As promised, the excerpt from The Age of the Network, Chapter 7, featuring Elizabeth Lorentz, sparked in her networking by meeting Seymour Sarason:
“THE COORDINATOR,” STARRING MRS. DEWAR
Networks began developing new leaders long before computers enhanced their reach. In a richly connected environment where many potential projects are sparking, growing, diminishing, and disappearing, a new role arises, that of the coordinator, whose distinguishing characteristic is the ability to see “connections” among people.
Elizabeth Meyer Lorentz will not receive the fame she deserves in her lifetime. Then again, she just might. As we write this, she is 81 and still networking.
With a small network that coalesced around the work of Yale psychology professor Seymour Sarason, Elizabeth has invented, commented on, and superbly played the role of the Coordinator. It has to be capitalized because it is so important. The network depends upon it.
The Coordinator brings the network to life, matching needs with resources. It’s a vital role, and Lorentz and company have been lending it legitimacy for nearly a quarter of a century. Elizabeth models coordinators after the role of the Oxford tutor, who “links students to the possibilities of the university and the world outside.” Links. Possibilities.
Having just read Seymour’s book, The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies, she met him for lunch in the early 1970s at the Yale Faculty Club. “We were walking in the street when I said how great I thought his book was,” she recalls. “Seymour stopped, turned, and said, ‘Please don’t be brief.’” It was a good beginning to a long collaboration.
In their two books that followed, Elizabeth appears as the central character, Mrs. Dewar (pronounce it to understand it: “do-er”).
As a trustee of her local hospital for more than 15 years, Elizabeth chaired the long-range planning committee. At the same time, Seymour and his colleagues had a federal grant to study networks. “Mrs. Dewar’s network” became the object of their study, with her as the Coordinator Extraordinaire, involving the whole community, everyone who had a stake in the future of the hospital.
“I survived three executive and presidential changes,” she recalls,“ and I learned how the executives try to bypass the board. They were always plotting, so I’d plot back.” Which she did by being a world-class coordinator.
“It’s a radar type of mind that sees things and connections in the social fog that most people cannot,” her peers reported. “I get lost trying to follow the connections she comes up with.”
“FINDING” PEOPLE“The coordinator is a scanner of possibilities,” Elizabeth says. To “design configurations of people,” as she puts it, the coordinator must first “find” them.
So, Elizabeth invented a one-hour interview that usually turned into five. “They’d start canceling appointments left and right, and then I knew I was on track,” she recalls. “The interviews help you ‘find’ the person.”
“Finding” means identifying the person’s full range of possibility, capability, skill, expertise, and talent. Elizabeth calls it “mapping a person’s terrain, asset hunting instead of looking for what’s wrong with people. A certain characteristic may be an asset, depending on what you match it with.” She advises interviewers to:
- Think while you talk. Mentally match this person with others in the network. “Your job is to think, ‘for whom is this an opportunity?'"
- Make sure that the first vital phone call is made, even if you have to make it yourself for people who are reluctant.
- Get a real kick out of making a match; it’s the coordinator’s “reward.... An inner integration reflecting the outer one takes place,” she says.
- Be ready to demean yourself and have no pride. “Like a little poodle, the coordinator has to gallop after people, asking their plans and reminding them by example that they are not a twosome but a part of a network.”
Yet, key practical questions remain unanswered. People will pay for technology network managers and infrastructure support, but will they pay for coordinators on the people side? Who trains them? How do you convince people that coordination is not an add-on to an existing job?