On "networking" in leadership development

Yesterday, I posted:

to which an old friend responded, "I would really like to know more. If you can share."

This will be my first time trying to verbalize my revulsion to what I was asked to do at a time when my relationship with HBP was already souring. What was mostly a gut reaction in the moment, something I intuitively understood as wrong, has become more clear with time. The networking instruction I was assigned to work on was one more source of moral injury and quickly became one of the last straws for me.

In my opinion, the networking component of their leadership development program normalizes grossly transactional behavior among the kinds of “leaders” that are their target clientele (varying levels of management at global Fortune 2000 companies). I was tasked with what I essentially felt was re‑packaging exploitation and manipulation as a skill. I was expected to frame resource extraction using more palatable (but ultimately hollow) language while leaving the underlying dynamics intact, just more obscured.

The source material I was provided to work with to produce new instruction treated relationships as tools, using quid‑pro‑quo language. Among other things, it exposed the lie of the meritocracy—achieving a goal or advancing your career depends more on who you know and how you can leverage relationships and build strategic alliances with influential people than on the value of the goal or the quality of your work or the depth of your expertise.

Some of the activities I was asked to build out included “mapping your network,” in which the learner identifies “areas of relative strength and weakness of a network” while determining who does and doesn’t belong in your network or a specific area of it while “being mindful of power imbalances” to achieve one’s own goals. To me, it felt like treating your social and professional circle like a marketplace where people are assigned a value and exchanged. Phrases like “demonstrate authentic curiosity” felt manipulative and disingenuous when the surrounding, contradictory language treated people as means to an end. “Use your network to access resources” and “craft an ask that will help you get what you need” reduced colleagues to stepping stones and turned relationship‑building into a calculated transaction.

As a person from the working class who was rapidly gaining class consciousness in large part because I was working for an institution which develops the professional managerial class, I could not reconcile the contradictions of the assignment, nor stomach being complicit with training the masters to be better (sneakier) at mastering us.

P.S. I want to clarify that I don't actually know what the networking component of the finished leadership development product looks like, because I parted ways with HBP before it was finished. But as the saying goes, "You can't polish a turd."