Most leaders think networking is about who they know. KP Powers makes the case that it’s really about who’s shaping how you think — and what she learned from actually participating rather than just holding a membership.
Most leaders understand that networks matter. No one needs another article solemnly announcing that relationships are important. What many leaders under-optimize is the kind of network they are building and how it shapes their success.
Jim Rohn famously said you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. The people in your orbit shape how you see problems, what you expect of yourself, and what you believe is possible.
Herminia Ibarra, Charles Handy Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School and one of the world’s most cited researchers on leadership and career development, pushes this further. In Working Identity, she argues that career reinvention does not happen through introspection alone; it happens through new relationships: “Changing careers is not merely a matter of changing the work we do. It is as much about changing the relationships that matter in our professional lives, finding people who can help us see and grow into our new selves.” Her research also shows that women in particular tend to internalize professional development as self-improvement work, when what actually produces career advancement is outward-looking, network-building, and opportunity-seeking behavior.
The point is simple: who you spend time with shapes who you are becoming. Build purposefully.
I have spent my career building and benefiting from a strong professional network in higher education. My work sits at the intersection of data, finance, accreditation, governance, institutional effectiveness, and strategy, through my own thought leadership at KP Powers.com and collaborative work at the Institute for Effectiveness in Higher Education. But I reached a point where depth inside one sector was no longer enough for the kind of leadership I wanted to do next.
After moving to the Bay Area a few years ago, I started looking for a broader professional community, one that would put me in rooms where I did not already know the assumptions, where the conversation about leadership was not filtered through a single industry lens, and where the people around me were operating at levels that would raise my own. Athena Alliance checked all of those boxes.
I expected to find extraordinary women in Athena. Silicon Valley, leadership-focused, highly curated: the bar was going to be high. What I did not fully anticipate was the particular combination: ambitious in the most substantive sense of that word, creative in ways that come from having actually built things, accomplished across a range of industries you simply do not encounter in any single professional lane.
These are the right people to be around if you are serious about leveling up, not in the aspirational, motivational-poster sense, but in the concrete, applied sense of raising your own game. The right people expand what you think is normal and possible, not just for your field but for you specifically.
Every industry teaches its members how to see. It gives you language, norms, expectations, and explanations for why certain things are difficult. Some of that learning is useful. Some of it becomes so familiar that you stop questioning it. Cross-industry networks interrupt that pattern in productive ways.
A technology leader may think differently about speed and scale. A finance executive may hear risk in a sentence before anyone else notices it. Someone from a completely different sector may describe something ordinary in her world that gives you new language for a challenge in yours. That kind of exposure moves you past the reflexes of your own field.
It also resembles the best board environments, where different forms of judgment work together in service of an organization’s long-term health. The value comes from disciplined perspective: better questions, earlier risk signals, tested assumptions, and decisions made with greater clarity. Athena gave me a place to develop that intentionally while widening the range of people and perspectives shaping my thinking. That kind of environment is not something you absorb by holding a membership card; you have to work for it.
For the first six months when I joined Athena Alliance, I attended salons and sessions every week, often multiple times a week. Nearly a year later, I still attend 3-6 sessions per month. I listen to how other leaders talked about governance, risk, capital, technology, influence, and transition. I pay attention to the questions they asked and the assumptions they brought into the room. When a conversation raises something worth continuing, I follow up.
The salons exposed me to new content and thinking. The Board Readiness (now Modern Board) course gave me structure. The Branded Career Portfolio work helped me clarify how my experience translated beyond higher education.
Inside higher education, the combination of data, finance, accreditation, governance, and strategy makes sense quickly. Outside the field, the throughline needs to be stated with more precision. For me, that throughline is clear: I help leaders and boards turn data into direction. A résumé tells people what you have done. A board narrative explains how your judgment helps an organization govern better. Refining that narrative requires understanding where your experience creates value in rooms that do not share your industry context, which creates clarity in how you talk about yourself and opens up opportunities.
One of those opportunities arrived recently: I was appointed as a University Trustee at Saybrook University, part of The Community Solution education system, which carries particular meaning after more than two decades in higher education. The appointment is an expansion of my commitment from a different seat: helping institutions ask better questions, understand risk earlier, align resources more clearly, and make decisions that strengthen mission and long-term performance. Athena was part of that broader journey. If you are weighing whether a community like this is worth your time, here is what I would tell you.
A network is a set of connections. Relationships are something you build through repeated, substantive engagement over time. The first gives you access. The second gives you leverage, the kind that comes from trust, shared context, and genuine mutual investment.
Rohn was right that you become the average of the people you spend the most time with. Ibarra is right that the relationships you cultivate are as consequential as the work you do. What both understood is that growth is not a solo endeavor; it is shaped, in material ways, by who is in the room with you. I’m grateful that Athena Alliance has helped me to not only grow my network, but has also led to growth and new relationships.
