It’s not easy to be a protégé these days.

Everybody knows the setup of the classic mentoring relationship: Older workers take junior colleagues under their wing and stay in their lives for years, giving them one-on-one advice and shepherding them through their careers. Nowadays, though, seasoned workers rarely stay in a job long enough to stick close to a protégé for any length of time. And they’re often too harried managing their own careers to devote lots of attention to somebody else’s.

Last year in these pages, Kathy E. Kram and Monica C. Higgins proposed a different model—the developmental network. Instead of looking to one person as a guide, a would-be protégé should build up a team of mentors drawn from all areas of his or her professional and personal lives. That way, you don’t have to rely too heavily on one person to give you all the guidance you need. And you get a broader range of advice and information.

But there’s a snag: Most people aren’t very good at creating and maintaining these networks. Obviously, it takes a lot more effort to track down a team of helpers than a single mentor. But it also takes a special blend of skills and strategy to find just the right people and cultivate rewarding relationships with them.

To find out the best way to approach the task, we looked for people who are “relationally savvy”—in other words, they have demonstrated a knack for building networks. We interviewed a number of these talented protégés, as well as their mentors and three career coaches, to figure out what makes them tick—the abilities they bring to the table and the approaches they use to keep people on their side.

Here’s a look at