behaviors are not always interpreted or rewarded equally. Black professionals were seen operating with a smaller margin for error, where trust often has to be earned repeatedly and is more easily challenged.
How Social Capital Is Built
Based on the experiences people shared in the interviews, I identified four underlying mechanisms through which social capital is built and converted into mobility: performance, reputation, influence, and network.
Performance reflects an individual’s ability to execute, deliver results, and establish credibility through consistent output. This is the foundation of reputation: one’s subject-matter expertise, ability to solve problems and handle complexity, and reliability. As noted earlier, performance is not sufficient to enable career mobility, but it is necessary for credibility.
Reputation captures how an individual is perceived across the organization based on their behavior, judgment, and consistency over time. It is shaped not only by outcomes but by how individuals engage others across levels, upward, laterally, and downward.
Influence reflects the ability to shape decisions, align stakeholders, and mobilize action without relying solely on formal authority. As roles expand, success increasingly depends on the ability to cooperate with others rather than through direct execution.
Network represents the relational infrastructure through which information, opportunity, and advocacy flow. More than proximity or access, it reflects the strength, relevance, and credibility of relationships, particularly those that extend beyond immediate teams or functions. It also serves as a reputational signal that is reflected in who associates with an individual and whether those relationships amplify credibility and opportunity.
Together, these four components form the architecture through which social capital is built. While each contributes independently to professional effectiveness, participants saw their value as emerging in concert. Performance establishes credibility, credibility develops into reputation, and reputation enables influence and networks. Together, influence and network amplify reputation beyond an individual’s immediate environment, creating the conditions for career mobility.
As individuals advance into management and leadership roles, performance becomes assumed rather than continuously evaluated. Mobility increasingly relies on the interactions between reputation, influence, and network. Each advancement strengthens reputation, expands network reach, and increases influence, which in turn creates additional opportunities for mobility.
Why Building Social Capital Can Be Difficult
If social capital governs mobility, then understanding why some otherwise capable professionals struggle to build it is important in identifying how to help high-potential individuals prepare for leadership roles. The following patterns emerged in my research.
1. The productivity trap. High-performing individuals whose social capital is built almost exclusively through performance may be operationally indispensable but strategically invisible. These professionals consistently deliver results, solve problems, and become highly valued within their immediate teams. Yet their reputation, influence, and network remain largely confined to the environment in which their work is performed, especially if they work on projects that don’t create touch points outside the immediate team.
As a result, they become indispensable to current operations but increasingly invisible to those selecting potential leaders for growth opportunities. Their contributions are recognized locally but rarely translated into visibility, advocacy, or mobility elsewhere in the organization. Over time, performance ceases to generate mobility and instead becomes the mechanism through which they remain anchored to their existing role.
2. Reputation without advocacy. Some individuals develop strong credibility and positive reputations but lack the relationships or influence necessary to convert that reputation into opportunity. These professionals are respected, viewed favorably by colleagues, and often considered capable of larger responsibilities. However, when advancement opportunities emerge, they lack relationships with people who could actively advocate for them.
In these situations, reputation becomes passive capital. Trust exists, but it isn’t mobilized. As a result, advancement frequently lags behind capability.
3. Network without credibility. The third pattern reflects the opposite imbalance: Some individuals successfully develop broad networks and visibility but lack the credibility necessary to take advantage of the opportunities those relationships create. Access outpaces demonstrated capability, and the individual’s visibility exceeds their readiness to perform at the required level.
While networks can create opportunity, long-term mobility still depends on trust and performance. Without credibility, relationships alone rarely generate sustained advancement and may even create reputational risk, when expectations exceed demonstrated capability. One participant observed that an employee’s network could be seen as a distraction if their “ducks aren’t in a row.”
These patterns suggest that career mobility is rarely constrained by a complete absence of social capital. Understanding these obstacles can help point to where development efforts should be focused and what may be preventing otherwise capable professionals from moving forward.
How to Develop for Social Capital, Not Just Performance
Excellent performance is typically what makes potential leaders stand out, but often, development efforts remain focused on building expert skills, leaving the broader mechanisms of mobility largely unaddressed. Social capital should be developed as intentionally as any other professional capability. Managers and sponsors are uniquely positioned to do this, but it requires them to offer different kinds of support than they may be accustomed to providing.
What Managers Can Do: Develop More Than Performance
Managers often focus development conversations on execution, productivity, and technical capability. While these factors remain essential, performance alone rarely prepares individuals for the complexity of future leadership roles. Managers should therefore view development through a broader lens, helping employees build the components of social capital while creating opportunities to accumulate trust, credibility, and relationships that support mobility.
They can begin by creating opportunities for employees to establish credibility beyond their immediate responsibilities. Cross-functional projects, enterprise initiatives, stakeholder-facing work, and opportunities to present ideas to broader audiences all help expand visibility and reputation. Managers can also help employees strengthen their influence by involving them in decision-making discussions, encouraging them to lead through collaboration, and providing them with opportunities to navigate competing stakeholder interests.
Equally important, managers should recognize when high performers are becoming trapped within the boundaries of their current role. Development should focus on helping performance travel beyond the environment in which it originated.
Perhaps most important, however, is helping employees recognize that these experiences create opportunities to accumulate social capital through repeated deposits. Completing a stretch assignment may create initial visibility, but sustained mobility often depends on what happens afterward. Maintaining relationships with stakeholders, staying connected with peers across functions, and continuing to engage with leaders from temporary assignments help reinforce trust, credibility, and familiarity over time. These deposits keep an individual’s name present in conversations long after a project has concluded and increase the likelihood that opportunities will emerge from relationships built through prior experiences rather than current performance alone.
Where Sponsors Can Help: Extend and Educate
Sponsors occupy a unique position because they can extend their own social capital on behalf of another individual. Like managers, sponsors can help individuals build social capital by creating opportunities for visibility, exposure, and relationship development. However, sponsors contribute something additional: Through advocacy, introductions, endorsements, and visibility, they lend their own social capital to create opportunities that may not have been accessible through performance alone, in a dynamic described by scholar Ronald S. Burt in his writing on social capital. However, with any loan, there is an expectation of repayment: The sponsor expects to benefit in some way that will enhance their reputation and influence. This reciprocity is key to a successful relationship between a sponsor and the individual they’re sponsoring.
But effective sponsorship extends beyond opening doors. Sponsors routinely make decisions based on trust, reciprocity, credibility, judgment, relationships, and reputation because they understand how mobility operates within organizations. However, these dynamics are often left implicit. Individuals may benefit from sponsorship without fully understanding why opportunities emerged, what reputational considerations were involved, or how advocacy was earned.
Effective sponsors make these mechanisms visible. They help individuals understand how social capital is accumulated through consistent deposits and built through the four components I outlined, and how it ultimately translates into opportunity. In doing so, sponsors move beyond providing access and begin teaching others how to build, accumulate, and benefit from social capital throughout their careers.
Performance remains essential for career success, but it is rarely sufficient on its own. As careers progress, advancement increasingly depends on whether performance is recognized, trusted, advocated for, and carried beyond the environment in which it is produced. Social capital provides the mechanism through which that occurs.
For professionals, the implication is clear: Social capital must be built, accumulated, and intentionally developed alongside performance. For managers and sponsors, the responsibility extends further. Developing talent requires more than improving execution; it requires helping individuals cultivate the trust, credibility, influence, and relationships that enable mobility. Ultimately, social capital determines whether performance stays where it originated or travels to where opportunity exists.