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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 infr
