Liaison Communicator: you connect people and ideas across the team

You connect people, ideas and teams with each other: your contribution usually lies in getting information and people to understand one another, more than in executing things yourself.

When two people or two subgroups on the team aren’t communicating well, you’re usually the one who bridges them. This article explains where this profile comes from, what research has measured about people who connect groups, and why their work tends to go unnoticed.

A bridge between people, not a formal title

The name “liaison communicator” comes from the What’s My Team Role? test. The test builds on Robert Bales’s distinction (1950) between task-oriented and socio-emotional contributions, and this profile sits somewhere in between: it focuses on coordination and the flow of information between people or subgroups, more than on the emotional climate that the cohesion builder looks after.

Its most direct precedents are in two other models:

• Benne and Sheats (1948) described, among the task roles, the coordinator: the person who clarifies the relationships among other people’s ideas and suggestions, tries to pull them together and coordinates the activities of different members or subgroups.
• Meredith Belbin (1981) included in his model the Resource Investigator: extroverted, communicative, with a network of contacts outside the team, who brings in ideas and opportunities from elsewhere. Belbin’s model has uneven empirical support (Aritzeta, Swailes and Senior, 2007), but its descriptions help to place this profile.

Ways this profile shows up

• You tend to be the one connecting different people or teams with each other, even when it isn’t formally your job.
• You make sure information reaches whoever needs it, even when that’s not your direct task.
• You help different points of view within the team understand each other, translating when needed.
• You act as a bridge when two people or subgroups aren’t communicating well with each other.

An example: the product team asks for a “simple” feature and engineering replies that it will take three months. Each side thinks the other is exaggerating. The liaison communicator, who often has lunch with people from both, realizes that product only needs a minimal version for a client demo, and that engineering was estimating the full version. A ten-minute conversation between the right two people solves what three emails hadn’t.

What research says about people who connect groups

Structural holes. Sociologist Ronald Burt uses this term for the gaps between groups that barely talk to each other. Within each group, opinions and practices tend to be similar; between groups, they differ. Whoever has contacts on both sides of a gap sees alternatives earlier than others do. In his 2004 study of several hundred supply chain managers at Raytheon, a large US electronics company, those whose networks spanned these gaps expressed more ideas for improving the company, saw fewer of their ideas dismissed and had their ideas rated more highly. They also received better evaluations, salaries and promotions. Many of those “good ideas” weren’t new inventions, but something commonplace in one group and unknown in another.

Teams’ boundary work. Deborah Ancona and David Caldwell (1992) studied new product development teams in technology companies and showed that their performance also depended on what they did outward: dealing with management, coordinating with other departments, bringing in information from the environment. Not all those activities helped equally, but a team closed in on itself performed worse. The organizational literature calls the person who does this work a boundary spanner, someone who crosses boundaries.

Why it goes unseen. Researcher Joyce Fletcher (1999), in a study of female design engineers, described how relational work (anticipating what others need, connecting people, preventing misunderstandings) tended to “disappear”: it wasn’t recognized as competence but as niceness or a personality trait, precisely because its success consists in nothing going wrong. It’s a good description of the invisible coordination load this profile tends to absorb.

The cost of a function that almost never gets seen

This profile can end up taking on more coordination than is its share, without it appearing in any objective or any evaluation. There’s also a risk specific to the bridging position: if all information between two groups passes through one person, the team depends on them, and when they’re missing, the bridge disappears. Burt observed the other side of that same position: what is a bottleneck for the team is an information advantage for the person occupying it.

That’s why the value of this role grows when it becomes visible and shared: when the connections it creates leave the two sides talking to each other directly, and not only through the liaison.

Shared information and autonomy

On the popular-nonfiction side, General Stanley McChrystal recounts in Team of Teams (2015) how he transformed a rigid command structure into a network of small teams, and places shared access to the same information among the conditions that allowed each team to decide on its own without losing coordination. It’s a military leader’s account of his own experience, not a study, but it matches what Burt and Ancona measured: in complex organizations, someone has to circulate information between groups.

Who it works well with

If your main contribution to the team is more about tending the emotional climate than coordinating information, check out the cohesion builder role. With the results driver it makes a useful pair: one pushes the task forward and the other makes sure it reaches whoever it needs to reach. You can go back to your full result in the What’s My Team Role? test.

Sources

• Bales, R. F. (1950). Interaction Process Analysis: A Method for the Study of Small Groups. Addison-Wesley.
• Benne, K. D., and Sheats, P. (1948). Functional roles of group members. Journal of Social Issues, 4(2), 41-49. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.1948.tb01783.x
• Belbin, R. M. (1981). Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail. Heinemann.
• Aritzeta, A., Swailes, S., and Senior, B. (2007). Belbin’s team role model: Development, validity and applications for team building. Journal of Management Studies, 44(1), 96-118. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6486.2007.00666.x
• Burt, R. S. (2004). Structural holes and good ideas. American Journal of Sociology, 110(2), 349-399. doi:10.1086/421787
• Ancona, D. G., and Caldwell, D. F. (1992). Bridging the boundary: External activity and performance in organizational teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37(4). doi:10.2307/2393475
• Fletcher, J. K. (1999). Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work. MIT Press.
• McChrystal, S., Collins, T., Silverman, D., and Fussell, C. (2015). Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. Portfolio.