The network you thought you had

I lost my job on a Tuesday in October 2023 and by the Friday I had sent forty-seven LinkedIn messages to people I considered "in my network". Some were old colleagues. Some were people I had met at conferences. Some were senior names I had nodded to at industry dinners over the past decade. My logic, sitting at the kitchen table with a cold cup of coffee, was that this was what the network was for. You build it for years, and when the moment comes, you reach.

By the following Friday I had eight replies. Three were warm and useful. Two were polite passes. Three never came at all. The other thirty-nine messages just sat there in a column on the screen, marked "Sent", quietly humiliating me.

That fortnight is when I learnt, properly, what a network actually is. It is not 2,400 LinkedIn connections. It is not the contacts list on your phone. It is not the alumni group, the industry chapter, or the WhatsApp from that course you did in 2019. Those are address books with a logo on them. Useful, sometimes. A network they are not.

This is for the man who has just been made redundant, or who suspects he is about to be, and who is staring at his connections list and discovering that the muscle he thought he had built was mostly fascia.

What a real network actually is

A network is the set of people who would take your call within twenty-four hours, without you needing to remind them who you are or why you are ringing. That is the whole definition. Strip away the LinkedIn vocabulary and the conference small talk and you are left with that one functional test: would they pick up.

For most men in their forties, that list, when they stop kidding themselves, is between three and seven people. Five is the average I keep seeing. Five people who would take the call. Five people who, if you said "I have just been made redundant and I need fifteen minutes to think out loud", would find the fifteen minutes inside the next forty-eight hours.

Everyone else is a contact. Contacts are useful. They are not a network. The two get conflated because LinkedIn calls them both "connections" and the dopamine of a 500-plus badge made us feel like we were building something. We were not. We were tending an address book.

The five-people rule is simple to state and uncomfortable to apply. Write down, right now, the five people who would take your call within twenty-four hours, no preamble required. If you can name five, you have a network. If you can name fewer, you have homework.

Why the redundancy lesson is so harsh

The reason redundancy is the test moment is that it is the only career event that requires the network to do real work. Job changes you initiate yourself can be done with a recruiter and a CV. Promotions move through the internal politics. Side projects can be built solo. But a redundancy, particularly a senior one, requires you to access the hidden job market, and the hidden job market runs entirely on the willingness of people to pick up the phone.

A senior role is rarely advertised cleanly. It is sketched in a coffee, scoped over a lunch, validated through a back-channel reference, and then sometimes, at the end, posted to LinkedIn as a formality. The men who land well after redundancy are the men who have five or six people threaded through that hidden market, willing to mention them in the right room.

The men who do not land well are usually the men who, like me in October 2023, had been collecting connections for two decades and tending zero of them. Twenty years of conferences, and not a single relationship deep enough to survive a year of silence. That is the hard mirror.

It is not that the contacts were fake. They were just contacts. We never did the work to turn them into something more, and the work is unglamorous and slow and not what an ambitious careerist tends to prioritise.

The actual practice of network-building

Here is what works, drawn from watching the men who survive redundancy without a six-month gap on the CV.

• Five people, four coffees a year. The simple version. You pick five people you genuinely enjoy and respect. You commit to one coffee or call with each per quarter. That is twenty interactions a year. Over five years, it is a hundred. After five years of that, those five people would walk through a fire for you.
• The reverse cadence. Most men reach out only when they need something. Reverse it. Reach out when you have something useful to share. An article, an introduction, a piece of news from inside your industry. The asymmetry of asking versus offering is the thing most men get wrong. Offer for years before you ask once.
• One question per coffee. Not a sales pitch about yourself. One real question about them, their work, their thinking. People remember being asked a question they actually wanted to answer. They forget being told things.
• Keep a list. Write the five names down. Put the date of last contact next to each. If the date is older than four months, that person moves to the top of next week's list. This sounds clinical. The men who do it have networks. The men who rely on memory have address books.
• Drop the conferences. One conference a year is plenty. The men I know with strong networks attend fewer events than the men with weak networks. Conferences are a substitute for relationships, not a source of them. The hour you would spend at a panel is better spent on a one-on-one walk with someone who matters.

The unspectacular maths is that fifty conferences a year for ten years gives you a contacts list. Five coffees a year for five years gives you a network. The second compounds. The first does not.

Why it is so hard to start when you are already in the hole

If you are reading this in week three of a redundancy, you do not have five years to build the network you should have built. That is the painful frame. The five-people rule is a long-game tool. You cannot speed-run it.

What you can do, in the short window, is be honest with the few people you do have. Do not message thirty contacts hoping for warmth. Pick the three or four people who have any genuine claim on you and have a direct, unflattering conversation. "I am between roles. I need help. Here is what I am looking for. Can we have a thirty-minute call this week?"

Three of those calls beat thirty messages every time. The contacts list will not save you. The two or three real relationships might.

And then, parallel to the search, start building for next time. The next redundancy, the next pivot, the next hard moment. Pick five names. Set the cadence. Begin the long, dull, compounding work of being someone who actually shows up for people, four times a year, for five years, before they need something.

CALL THE FIVE PEOPLE BY FRIDAY. If you cannot name five, the list of five you should have started yesterday is the start of the new list.

The asymmetry that quietly governs everything

The deepest lesson, and the one that took me the longest to absorb, is the asymmetry between asking and offering. Asking costs you almost nothing in the moment but compounds into a debt. Offering costs you a small amount of time and compounds into trust.

If you have spent ten years asking your network for things and rarely offering, the network is in deficit and will collapse the moment you need it. If you have spent ten years offering, with very few asks, the network is in surplus, and one big ask, when it finally comes, will be honoured without resentment.

Most professional men I know are net askers and do not realise it. They count favours done as one-for-one. They are not. An offered favour, unprompted, with no return expected, is worth four asked favours. The accounting is asymmetric, and most men keep the books wrong.

The fix is to spend the next year doing five small, unsolicited, useful things for the five people on your list. An introduction they did not ask for but will value. A piece of intel they would not otherwise have. A book recommendation that lands. A genuine question about their kid's exam, six months after they mentioned it.

That is the network. Five people. Four coffees a year. Quiet offers. Ask once a decade.

Plant five trees. Water them. Sit in the shade later.