Why Some People Become the “Go-To” Person at Work

Some people just end up being the “go-to” person in an Organisation. Everyone asks them for advice, everyone seems to know them, and somehow they end up more trusted and more influential than everyone else. The usual explanation is: extroversion or personality: some people are just wired to network. Research by Lorenzo Bizzi, a professor at California State University, Fullerton, says that’s mostly wrong.

Bizzi looked at five job traits, how much freedom, variety, and meaning a role has, plus how self-contained and clear its feedback is, and checked how each one affected where an employee actually sat in the company’s social network. Freedom, variety, and meaning made people more connected. A job that already gave you everything you needed, including its own built-in feedback, made people less connected. Personality barely moved the needle.

That flips the usual HR playbook on its head. If someone isn’t networking, coaching them probably won’t help if their job never actually requires them to look outside their own team. The real lever is the job itself.

This matters more now than it used to. Remote work already makes it harder to build connections naturally. And more roles now use AI to handle the feedback and self-contained work that used to mean asking a colleague for help. Without meaning to, companies might be quietly designing connection and a lack of networking out of people’s jobs.

Three things you can do today:

1. Audit your team’s roles for autonomy, variety, and significance. Low scores on all three usually explain a lack of networking better than personality does.
2. Before coaching someone on networking, check their job structure first. No amount of coaching fixes a role that doesn’t require reaching outside the team.
3. Watch for roles that have become fully self-contained, especially AI-assisted ones, and look for ways to reintroduce a reason to connect, like cross-team projects, shared reporting, or rotating responsibilities.