ten years ago Malcolm Gladwell famous author coined the concept of a connector
as one of the three types of people that create the rise of social epidemics and
that idea of being a connector captivated corporate America and really
global corporations around the world for the last decade but in today's era I'd
argue that the idea of being a connector is outdated because we are all
connectors we are over connected so the job today is not just to say whether
we're a connector or not it's really about how do we connect intelligently in
today's world to drive value not only for our teams and organizations but for
our broader stakeholder networks what we found in our research is that in today's
world there are actually three types of connectors that allow you to really
capture the power of connectional intelligence the three types of
connectors are number one the thinker's number two the enablers and number three
the connection executors first the thinkers the thinkers are the people
that are great at combining ideas and bringing in new types of curiosity to
problems these are the people that are always asking how might we solve this
differently or let's take a devil's advocate view or let's bring this
approach from an outside industry or a different team in a way that allows us
to solve this problem differently so you may think of those people that are
thinkers on your team as the ones that are always bringing in that different
perspective or that different approach that will allow you to transform your
mindset of how you solve a problem the second type of connector are the
enablers these are your traditional people connectors these are those that
are really good at bringing together all the right people that need to come
together to solve a problem you can think about these people as the
community builders they're often those that understand not just you know how
might we solve this problem but here are the five people we need to engage that
could allow us to combine a different perspective or give us a different
approach to allow us to mobilize this effort
for word and the third type of connector are the connection executors these are
the people that love to just get things done they know how to implement in not
those that are bringing in the new big idea or bringing the community together
they're those that love to get things done when the community is already built
they're the combustors if you think about the mobilizers on a team so as you
think about your own role in your organization are you more of a thinker
are you more of an enabler or are you more of a connection executor and how
might you design your team to make sure that you're leveraging these three types
of connector skillsets to really maximize the power of the networks on
your own team the other thing is that it's really important to be careful of
connector bias if we're thinkers we often love to connect with other
thinkers on our team and we end up spending lots of time in meetings
talking about ideas but leading into analysis paralysis if we're enablers we
may love to bring people together but that could lead to too many meetings all
the time that lead to inefficiencies and delays and if we're connection executors
we may love to be around other executors who love to implement project plans but
we may be losing sight of how we might be engaging other functions in our
company other businesses other networks that could help us really amplify that
effort so the power of connectional intelligence is not only understanding
your own connector type but making sure that you're building a network that
allows you to leverage those that are different from you get smarter faster
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