The standard advice to senior leaders who don't enjoy networking is to do more of it: attend the conference, work the room at the industry dinner, force yourself into small talk with strangers holding the same brand of wine glass. The assumption underneath all of it is that career-moving relationships only form in a room, in real time, with everyone standing up.
At the manager-and-above level, that assumption is expensive. Executives who avoid events because they find them draining aren't opting out of relationship-building, they're opting out of a specific format. The mechanism that actually moves careers, a well-placed connection at the right moment, doesn't require a room at all, only timing and specificity, both easier to produce in writing than in a five-minute hallway conversation. That's true whether the room is in London, New York, Toronto or Sydney: LinkedIn is the dominant professional network across all four markets, even though usage patterns vary by country.
The advice to "network more" assumes the wrong unit of effort
Most networking advice treats attendance as the metric that matters: more events, more handshakes, more business cards. But attendance was never the variable that produced results. The variable was always the strength of the relationship itself.
Mark Granovetter's 1973 "strength of weak ties" thesis proposed that weak, non-redundant connections spread job information disproportionately well, better than close friends who mostly already know what you know. A causal study of more than 20 million LinkedIn users, run over five years with researchers from Stanford, MIT and Harvard Business School and published in Science in September 2022, tested that idea directly and found an inverted U: moderately weak ties drove the most job mobility, while both very strong and very weak ties drove less. The study tracked roughly 2 billion new ties and 600,000 new jobs created during the experiment window.
That finding undercuts the room-based model of networking on its own terms. A conference doesn't generate moderately weak ties efficiently. It generates a stack of business cards from people you spoke to for ninety seconds, either too weak to matter or requiring months of follow-up to become useful. Written outreach can build the same tie strength on purpose, without the room.
Senior professionals often network less than their track record would justify
Kellogg School research (Cao and Smith) found that willingness to network correlates with what people believe about their own status and value, not their actual status. Professionals who attribute their success to luck rather than skill network less, regardless of how senior they actually are. That means the executive who dreads the mixer isn't necessarily undervaluing networking, they may be undervaluing themselves, and the room format simply makes that self-assessment visible in real time.
Separately, Adam Grant's Wharton research on "givers, takers and matchers" found that givers, people who contribute to others' networks without expecting an immediate return, tend to build broader networks and benefit more from dormant ties over the long run. The two findings point the same direction: the executives who get the most from their network are rarely the ones working a room the hardest. They're the ones who give useful things to their contacts consistently, in a way that doesn't depend on being in the same physical space.
That's good news for anyone who dislikes events. Giving something useful, an introduction, a piece of information, a considered reply, is easier to do consistently in writing than to manufacture at a cocktail hour.
Why a considered message does the same job as the hallway introduction
The reason a hallway conversation works, when it works, is specificity: you learned one real thing about the other person, referenced it, and gave them a reason to remember you. Nothing about that mechanism requires physical proximity. It requires attention and a clear reason for reaching out, both easier to construct in writing than in ninety seconds of small talk.
This is where most executives get the written version wrong. A generic connection request carries none of the specificity that made the in-person version work in the first place.
Before: "Hi, I saw we're both in fintech. Would love to connect."
After: "I read your post on core banking migration last week and disagreed with the point on vendor lock-in. We ran into the same issue at scale and landed somewhere different. Curious how you'd respond."
The second version does what a good hallway conversation does: it signals you paid attention, gives the recipient something specific to respond to, and starts the relationship at a tie strength worth having. It also takes a few minutes to write and can be sent from a phone between meetings, which a conference cannot.
The relationship-building mechanism a networking event promises is available in writing, without the room.
The contacts you already have are worth more than the ones you haven't met yet
Executives who dislike events often assume the fix is finding a lower-effort way to meet new people. There's a faster option already sitting in their contact list: people they knew well once and haven't spoken to in years.
Peer-reviewed research on "dormant ties" (Levin, Walter and Murnighan, published in Organization Science, 2011) found that reconnecting with lapsed contacts produced insights rated as valuable as, or more valuable than, insights from currently active contacts. Dormant ties combine two things that rarely coexist: the trust built from a real prior relationship, and the novelty of someone who has spent years in a different context, industry or company since you last spoke.
The common assumption is that a relationship's value decays the longer it sits quiet. The research suggests close to the opposite. A former manager, a colleague from two roles ago, someone you mentored a decade back, all of them have accumulated new information and new networks in the meantime, and the trust from the original relationship means a reconnection message reads as picking up a thread, not cold outreach.
A working rule: before adding a single new contact, spend twenty minutes scrolling your own connections for anyone you haven't spoken to in three or more years. Message five of them. That list alone will usually outperform a full evening at an event.
Written thought leadership is a room that never closes
The other function a conference serves is visibility: being seen, by the right people, as someone worth knowing. That function also has an asynchronous version.
Two separate sources put numbers on this. Edelman and LinkedIn's 2025 B2B thought leadership report found that 95% of surveyed "hidden buyers," a subset of decision-makers, said strong thought leadership content made them more receptive to sales and marketing outreach. Separately, FTI Consulting's "Social CEO" research found that 85% of respondents said stakeholder relationships improved when executives engaged online. Treat both figures as directional rather than precise, since the two studies used different samples and methodologies. Even taken cautiously, they point the same way as the weak-ties research above: a well-argued post read by the right people over a week can do more positioning work than an evening of small talk with a room you'll mostly never see again.
For senior candidates specifically, this matters beyond networking. Recruiters and search consultants routinely check a candidate's LinkedIn profile before a first conversation, and a visible history of considered posts and comments gives them more to go on than a bio alone.
This isn't a case for posting constantly. It's a case for treating one considered point of view, published regularly, as a substitute for the "being seen" function events are supposed to serve. The introverted advantage here is real: written argument rewards depth of thought over speed of speech, which is precisely the trade an introvert is already good at making.
A five-part weekly routine replaces the mixer
None of this requires a personality change. It requires a small, repeatable set of written actions that do the same relationship-building work an event does, spread across a week instead of compressed into one evening.
- Message two dormant ties a week, referencing something specific from the relationship, not a generic "checking in".
- Send one considered outreach message to someone new, built around a point of disagreement or shared interest, never a template.
- Publish one written point of view every one to two weeks, argued from direct experience rather than restated industry commentary.
- Reply substantively to three posts a week from people in your target network, rather than leaving a one-word reaction.
- Review the list monthly and prune anyone you're maintaining out of habit rather than value.
That system takes roughly the same weekly time as attending one evening event, spread across small, low-friction actions instead of one high-effort one. It also produces a written trail: every message and post is a record of judgment and expertise, which a hallway conversation never leaves behind.
Where the standard advice is still right
None of this argues that in-person events are worthless. Some relationships, particularly with people you'll work closely with, do benefit from meeting face to face, and a well-chosen dinner with three people you actually want to know can outperform a written exchange. The failure in the standard advice isn't recommending events, it's recommending them as the default, high-volume mechanism for every executive regardless of what actually produces results.
The better test isn't "do I enjoy this format" but "does this format let me be specific." A room full of strangers rarely does. A considered message, a reconnected dormant tie, or a well-argued post almost always does, and that's the variable research ties to outcomes.
None of this requires the events circuit, but it does require consistency, and that's usually easier with a clear structure behind it. If you want a general sense of how Sanctum works, our About page introduces the founder and how Sanctum works with senior professionals.
If you'd rather talk through what a written outreach and visibility system could look like for your specific role and network, you can book a call and we'll go through it together, no pressure either way.
