Jack of All Trades or Master of All?

Two out of the many emerging and related work trends I’ve been hearing and reading about lately are the growing interest by many organizations in developing generalists versus specialists, and the increased skepticism about expertise.

Let’s take the first trend. A recent article in The Atlantic Monthly (2019) describes a new type of Navy ship, The USS Gabrielle Giffords. According to the authors, the ship has a very unusual design in its lower contour - it has three separate hulls and is powered like a jet ski. In fact, the ship is described as almost modular; its insides can be swapped out, so it can “set sail as a submarine hunter, minesweeper, or surface combatant, depending on the mission.” (p. 58)

What is particularly interesting, according to the authors, is that the ship has adapted “minimal manning,” or the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists. For example, the authors interviewed a crew member calling out distances using a pair of binoculars. He was working to become a certified lookout, but should a fire break out, he would become a “boundaryman” and work to stop the spread of smoke to other compartments. The authors cite many more examples of other crew members with multiple roles.

As a result, the Navy has been selecting future crew members based on their ability to multitask. The authors also suggest that for such individuals tasked with many different roles, a “rigid adherence to routine … in situations with rapidly changing rules and roles … can leave you ill-equipped.” (p. 62)

Traditionally, organizations have relied on job descriptions to specify what your job responsibilities are; the more specific, the better. Yet in many companies today, jobs are being defined more broadly; in fact, for some organizations, rigidly defined job descriptions no longer exist. Employees are expected to contribute not just by doing what their job requires but also by being part of teams that are working for a common goal. And what this means is that at times, you are expected to go beyond what your job definition is to help others, and to learn what others in your team are doing so you can jump in when needed. Job rotations and training in multiple skills are part of this trend.

Furthermore, there are dangers in overspecializing. For example, Epstein (2018) writes in his book, Range, that “… among athletes who go on to become elite, broad early experience and delayed specialization is the norm. Musicians arrive at greatness via an incredible diversity of paths, but early hyperspecialization is often not necessary for skills development …” (p. 289) His examples include the basketball Hall-of-Famer Steve Nash (who did not get a basketball until he was thirteen) and the famous pianist Stanislav Richter (who did not start formal lessons until he was 22).

What about law, engineering, medicine, and many other professions where specialization is necessary? Even in medicine, Epstein claims, there are dangers in specialization. He cites interventional cardiologists who have a deep-seated belief in the efficacy of stents, despite evidence that stents do not really work that well.

However, many professionals do start by specializing, and eventually, some become generalists. There certainly is value for both roles. For example, in a study of inventors at 3M (Boh et al., 2013), a company well-known for its innovations, the authors found three types of inventors there – generalists, specialists, and polymaths (those with both breadth and expertise) – and each had different impacts on the organization: “The specialists contributed to 3M by producing the most technologically influential inventions. The generalists contributed by producing many ideas and patents. The polymaths contributed not only by generating inventions but applying these inventions widely to multiple parts of the organization, integrating with multiple technologies, thus becoming the most valued scientists of 3M.” (p. 364)

Van der Hejden’s (from Frie et al., 2019) concept of flexperts, as “those experts who have the ability to meet changing expertise requirements above and beyond their already existing in-depth domain-specific knowledge and skills” seems similar to these polymaths.

On the second trend, the distrust of experts has an underlying populist theme. This distrust has also increased due to the accessibility to all kinds of information online, as well as the highly-publicized errors that so-called experts have made. e.g., in not predicting the economic recession. Although the importance of expertise is well acknowledged, other researchers have questioned the risks of overrelying on expertise. For example, Fisher and Keil (2015) showed that individuals with so-called formal expertise (e.g., those who have studied a topic or field for an extended period – think MBAs or physicians) tend to forget what they have learned over time and also tend to overestimate their ability to explain something related to their specialty area. As they state: “Those with formal expertise exhibit meta-forgetfulness within their domain of knowledge, neglecting the rate at which deliberately learned information decays from memory.” (p. 15).

In a review of over 700 studies on the accuracy of physicians’ self-assessments with external observations of their competence, Davis et al. (2006) found “…weak or no associations between physicians’ self-rated assessments and external assessments …” (p. 1100). And as they point out, these findings for the medical profession are consistent with findings from other professions, such as law and engineering.

Professor Finkelstein (2019) describes this as the expertise trap. This happens in one of two ways. One, you can become too overconfident in your own knowledge. Two, your expertise narrows your perspective, and you begin to look at problems through your own limited perspective.

In organizations, of course, specialists and experts are undoubtedly needed. Firms from all kinds of sectors (from technology to financial services to education) hire highly specialized and highly trained individuals to work on complex problems. Companies like General Motors, Samsung, Shell and many start-ups would not succeed unless they have the right talent and specialized knowledge to build their competitive advantage. And wouldn’t you rather be operated on by an expert surgeon than, say, your primary care physician? Research by Goodall et al. (2011) has shown that teams and organizations led by experts tend to get better results than those that are not.

For managers and organizations, here are three recommendations for making sure you have the right balance of experts, generalists, and flexperts or polymaths. First, select for potential, not just experience. I will elaborate on this in a future post, but I do see more and more companies moving away from looking exclusively at experience or pure technical or specialized skills. Expertise and technical skills will continue to be important but in addition, I predict that potential will also weigh heavily in the future. Second, do not define roles too rigidly and coach your workers to be able to take on several roles. In the dynamic team environments of business today, teams with members who can adapt quickly and learn different roles are likely to be more effective.

Third, create a learning environment. For example, when a project or assignment fails, dig deep to understand the underlying causes without necessarily pinning blame. Encourage an “outside-in” mindset; be aware of outside trends and the implications for your team or firm. I know of a janitorial services company that wanted to dramatically improve their services.To get an idea of what great customer service looks like, its senior management team contacted Ritz Carlton management and arranged for the company’s management team to visit the hotel chain’s headquarters. As another example, when I was leading an internal learning and development team at a Fortune 500 company, we arranged a visit to General Electric’s Crotonville plant, where its world-famous Learning and Development center was based, to learn from GE’s success in this area.

For individuals, here are three suggestions. First, make sure you make a commitment to engage in lifelong learning. I like what Wiseman (2014) describes as adopting a “rookie” mindset. Her overall message (with many examples in her book) is that we all need to think and act like perpetual rookies. She is not suggesting that prior knowledge and experience are useless, but that we remain open and eager to learn. Getting a degree or certificate should be merely a step in a life-long learning journey. The key today is not whether you become an expert or a generalist but how you are continuing to learn and renew yourself. The recruiting firm Korn Ferry places great value on identifying potential executives who have learning agility, which they define as the ability and willingness to learn from experience, and then apply that learning to perform successfully under new situations. It’s how you learn, not necessarily (or exclusively) what you know.

Second, be aware of the different career choices you will have to make at some point – specialist, generalist or polymath – where your passions lie, and what you are best at being. Third, engage in self-reflection, and get out of your comfort zone occasionally. This is a challenge especially for successful executives, but important for them to do. Most of us like our routine and take comfort in our habits, dysfunctional though some of them may be. But forcing yourself out of your comfort zone occasionally will make you more open to new experiences and ideas. The late Eleanor Roosevelt used to say, “Do something every day that scares you.”

Boh, W. et al. (2014). Balancing Breadth and Depth of Expertise for Innovation: a 3M Study. Research Policy, 349-366.

Davis, D. et al. (2006). Accuracy of Physician Self-assessment Compared with Observed Measures of Competence: A Systematic Review. JAMA, 296 (9), 1094-1102.

Epstein, D. (2019). Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York: Riverhead Books.

Goodall, A. et al. (2011). Why Do Leaders Matter? Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 77 (3), 275-284.

Finkelstein, S. (2019). Don’t Be Blinded by Your Own Expertise. Harvard Business Review, May-June.

Fisher, M. and Keil, F. (2015). The Curse of Expertise: When More Knowledge Leads to Miscalibrated Explanatory Thought. Cognitive Science, 1-19.

Frie, L. et al. (2019). How Experts Deal with Changing Expertise Demands: A Qualitative Study into the Processes of Expertise Renewal. Human Resources Quarterly, 30: 61-79.

Wiseman (2014). Rookie Smarts. New York: HarperBusiness.

Choosing Between Tightness or Looseness

I recently finished reading Michele Gelfand’s 2018 book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, which is based on research she has been doing over the past several years (I have referenced her work in my own book, Successful Global Leadership). Her book details a different way to look at cultures by examining the dimension of tightness-looseness – the degree to which social norms are pervasive, clearly defined, and reliably imposed within nations. Tight cultures, her research shows, have strong social norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures have weak social norms and are highly permissive. Furthermore, people from tight cultures “view effective leaders as those who embody independence and great confidence – that is, as people who like to do things their own way and don’t rely on others”, whereas people from loose cultures prefer “visionary leaders who are collaborative.”

Her measure of tightness-looseness, which she and her team have administered in over 30 countries, uses the following six items which individuals respond to on an agree-disagree scale:

1.    There are many social norms that people are supposed to abide by in this country.

2.    In this country, there are very close expectations for how people should act in most situations.

3.    People agree upon what behaviors are appropriate versus inappropriate in most situations in this country.

4.    People in this country have a great deal of freedom in deciding how they want to behave in most situations.

5.    In this country, if someone acts in an inappropriate way, others will strongly disapprove.

6.    People in this country almost always comply with social norms.

Countries that she has found to be more tight include Pakistan, South Korea, Turkey, Malaysia, and Singapore, while countries that are more loose include Brazil, New Zealand, the United States, Greece, and the Ukraine.

Gelfand’s framework is but the latest in a number of frameworks studying cultural differences across nations. Hofstede’s is perhaps the most well-known, although his research, as well as those of others, has been subject to some criticism. His construct of Uncertainty Avoidance (which he defines as a society’s tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity) seems to overlap with the tightness-looseness distinction. In my own book, I propose Preference for Structure as one dimension that also seems to overlap with Gelfand’s concept.

Gelfand believes, and I agree, that her framework can be applied to organizations. Substitute “employees” or “workers” for “people“, and “organization” for “country” in the six statements above and you can see the applicability easily. For example, her book explains that part of the reason why the Daimler-Benz and Chrysler merger failed was due to the vast difference in cultural tightness-looseness between the two companies:

“Daimler had a top-down, heavily managed, hierarchical structure devoted to precision. As a result, the company’s manufacturing operations were rigid and bureaucratic. Much like its country of origin, Daimler leaned tight. Chrysler, on the other hand, was a looser operation with a more relaxed, freewheeling, and egalitarian business culture. Chrysler also used a leaner production style, which minimized unnecessary personnel and red tape.” (p. 140)

She acknowledges that differences in industry pressures may also explain the collective tightness or looseness of different organizations. For example, hospitals, police departments and airlines tend to have tighter cultures than R&D groups and start-ups because failures in the former tend to have greater life-and-death consequences. She also suggests that an organization’s country of origin plays a significant role in influencing its tightness or looseness; for example, Israeli companies tend to be loose, while Japanese companies tend to be tight.

In a Fortune piece (September 11, 2018) as well as in her book, Gelfand explains that many companies today want to develop tight-loose ambidexterity. Loose organizations that are capable of deploying the opposite set of norms she refers to as having structured looseness. Flexible tightness, on the other hands, happens when a tight organization tries to deploy a looser state. What’s the right balance and how do you manage the transition? For example, when start-ups start to scale, they introduce hierarchy and rules over time, and these can stifle the looseness that led to the initial success of these start-ups. On the other hand, tight organizational cultures that move toward looseness might suffer from an “anything goes” mindset.

Having had experience interviewing and consulting with many managers from global companies, and having worked as an executive with several multinationals, I can confirm that her observations seem to make sense on the surface. However, the reality is more complex. Let me explain. As we know, all organizations have cultures that are shaped by many things: the behaviors of top leaders, the history of the organization (including certain events which have influenced it), the industry in which it belongs, its national origin, and its goals and strategy. For example, Apple and Amazon’s cultures have been heavily influenced by Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos respectively. As another example, I know managers who work in the U.S. subsidiaries of Samsung and Michelin who have described to me organizational norms in these companies that are heavily influenced by their home countries’ cultures (South Korea and France, respectively).

In my experience, there is something missing in this dichotomy between tight and loose, and that is the strength of the organization’s culture. As Sorensen (2009) and other researchers have pointed out, companies with strong corporate cultures tend to be higher-performing than companies in the same industry with weaker cultures. Now what is a “strong culture” exactly?  This is Sorensen’s definition: “An organizational culture is said to be strong when the basic assumptions of the culture are widely shared and deeply held by members of the organizations.” In other words, there is a shared understanding among organizational members of what the basic values of the organization are. Talk to individuals in these organizations, such as Johnson & Johnson, Google, Wegmans, and the Navy Seals, and they will be able to tell you what the organization stands for and what its purpose is. Not only that, most of them are committed to these values.

On the other hand, the degree of tightness or looseness of an organization refers to its practices, social norms and customs rather than deeply held values. These espoused values will not always translate to practices and customs unless the organization’s senior leaders model and reinforce these practices through the organization’s systems, processes and structures. So you can envision a 2 x 2 matrix, where you have strong and weak cultures on one dimension, and tight and loose organizations on the other dimension:

	Tight Organizations	Loose Organizations
Weak Cultures	1 (Tesla)	3 (Uber)
Strong Cultures	2 (Apple, Goldman Sachs)	4 (Southwest, Twitter, Zappos)

Some examples might help. In Cell 4 you will find companies such as Southwest Airlines, Twitter, and Zappos. At Southwest Airlines, for example, the late Herb Kelleher instilled a very strong culture through his own behaviors and reinforced the company’s values in many different ways, such as hiring employees with the right attitude. Yet Southwest leans very loose; this has been widely reported in the press as well as in several interviews with Mr. Kelleher and his successors. For example, you can watch many YouTube videos where Southwest airplane crew members are playing pranks or improvising pre-flight announcements.

In Cell 1, on the other hand, you will find companies where there is a strong emphasis on procedures and practices, but values that are not strongly emphasized and reinforced.  One of my colleagues once consulted for a mid-sized, family-owned business where rules and protocols were tightly enforced. For example, employees had to follow a dress code strictly, and the CEO believed that this level of tightness was what has made the firm successful to this point. The firm paid its employees way above the market, which has kept its turnover rate low. Yet, in my colleague’s opinion, the company seemed “soulless.” Employees did not seem engaged, and there was no passion or higher purpose other than making money for the company.

Based on my readings about Tesla, it seems to fall in this category. Elon Musk runs a very tight ship and fires executives seemingly willy-nilly. A number of people I have talked to who know employees in Tesla say that they remain there mainly for the opportunity and not necessarily because they believe in the company’s culture.

In Cell 2 you will find companies such as Apple, which is run very tightly yet manages to have a very strong, values-driven culture. Tim Cook and his executive team, and Steve Jobs before him, make sure that everything is very buttoned-up. Finally, in Cell 3, you will find companies such as Uber and other startups, where cultures are not well-defined and there is a looseness to the organization. The past scandals involving Uber’s founder are a reflection of this.

What’s the best cell to be in for an organization? It depends on at least four factors: the industry or sector it’s in (e.g., hospitality versus hospitals), its own strategy and long-term goals, its competitive pressures, and its own core competencies. There is no magic bullet here. However, as far as tightness or looseness is concerned, I agree with Gelfand that companies in today’s complex and turbulent environment need to strive toward greater flexibility and looseness. In addition, I would suggest that organizations should also strengthen its culture; the evidence on the positive relationship between cultural strength and performance is quite strong. In other words, moving towards Cell 4 would make a lot of sense as a go-to strategy for many organizations today.

Gelfand, M. (2018). Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. New York: Scribners.

Gelfand, M. (2018). Is Your Organization Tight or Loose? How to Tell – and Ways to Fix It. Fortune, September 11.

Gelfand, M. et al. (2011). Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study. Science (332), 1100-1104.

Henson, R. (2016). Successful Global Leadership: Frameworks for Cross-Cultural Managers and Organizations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sorensen, J. (2009). Note on Organizational Culture. Stanford Graduate School of Business Case OB-69.