This can work, but it can also backfire. Sometimes I've ended a conversation that was going well because I wanted to meet/talk with other people, and then later regretted it. This is partly because the other conversations didn't pan out, and partly because sometimes the value of an extended conversation can be 20x the value of a bunch of brief interactions. I don't need another person to add on LinkedIn and then rarely actually talk to — sometimes I need a strong advocate or someone who is really into the project I'm working on.

Or perhaps I'm just not as good at the hyper-optimized-networking game as your boss.