The Connector Manager: Why Some Leaders Build Exceptional Talent - and Others Don't
This book was published in 2019 - before Covid and before the rise of GPT. Much of the concepts still hold true although the timetables of change in the workplace have rapidly accelerated.
Today we are still dealing with the aftermath of the Covid work remotely change. The news is still reporting every week about struggles companies have with their declarations of return to the office policies. WebMD last month released a video about how they are requiring people to come back and the best arguments they could articulate became jet-fuel for parody. Added to that, in the first half of 2024 many large companies are doing layoffs and letting go of thousands of people at a time. All this tells me that focusing on manager training and up-skilling is only getting lip service and no real efforts or budgets are being put against the effort.
Based on a first-of-its-kind, wide-ranging global study of over 9,000 people, analysts at the global research and advisory firm Gartner were able to classify all managers into one of four types:
Teacher managers, who develop employees' skills based on their own expertise and direct their development along a similar track to their own.
Cheerleader managers, who give positive feedback while taking a general hands-off approach to employee development.
Always-on managers, who provide constant, frequent feedback and coaching on all aspects of the employee's performance.
Connector managers, who provide feedback in their area of expertise while connecting employees to others in the team or organization who are better suited to address specific needs.
Although the four types of managers are more or less evenly distributed, the Connector manager consistently outperforms the others by a significant margin. Meanwhile, Always-on managers tend to see their employees struggle to grow within the organization. Why is that?
💡 Max Planck darkly confessed, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
work is less predictable. The average organization has experienced five enterprise-level changes over the past three years.14 These may include, among others, an organizational or leadership change, a merger, or an acquisition. And these same organizations predict a pace of change that will only increase in the foreseeable future. Long gone is the “industrial revolution” model of work where people are assigned predictable work plans from a stable hierarchy and go about their individual tasks. Work today is more dynamic, with shorter time horizons, forcing managers to adjust plans and workflows constantly.
when we asked more than seven thousand employees throughout the world what they needed to aptly manage change, the top two responses were “need more upskilling” and “need to be able to work faster.”
When we surveyed employees about the skills most critical to their success today and then asked how effective they felt at performing those same skills, 70 percent told us they haven’t mastered the skills they need for their current jobs.
Here is the LINK to the AMAZON Book
