My friend Mike hates giving presentations. He doesn’t enjoy being the center of attention in a group of people. He’d also be the last to volunteer to do role plays at work. Despite this, nobody I know would hesitate to call Mike a leader. In his own words, he just “leads from behind.”
Mike has worked as a freelancer for many years. I’ve never seen him pitch to get clients. People just “find him.” I’m always amazed at how many people he knows, who he knows, and how he bumps into the right person at the right time. Needless to say, if I’m trying to connect with some person or company, Mike is the first person I ask.
“Connect” is the right keyword. Malcolm Gladwell would call Mike “a Connector.” In The Tipping Point, Gladwell describes them as “people with a special gift for bringing the world together.” They are “the kinds of people who know everyone,” and “all of us know someone like this.” My friend Ted from third grade is a Connector. At our annual city festival reunion, you can’t walk ten meters without him shaking hands with someone. My friend Marc from my Master’s is another Connector. He’s had dinner or worked with seemingly every other person in Munich.
Connectors aren’t leaders in a typical sense. They don’t sketch out some socially or technologically utopian vision and then rally everyone around them to make it come true. They don’t necessarily love the limelight. But lead they do nonetheless—lead you to people, places, and new possibilities.
When I met Mike, I introduced him to other people I knew. Most of them were writers. Mike, on the other hand, connected me both to new people inside my bubble as well as folks completely outside of it. As Gladwell said, we all know Connectors—but we rarely consider how priceless of a friend these people actually are. That was one of the key findings of his book: Yes, the entire world is connected in a surprisingly tight network, but that network runs through just a handful of people. Remove the Connectors, and the entire network collapses.
If you’re neither a leader in the most traditional sense of the word nor a first follower, you might be a Connector. Connecting, too, is leading. And if you’re not? Then that just means you’re a leader of another kind—and that you have all the more reason to be grateful for the Connectors in your life.