Industry Sector: Social Competence – Teamwork/Relationship
Baskerville, Philip. (2026). Connecting people well: The skill that multiplies your impact. Industry Professor Journal.
Application: This article describes the skills and knowledge required to identify, facilitate and sustain high-value connections between people within and beyond a professional network. It includes recognising opportunities for connection, assessing shared purpose, crafting purposeful introductions, and evaluating effectiveness through observed behavioural outcomes.
The article applies to managers and supervisors across a wide range of organisations and sectors who are responsible for building productive working relationships and creating conditions for collaboration to emerge. Managers applying this skill are expected to act as deliberate connectors: identifying where mutual value exists between people in their network, facilitating introductions with intention and care, and sustaining the trust that makes those connections possible over time.
Keywords: tacit knowledge, relationship brokering, managerial networking, social capital, practitioner knowledge
The Skill Identified — Analysis and Practical Framework
Skill: Connecting People Well
Connect around purpose, not around people
Before making any introduction, ask yourself: why should these two people actually meet? If you cannot answer that in a single sentence, you are not ready to make the connection. The purpose needs to be specific and genuine — not “you are both in business” but something concrete: “Rob is looking to recruit a Solar Electrician, and Jackie works within a network that may be able to help him.” That one sentence does the cognitive work for both parties before they have even met. Without it, even a warm introduction can feel purposeless.
Ask before you connect
Before making a formal introduction, signal the possibility first. “Would you be interested in meeting someone who is doing similar work with young people?” This simple step respects the other person’s time and tests whether the connection is genuinely welcome. When both parties have said yes, the introduction lands far more effectively than if it arrived uninvited. This is not caution — it is craft. It also protects you from the awkward outcome of an introduction that neither party wanted but felt obliged to acknowledge.
Present each person at their best
When the introduction is made, your job is to write a genuine advocate’s profile of each person — not a generic biography, but a tailored description that highlights the credentials, passions and experiences most relevant to this particular connection. Tell the story of why this person matters to the recipient. Include a LinkedIn link if it helps. You are doing the research work for both parties so that neither arrives cold. The quality of this framing is what separates an introduction that generates a meeting from one that generates a polite reply and nothing more.
Name the value in one sentence
Before the profiles, place a single sentence that clearly states the purpose of the connection. “I believe there are synergies for both of you.” “I thought there may be some shared interests here regarding young people in schools.” That sentence frames everything that follows. Without it, even the best biographies can feel random.
Stake your reputation
Put your name behind both people. “I highly recommend both of you and know the passion that both of you have to make a difference.” This is not courtesy — it signals to both parties that you have assessed them and found them credible, and that your own relationship with each of them is on the line. That raises the stakes in the best possible way. It is also, I should acknowledge, why the technique depends partly on the reputation you have already built. The protocol is backed by credibility. Building that credibility over time is a parallel discipline.
Building the habit and testing it yourself
The five-move protocol — scan for the opportunity, seek permission, profile each person at their best, state the purpose, endorse both parties — is a learnable sequence. The move that takes the most practice is the first: developing the habit of scanning your network continuously for connection opportunities, not just when you personally need something.
Start small. Nominate one introduction per week that you are genuinely willing to make. Communicate as if you are setting both people up for success. Then collect what happens. Warm, specific, meeting-committed replies are evidence that the skill is working. Polite acknowledgements that drift into silence tell you something is missing — most often it is the value bridge sentence, or a biography that was too brief to do justice to the person.
This is where I would encourage you to move beyond taking my word for it. If the five-move protocol describes something real and transferable, you should be able to apply it yourself and observe similar results in your own network. That is the honest test. Thirteen years of my own practice gives me confidence in the framework, but your practice — applied consistently, observed carefully — is what will give you confidence in it. And if you find variations that work better in your context, those variations are themselves worth capturing and sharing.
What you will find, over time, is that connecting people well does not diminish your own value. It multiplies it. Every successful introduction deepens the trust others place in your judgement. And the collaborations and partnerships that grow from those introductions are often the most satisfying outcomes a manager can be part of — even when, especially when, you are not in the room when they happen.
Methodology
Every manager who has worked with people for any length of time knows the moment. You are in a conversation with someone, and a name flickers in the back of your mind. These two should know each other. Most of us let that flicker pass.
I have learned — not through formal study, but through years of working across schools, TAFE, industry associations and small business networks — that acting on that instinct is one of the most productive things a manager can do. I call it relationship activation and bridging: the ability to notice when two people in your network could genuinely help each other, and then to facilitate that connection in a way that actually lands.
This article draws on something I did not fully understand about myself until recently. An analysis of thirteen years of my communications — more than three thousand messages written across education, industry, community, and business contexts between 2012 and 2026 — identified a consistent pattern in how I connect people. I was not aware of the pattern as a pattern. To me, it simply felt like the obvious thing to do. That is, I am told, the hallmark of tacit knowledge: skill so thoroughly internalised that its practitioner cannot see it from the outside.
I want to be honest about what that kind of evidence is and is not. These are my communications, my network, my outcomes — a single person’s practice across a single life. The patterns identified are real, but they emerged from my particular context, my pre-existing relationships, and more than a decade of accumulated trust. It would be an overreach to claim that what worked in my network will work identically in yours, or that my technique alone explains every positive outcome. Reputation, timing, and the natural generosity of the people I work with all played a role.
What I can say with more confidence is this: across fifteen independent introduction sequences, spanning education, solar energy, technology, politics, community development and professional associations, the same behavioural pattern appears. And in each case, the people I introduced responded with warmth, specificity, and a commitment to meet — not as a courtesy to me, but as a genuine response to the framing of the connection. Those responses are real. They are not self-reported. They are what people actually wrote, within hours of receiving the introduction. That, at minimum, is worth examining.
The knowledge embedded in skilled practice is real knowledge, even when its holder cannot articulate it. Philosophers and management researchers from Polanyi to Schön to Nonaka have argued that much of what expert practitioners know lives below the threshold of conscious explanation — and that extracting it requires studying what they do, not asking them to describe it. That is what this analysis attempted. Whether or not it meets the standard of peer-reviewed research, it is grounded in real behaviour, real people, and real outcomes across a long period of time. That is a form of evidence worth taking seriously.
Sources
The theoretical sources
- Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press.
- Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. University of Chicago Press.
- Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. Doubleday.
- Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.
The primary data source — Discoverable communications
Baskerville, Philip. (2012–2026). [Unpublished communications]. Private collection.
Alignment with the Australian Vocational Education Standard (VET)
Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) is governed by national standards ensuring high-quality, industry-relevant training, regulated by the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) and the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF)
This tacit knowledge/skill, built from industry expertise, adds author’s insights to the following Units of Competency: