UpTrajectory Review

The piece, by executive career coach Ellie Rich-Poole, argues that senior leaders who quietly schedule networking, mentoring, and professional development on their own time are shortchanging themselves and their organizations. She draws on her experience as a coach and former headhunter to describe a common pattern: executives treat career management as a guilty secret, fitting it around the edges of the workday or waiting for a day when the boss is out of the office. The context here is a corporate culture that still equates visibility with presence, and where leaving the office to meet a contact can draw suspicion rather than support.

For small-business operators, this is not an abstract HR debate. Many owners and managers face the same tension in miniature: the day-to-day demands of running the business crowd out the very activities that could sustain it, from building relationships with peers to learning new skills. The piece's central claim is that visible investment in development is not a distraction from the work but a driver of performance, and that teams led by people who model learning tend to thrive. That is a useful corrective to the instinct to treat growth as a luxury to be deferred.

What is genuinely new here is not the observation that networking matters, but the framing of the guilt dynamic. Rich-Poole's account of leaders feeling selfish for investing in themselves, and of bosses policing physical presence, points to a deeper cultural problem: organizations say they value development while implicitly punishing it. The piece is persuasive on the benefits of modeling these activities, though it leans heavily on anecdote and a single example. The claim that a small proportion of leaders who visibly invest in development are thriving is plausible but under-evidenced.

The second-order effects cut both ways. If leaders normalize development during work hours, it can reduce the hidden penalty that falls disproportionately on those who cannot easily sacrifice personal time, such as caregivers or people with long commutes. But there is also a risk that visible development becomes another performance metric, and that the pressure to be seen learning crowds out the actual work. For small businesses, the practical question is how to build development into the rhythm of the week without turning it into theater.

The piece's five benefits are worth reading in full, but the actionable takeaway is simple: treat career management as part of the job, not a guilty secret. For operators, that might mean blocking time for networking or mentoring and treating it as non-negotiable, or encouraging employees to do the same. The harder task is cultural: creating an environment where leaving the office to meet someone is seen as an investment, not an absence. That shift is easier to make in a small business than a large corporation, and it starts at the top.

Takeaway: Treat networking and development as core work, not a guilty secret, and model it visibly for your team.