Maximize your team’s power. Identify your connector type. | Erica Dhawan | Big Think

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. 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 But in today's era, I'd argue that the idea of being a connector is outdated because we are all connectors; we are over-connected.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 thinkers; 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 "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 forward."

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 and 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? How might you design your team to make sure that you're leveraging these three types of connector skill sets 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 to 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.

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.

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