Book Review: The Connector Manager – Jaime Roca & Sari Wilde -

Welcome to another of my book reviews. (Top tip: reading and learning leaves me feeling more productive and positive during lockdown than watching endless box sets on Netflix. Confession: I watch box sets too!)

The basic job of a manager is to solve an ever-growing number of complex problems and achieve extraordinary results through other people. Whenever I am delivering leadership and management training (whether in recruitment or other industries), managers often complain of overwhelm, and sometimes express guilt that they feel unable to give their teams the level of support and development they would like to give them due to workload. This book recognises that the approach of many managers to attempt to somehow be superhuman and be everything to everyone doesn’t achieve best results.

This book postulates that there are 4 basic types of manager – Teacher, Always On, Connector and Cheerleader.

‘Always On’ is the style that most managers seem to think is what they should be aspiring to – a manager who provides continuous, frequent coaching, drives employees’ development, and gives feedback across a breadth of skills. Managers trying to live up to this supposed ‘ideal’ find themselves exhausted and have a poor work/life balance. However, it is also (according to research by the authors) the one style that actually impedes performance.

The other three styles deliver an improvement in performance, however the biggest improvement is achieved by the Connector manager.

The book has an executive summary at the end of every chapter, and a toolkit at the end, and has clearly been designed to be a practical tool.

What did I learn?

There are some useful reminders in the book of some fundamental truths that had me nodding along in agreement – you can’t be an expert in everything; the manager doesn’t always know best; it’s super important to really get to know and understand your team and their motivations; although supportive feedback is super important, you must not shy away from giving tough feedback when it’s needed; and some others.

There were a couple of ideas in the book that I really liked – my favourite was the ‘baseball card’. Essentially, every team member completes a ‘baseball card’ style analysis of themselves – a short bio, then their strengths (that they could train others on), their development areas (that fellow team members can support them with), and their goals (so that everyone knows where they want to get to).

It made me think of another idea that aligns well with the Connector Manager approach – getting people to write ‘baseball card’ style overviews of their job roles (what excites them about the role? what’s challenging in the role? what has the role enabled the job holder to learn? what roles/people do they interact with that add value to their role?) that could be used to help people get an insight into non-linear career paths within the organisation. (These could also be useful tools in the external recruitment process.)

It also made me reflect on times in my past career that I have used shadowing as a development opportunity for team members in the past, realising that had I ‘warmed up’ and ‘cooled down’ the team members before and after (i.e. asked them to think about what they wanted to learn from the shadowing and then downloaded and reinforced the learning and how it could be used afterwards) I could have potentially delivered better outcomes for them.

I learned that my two dominant manager styles are naturally Connector and Cheerleader (enabling and encouraging team members to take ownership for their own development), but that I also have elements of Teacher (not surprising, as I’m a Trainer!) and have to fight hard to suppress my inner Always On manager. I expect most managers reading this book will not fall neatly into any one category, however by developing their self-awareness, everyone has the potential to become more of a Connector Manager and improve their team’s performance.  

How would I improve this book?

Usually I am a ‘sit down and devour the book in one go’ type of person. However, this book took me three attempts to get through. I’m not sure why?

In the toolkit at the back, having emphasised the importance of open questions, a lot of the diagnostic questions are closed questions. It’s easy enough to reframe them, however I am surprised the authors didn’t use open questions to start with.

Why would I recommend this book?

There are a lot of managers out there struggling with trying to be all things to all people and feel like they are running out of time, energy and enthusiasm. This book teaches that you actually achieve more by NOT trying to do everything yourself, and that by encouraging input from your team and your network, you can achieve better results for everyone.

There is also a useful tool for getting to understand what motivates the individuals in your team, and the team as a whole – so if you haven’t had that type of conversation before, there is something to help you get started.

It can be a huge relief to realise that you don’t have to have all the answers, you don’t need to be an expert in everything, you just have to work on being: self aware; curious; a learner; courageous; and judiciously generous. This last point is important – if you try to do too much, you burn out and end up being precious little use to anyone!

Disclaimer: I write book reviews of books I have read and found useful in some way. I do not get paid for endorsing any author/service/product, because I believe that would impact on my ability to be completely objective.

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