Your Network is Your Networth

By John Roberts, CEO – Leadership Collective Australia, 4-minute read 

When people talk about their network, they tend to define it narrowly. It becomes a list of professional contacts - the people they know, the ones they can call on, the names that might help get something over the line. Useful, certainly. But a true network is far broader and far more influential than a contact list. It shapes how you think, how you lead, and how you decide.

In reality, your network sits across three distinct layers - family and friends, work, and the hobbies and interests that occupy your time outside it. Each plays a different role, and each has a different kind of value. And increasingly, there is a fourth layer emerging for senior executives, one that is structurally different from all the others: the executive roundtable.

Family and friends: your foundation

Your personal network is your first and most enduring influence. It's where your values were shaped, where your perspective stays grounded, and where your resilience is quietly built and rebuilt over time. Family and close friends don't sit inside the complexity of your role - and that is precisely their value. They offer honesty without an agenda, a perspective that reaches beyond the day-to-day, and a steady reminder of what actually matters.

But as your responsibility grows, so does the limit of what these conversations can hold. You can share how you feel. You can be met with genuine care. What you often can't do is fully unpack the strategic dilemmas, the commercial pressure, or the leadership decisions that carry real consequence. The people closest to you can support you through the weight of a decision without being able to help you make it. That is where the other layers of your network become critical.

Work: your operational network

Your professional network is where most executives spend the bulk of their time. It's made up of colleagues, peers, stakeholders, and advisors, and it is essential for getting things done. It helps you move faster, access expertise, build alignment, and deliver outcomes. Without it, execution stalls.

But it comes with constraints that rarely disappear, no matter how senior you become. Workplace relationships are seldom neutral. They are shaped by hierarchy, by incentives, by visibility, and by organisational context. As a result, conversations tend to be filtered, careful, and at times political. Even at the executive level, it can be surprisingly difficult to fully test an idea, to admit uncertainty out loud, or to explore alternatives without that exploration carrying weight. So while this network drives performance, it doesn't always create the space for unfiltered thinking.

Hobbies and interests: your reset

Your third network sits outside both family and work. It might be sport or fitness, a community group, or a creative pursuit - anything that pulls you out of the role for a while. This network offers something different again: distance, energy, and a genuine mental reset. Just as importantly, it often connects you with people who think differently, who operate in entirely different environments, and who have no stake in your world at all.

That diversity has real value. It loosens fixed thinking and reintroduces a sense of proportion. What it rarely does, though, is go deep enough into the complexity of leadership to meaningfully shape a major decision. It restores you - but it doesn't sharpen you in the way the moment sometimes demands.

Executive roundtables: your thinking network

This is where a different kind of network comes in - one that is intentional, structured, and built specifically for leaders. An executive roundtable sits somewhere between your professional and personal networks, yet operates like neither. It brings together peers at a similar level, from non-competing organisations, carrying comparable complexity and responsibility.

The value isn't in networking. It's in the quality of the conversation. What emerges consistently across roundtables is that leaders are not short of information - they have plenty of that already. What they're actually seeking is perspective, clarity, and the space to think. A roundtable creates exactly that environment. It allows leaders to step out of operational pressure, to test their thinking without consequence, and to explore decisions before they're made rather than defend them afterwards.

Unlike the conversations at work, there is no hierarchy, no agenda, and no internal politics in the room. And unlike personal networks, there is shared context, lived experience, and a real understanding of what the role demands. It is the rare combination of safety and relevance - people who fully get it, with nothing to gain from your answer.

Why this matters more now

The demands on leaders have shifted. Across every industry, executives are navigating rapid technological change, workforce transformation, rising complexity, and sustained pressure to perform. Decision cycles are faster than ever, the margin for error is smaller, and the expectation to deliver - consistently - never really lifts.

In that environment, relying on traditional networks alone is no longer enough. Family gives you grounding. Work gives you execution. Hobbies give you relief. But none of them reliably gives you high-quality, peer-level thinking space. That is the specific gap an executive roundtable is built to fill.

Final thought

The strongest leaders aren't the ones with the biggest networks. They're the ones with the right mix of them - a foundation that grounds them, a professional network that enables them, a personal network that recharges them, and a peer network that sharpens their thinking.

Because in a constantly changing environment, the quality of your decisions is directly tied to the quality of the conversations you're having. And some of the most valuable conversations of all are happening around a very particular kind of table.