25. Lead as a connector, not a constrainer

Connecting people inside and outside your organisation is a simple and highly effective way of sparking new possibilities

This article was originally published in Developing Leaders Quarterly, June 2023. The whole issue is excellent!

Who would want to lead as a constrainer? You may be surprised to find that I come across people like this often. Ever met someone who:

• Was always keen to be involved

• Wanted to be kept ‘in the loop’ at all times

• Wanted the final say in everything?

• Kept on saying “I’ll get to it soon” (and never did)

• Saw themselves as indispensable

Yes, me too. I have even found myself doing this occasionally – with the best of intentions, wanting to support people, being interested, and thinking I had amazing skills of analysis and experience to offer. I was unwittingly acting as a constrainer, not a connector.

Leading as a host

I have researched and developed the Host Leadership approach – leading as a host, not a hero or servant – for the past two decades. Host Leadership is both a metaphor and a model. At some level we all know how to act as a good host; it’s analogous to organising a party! Invite the right people to come together in a well-prepared space, establish some boundaries and norms, introduce them to each other and don’t forget to join in and participate along with everyone else. The main part of the model is the six roles of a host leader:

• Initiator

• Inviter

• Space-creator

• Gatekeeper

• Connector

• Co-participator

Host leadership is a modern and much more engaging practice than the traditional hero leader paradigm. The five traits at the start of this article are all signs that someone (maybe you) is being a little heroic. You want to be there, you want everything revolving around you, you want all information going through you. Control is your friend – who needs trust when everything is happening in front of you?

Except, of course, that’s very hard work. You end up limiting progress and not engaging your people to the max. And they get frustrated. And then they wonder about going elsewhere. And you get left with the people who need to be watched, controlled, signposted and generally want you to approve everything and make all the moves. Not a good place to be – particularly with a tight labour market, squeezed economics and post-pandemic paralysis in the air.

In this article we’ll be unpacking how to be a better connecter and avoid constraining too much. It’s a life-changing shift. You’ll be able to be in the background more, engage your people better and get everyone working for the overall good. This works at any level; whether you’re leading a team, a project, a department or a multinational, there’s useful ideas to try out right away.

This piece first appeared in Developing Leaders Quarterly in June 2023. More about SLQ at the end of the article.

The power of connection

“We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about ‘and.’”

Arthur Eddington, astronomer, 1882–1944

Host Leaders are connectors. They build connections between people, link people and ideas AND know when to leave them to get on with it. Think of a connector in an electrical circuit: it joins two things together and something happens that wouldn’t have been possible without that connection; for example, a light comes on, we hear a sound, or a  kettle boils. Similarly, the Host Leader as connector joins people together and creates the possibility of something emerging that would not have happened without the connector.

In this article, we will look at three levels of connector:

• Level 1: Connecting with others (understanding people)

• Level 2: Connecting others (connecting people and ideas)

• Level 3: Everything is connected (wise connectedness).

Connector Level 1: Connecting with others (understanding people)  

Before we can connect people, we have to know at least a little about who they are, what they are doing and what would be useful for them. This sounds obvious… until you think of how a constrainer might meet new people. Sounding important, showing off, all about them and how clever they are. Good host leaders will have these things in mind when meeting new people:

Be interested, not interesting

Almost a century ago, Dale Carnegie wrote that ‘if you want people to be interested in you, then you have to get interested in them’. This is as true today as it ever was. Once you’ve got past the obvious who are you/what do you do, here are some very useful follow-ups from my good friend and BNI founder Dr Ivan Miser, a world expert in networking.

• How did you get started in your line of work?

• What do you enjoy most about your profession/role/project?

• What are the coming trends and developments in your field?

• What would be helpful to you right now? 

These questions get past the factual and on to the personal. They are all asking for the person’s perspective on their current work, not simply what it is. You can get a sense of the person’s ‘walk’, the journey they’ve been on to get where they are. Most people love to talk about this, and they very rarely get invited to do so! It also looks to the future, which is where connection can be a great help.

Catch people doing things right

When you are leading a busy team or organisation it can be easy to fall into ‘managing by deficit’. The things that shout loudest for attention are where there are mishaps, errors or worse. That can lead to meeting people only when they’ve done things wrong. While this is important, it is even more important to find ways to ‘catch people doing things right’. It’s so much easier and more productive to meet people when they have some kind of achievement, success, good practice or track record to discuss. We usually get to see the best of people when they are talking about success, not failure.

As a leader you can cultivate an eye for both spotting useful things happening (and maybe using these as good excuse to say hello) and for being very interested in how people are succeeding in working towards their goals. A few words can make all the difference in how valued and connected they feel.

Connector Level 2: Connecting others (connecting people and ideas)

Being a connector can make all the difference to the commitment and engagement of the team. Traditionally, leaders, particularly hero leaders, acted as if they were the ones who had to have all the answers, as if no one else would know what to do. For some followers, this is great – they like to be told what to do, and to be given clear instructions. For many, however, it means that their curiosity and creativity are compromised. Connectors bring people together, introduce them to each other and to the reason for bringing them together: a problem to be solved, a challenge, an opportunity.

The next thing the connector does is leave people to get on with it – whether they physically leave or stay quiet and allow the team to work things out and support them in implementing their ideas. It makes a great difference, and yet often it is very hard for the leader who may be tempted to micromanage the team. Perhaps it is hard to let go, especially if the outcome is not quite what you expected. Of course, at that point, the leader always can step in BUT only if necessary, and they know that they must tread carefully.

Connection: creating something from (almost) nothing

It has been said that love, attention and connection are some of the few things that grow by being given away. When we connect two or more people, we never know what might be possible. By introducing two people who didn’t know each other (or even who did, but didn’t know they had an interest in common or some mutually relevant skills or know-how), we open the door to potential. Sometimes this happens immediately, sometimes it’s a slow burner, sometimes it becomes important later on. It’s such a great level of pay-off for such a small act.

The maths of connecting

The number of possible connections we can each make is absolutely astounding. Let’s think about it. Say you have 30 contacts (actually this is a huge underestimate, but let’s keep it simple.) So you have 30 connections already. Now, suppose you start to think about connecting those people to each other; that’s 450 possible connections. (It’s 30 squared divided by two, so you can check my maths if you like.) Which of those connections might be most useful? Who in your circle needs to know whom?

It gets better. Those 30 people also know 30 more people each. Even given the inevitable overlaps, that give tens of thousands of connections which we can enable. Again, who do we know who knows whom? How can we help them get together? And how often can we find new contacts and connections to make?

Connector Level 3: Everything is connected (wise interconnectedness)

“When we try to pick out something by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

John Muir, father of the USA National Parks

John Muir was wise to see that, in the end, everything is connected. This is not to say that we can’t treat things as being units as a matter of convenience, but in the end that’s what our boundaries are – a matter of convenience. Muir was not referring here to some kind of ethereal force, some mysterious “field” binding everything. In a complex system (like the world in which we live), connections and interactions can mean that a change in one part of the system can lead to unexpected changes elsewhere. Even if the “mechanism” of the system is understood, the precise details of every fluctuation cannot be calculated in advance. Happy synchronicities and unintended consequences are inevitable results.

This is the level of ecosystemic connection. Nothing exists in isolation. And yet, trying to consider every possible connection in advance is clearly a fools errand. What to do in practice?

Raising our awareness

The key to finding and making use of unexpected connections is first of all to notice them. The happy synchronicities are there all the time; it’s just that we don’t notice them. When our heads are full of everything we have to do, let alone what everybody else should be doing, and we are trying to think several steps ahead, our minds are too cluttered to notice connections. There’s no space for awareness of synchronicities. Practices such as mindfulness, meditation and relaxation can help us to create the conditions in our minds for new realisations to begin to dawn. The benefits of such practices are becoming clearer – even such ancient establishments as the British Parliament are now offering mindfulness courses to busy lawmakers.

Know what would be useful to discover

When we know what we’re looking for, we are much more likely to see it. In psychology, this is called the “Frequency Illusion” – once we have thought about something (buying certain type of new car, for example),  we start to notice examples of the same car driving past. They were driving past all the time, of course, but we didn’t notice them because we didn’t know they were important.

One very useful attention-focuser is to think about both long-term hopes and short-term ‘signs of progress.’ It is the ‘signs of progress’ thinking that can be really useful here – by knowing what would be a great sign of progress, we can be alert to it even if it shows up unexpectedly. When you’re stuck, try listing at least five tiny things that would be useful signs of movement. Simply going through the process prepares us to notice them – and you may find that some were indeed already happening but weren’t on your radar.

Conclusions

We’ve looked at how to lead by being a connector, not a constrainer. The great news is that everything in this article can be put into action without costing you a cent. No McKinsey analysis. No software implementation. Just start to look for people who could use a connection and start making a difference. And don’t worry; those involved will know your contribution. They may even be able to connect YOU to someone useful next time.

This article was first published in the excellent Developing Leaders Quarterly magazine in June 2023. You can download this piece in PDF form here.

UPDATE! My good friend and colleague Chris Corrigan featured this article on his blog, with some interesting comments and how constraints don’t have to be negative. Read it here. He also mentioned Alicia Juarrerro’s long awaited new book on constraints, Context Changes Everything: How constraints create coherence (MIT Press, 2023). Even better, the book is Open Access and can be downloaded free from the link given here. Thank you Alicia and Chris.

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Dates and mates

My friend and colleague Roddy Millar publishes Developing Leaders Quarterly, a very handy pocket-sized publication with lots of the latest ideas for leaders. This latest issue (#41) has a focus on ecosystem leadership and lots more besides. Roddy’s desire is that the magazine helps in Making Organisations More Human - so it’s a very good companion to Steps To A Humanity Of Organisation! It’s subscribers only; more details at

https://developingleadersquarterly.com/

Roddy is also behind Ideas For Leaders, who produced the excellent online video course in Host Leadership as part of their Master Mentor series. Check it out, hear me talk about the course, watch a sample and enroll at

https://ideasforleaders.teachable.com/p/host-leadership

And finally… this is the last Steps To A Humanity Of Organisation this term. I will be back with more new writing on Wednesday 6th September 2023. Have a great summer wherever you are, and I’ll look forward to being in touch soon.