Why you should be (and look for) a Connector Manager
But first of all, what is a“Connector Manager”?
Every manager, at a certain point, faces the challenge of coaching and train her people. Providing good directions is not a trivial task, and a great piece of research about that has been done by Gartner and described in the book “The Connector Manager”.
According to the research, it comes out that managers use different approaches for coaching and development, and these usually fall into one of four categories: Teacher, Cheerleader, Always On, Connector.
Ok, so what do these categories mean?
Although I am not a fan of strict categorizations, I find this framework quite useful as I was able to find these traits in practically all of the managers I’ve worked with (and within myself as well).
I have prepared an infographic to summarize the characteristics of the four approaches (although I would strongly recommend reading the book, it’s a good one).
In general, and before the research took place, the approach that looked the best one on paper was the “Always On”; after all, if a manager directly coaches her people providing them with frequent feedback, she would look like a really dedicated professional who is going to get great results from a team. But after looking at the quantitative data gathered by the researchers, it was clear that is not the case. Rather, this kind of approach leads to degraded team performance. The key point here is that Always On managers provide too much feedback for people to actually act on; and their approach leads to people less engaged, and less likely to stay in their job, resulting in more harm than good.
How is it possible to be “Always On” and not getting great results?
The problem with this approach is especially true in knowledge work fields, and in general in our current social context in which the skills for the majority of professions are evolving rapidly. Assuming that a single manager could have all the vertical skills needed to “teach” her people is definitely a risky bet, and an unrealistic one. At the same time, the tendency to micromanagement and continuous, frequent feedback is something that might still work with very few people, but definitely doesn’t scale when teams get larger.
None of us is as smart as all of us. (Ken Blanchard)
The usual result is that managers end up dedicating less time to coaching and development (as after all, this is not their only task, although a very important one).
Then it comes the Connector
A connector manager adopts a different approach.
Instead of relying solely on her own skills, she knows very well that there are more suitable people, inside or outside the organization, that can provide coaching on a specific subject. If for example, a CTO should teach front-end development to her people, it is very unlikely she can be aware of the most recent details of the latest versions of the newest specific programming languages. Would she be the best person to coach about the subject? Probably not. But, the good news is, her task can shift from being the “teacher” to be the one that connects people with the other people that can provide specific coaching.
Now, this is not just delegating. An important point in the Connector manager approach is that the Connector is both preparing the person to get the training/coaching session and monitoring the results after the session has taken place. Also, a Connector manager spends a lot of time to know their people and identify the very specific needs of each person, thus tailoring the development approach on each individual.
In other words, it is not a passive or hands-off approach (like in the “Cheerleader” case), but a very active one.
Why should you prefer the Connector approach?
Because, according to the research, managers using it bring their teams to deliver much better results, boosting employee performance by an average of 26% and tripling the likelihood that the employee will be a high performer.
The Connector approach brings a lot of benefits when it comes to team environment as well, since it promotes a culture of sharing and coaching among peers; in the end, everyone is incentivized to coach others in their areas of expertise, with the manager being more of an orchestrator of minds than a boss or a teacher.
It is interesting to note that, after adopting the Connector approach at employee and team level, it is possible to scale it to the whole organization.
What I personally believe about the Connector Manager style
Before Casavo, I have had several experiences in large corporates and consulting firms; instead, Casavo was a very promising but still small startup when I joined it. It goes without saying, I have been exposed to several different kinds of managerial approaches and I had the chance to develop a pretty good opinion about what works well and what doesn’t.
When I discovered the Connector Manager approach, a lot of pieces of the puzzle went into the right place. I definitely wasn’t a connector in the beginning of my managerial career; I would rather say, something between the Always-On and the Cheerleader. But, and I’ve learned it the hard way, it just doesn’t work in a Knowledge Work context, when you hire top performers with incredible brains and mindsets. These guys know what they have to do in their daily activities, and they don’t need you to micromanage them. They probably don’t even need your skills, that are (and should be) different from their verticals of expertise. What they need is someone who can create a team environment and connect them with the best possible people to coach them, thus coordinating and orchestrating this incredible symphony of collective intelligences.
As the violinist Joshua Bell said: “Good conductors know when to let an orchestra lead itself.”
