Claude Grunitzky is a world-class networker. He’s so good, in fact, that both Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School have published case studies about him. (I am a coauthor of the Columbia study.) Both case studies document how Grunitzky built and maintained professional relationships during the course of his career that allowed him to launch his first startup—a magazine called Trace, which covered hip-hop music—and subsequently a series of businesses, including an advertising agency and a media network that now operates in 190 countries.

Today Grunitzky is the CEO of the Equity Alliance, a venture capital firm with a strategy of investing in companies whose founding teams include at least one woman or one member of a racial minority. Key to implementing this strategy is what Grunitzky calls the “social-capital playbook,” which he and his colleagues use to help their investees establish robust professional networks. They recognize that these networks—which consist of what might informally be called business friendships—are critically important in entrepreneurship and venture capital, but people from underrepresented backgrounds are less likely to have them.

Grunitzky’s own identity is expansive and diverse. He has lived in Togo, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His father was a powerful politician, and his mother a poor seamstress. They never married, and growing up, Grunitzky would spend weekdays in his father’s mansion and weekends with his mother in a humble home without running water. His interests today are eclectic: He’s a fan of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the political podcaster Ezra Klein, and the hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan. He considers himself “transcultural.”

I teach a class on social networking to MBA students at Columbia Business School, and a few years ago I invited Grunitzky to talk to us about his career and his approach to networking, which he prefers to call “developing social capital.” The key to building connections, he told us (and my own research subsequently confirmed), is to first arrive at a thorough understanding of your own identity—the interrelated elements that you use to define yourself. In Grunitzky’s case those elements include family roles such as father and husband, career roles such as CEO and journalist, an interest in jazz, and his Catholic faith. Only once you’ve identified the many facets of your identity, he continued, can you “identify commonality” with people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Commonalities provide a solid foundation on which to build and expand your network.

For earlier generations, venturing deliberately into the territory of identity was a discretionary act. The word identity wasn’t even used in social science to describe self-identification until the mid-1950s, and not until 1960 could citizens choose their own race for the U.S. Census. (Before then, census takers assigned it.) However, social scientists have since come to appreciate the importance of how people understand themselves, and they’ve conducted extensive research on the way your self-concept can affect your professional and personal livesI’m one of those researchers. I’ve spent years studying how leaders develop their personal identities, and my work supports Claude Grunitzky’s idea that to develop and expand a healthy professional network, you first need to focus on understanding your own identity. Doing that well can help you thrive both at work and in life. The good news is that you have more control over your identity than you may realize: You can curate it in ways that will improve your performance as a leader, the trust you’re able to inspire in others, and even your overall well-being.

Today we are constantly asked in the workplace to answer the question “Who are you?” There’s no avoiding it—especially if you’re in a leadership or a management role. Leaders project authenticity, and become trusted, by communicating their identities. When Captain Matt Feely was commanding officer of the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Logistics Center in Yokosuka, Japan, for example, he took each sailor, Marine, and Japanese civilian who joined his organization to the large globe in his office, where he pointed to the location of his hometown of Dedham, Massachusetts, and asked the newcomers to show him theirs.