For decades, innovation was a gated community. The hierarchy controlled it – and the hierarchy was largely controlled by those who looked the part. Senior women didn’t lack ideas. They lacked proximity to the rooms where ideas became strategy. What many did instead – quietly, consistently, and often without recognition – was build networks. They connected across functions, cultivated relationships across levels, and created influence without the title that was supposed to come with it. Finally, the world is only now catching up to what that capability actually means.
The Hierarchy Was Never Built for Women — But Networks Were
The shift that Shelley Huff describes in Inc. – innovation moving from hierarchies to networks – is real and accelerating. A growing class of senior leaders now operates across multiple organizations simultaneously: as board members, advisors, active operators. The constraints of the single-company model are giving way to something more fluid, more connected, more distributed.
For sure, this is a significant, structural change. For many female leaders, it is also a long overdue validation. The traditional hierarchy – with its single pinnacle of power, its closed-door strategy rooms, its informal networks built in spaces women weren’t always invited to join – was never a neutral architecture. It was built to favor those already inside it. Women who wanted to lead were often left to find another way in.
Many of us found that other way was the network. Not as a workaround, but as a genuine leadership model – one built on trust, reciprocity, and the ability to move ideas across organizational limits. The capabilities that were once treated as compensatory strategies are now the defining capabilities of modern innovation.
Network Fluency as a Leadership Superpower
Innovation is not simply a matter of having good ideas. It lives at the intersection of human capital, social capital, and reputation capital – what I call the Innovation Equation. You need the skills and the people, for sure – but you also need the relational architecture that allows ideas to move from one mind to many.
Research bears this out. Rocío Lorenzo’s landmark TED study of 171 companies found a clear and direct relationship between leadership diversity and measurable innovation outcomes. The presence of women in leadership wasn’t incidental to those results – it was structural. Diverse networks generate more varied inputs, surface more unexpected connections, and create the cognitive conditions that new ideas require to take hold and grow.
Women leaders, by and large, have built these networks differently – broader, more trust-based, more heterogeneous in composition. Don’t get me wrong – this is not a claim about biology. It is a claim about experience. Leaders who have had to earn influence across organizational boundaries develop a different kind of network fluency. That fluency is a competitive advantage and we are seeing the benefits that come with it.
Execution Is Relational Work and Women Have Always Known It
It is in the process of executing strategy where these network fluency superpowers come into their own – and where they are now most needed. Most organizations – as we know – don’t struggle to generate ideas and powerful strategies. The struggle is in executing the plan.
In an increasingly disruptive world we can no longer rely on predictable models, processes and supply chains. Under these conditions, projects are too easily side tracked, deprioritized or in some instances, stalled indefinitely. But for the sharp-eyed leader, there are patterns in the disruption.
This is what I mean by network fluency – an ability gained through experience and hard-won practice – to zig when everyone else zags. To know that unusual combinations win. And to trust in the network to deliver when outcomes and hierarchies seem lost to each other.
But where do we find these leaders? In many cases they can be right at our fingertips, hiding in plain sight. Rather than looking for consultants armed with frameworks and presentation decks, we need to look for the builders and creators. These operators have the higher order pattern recognition we need, honed through years of hands-on practice. They are the ones who understand the relational challenges that need to be solved before execution can roll across organizational boundaries. They are the ones building trust between parties who may have no formal reporting relationship. They live inside our matrixed organizations and teams, on the edge of hierarchy rather than at its center.
They can be recognized by their ability to align people around a shared direction without commanding compliance. They are the ones with the patience to build accountability structures that hold across contexts and cultures.
McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research consistently shows that women leaders outperform on exactly the behaviors – mentoring, collaboration, championing inclusion – that drive the kind of distributed execution modern leadership demands. The capability has always been there. The model is finally catching up.
Nina Nets It Out
The shift from hierarchy to network is not just a step change in how organizations innovate. It is a long overdue recognition of the leadership capabilities female leaders have built, practised, and refined over decades. This is the moment to stop treating those capabilities as soft supplements to “real” leadership and start leveraging them as the engine of it. Build your networks with intention. Operate across boundaries with confidence. Execute where others only plan. The model the world now needs is one you have always known how to run.