New Problems, New Approaches: The Rise of the Generalist

Almost every company as we know it has specialist organizations to support its business priorities.

Organizations such as Finance, HR, IT and Marketing have been in existence for as long as we can remember. In most companies, domain expertise, efficiency and process execution dominate the agenda for these organizations. You get hired, promoted and measured based on your expertise and value-add in your particular specialization.

This is all good, but what happens when the organization needs to solve a big hairy problem or launches a new business model that requires all-hands on deck?

While some companies have been successful in bringing together cross-functional teams to work together towards a common goal, the teams often have limited perspective and the lack of the capability to connect the dots. The result: problems are not getting fixed.

Furthermore, in the age of mounting competition and vast technological change, the capabilities needed to successfully differentiate a company and win in the marketplace are much broader than they were in the past. That’s not to say that there aren’t brilliant minds working in IT, finance or HR, but if your company wants to be better than anyone else and relevant to its customers, you need new approaches and capabilities to be able to problem-find/problem-solve and execute on your vision.

Value creation and problem solving don’t always intersect within areas of specialization. More than often, they span across multiple disciplines and across lines of business and industries. We can no longer rely on just bringing together groups of specialists to solve our most complex problems. Instead, companies are in need of Generalist individuals with new, agile skills that can see the big picture, listen, synthesize ideas and connect the dots.

Why in the world would we need Generalists? Going back to 1776, in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, division of labor always represented a qualitative increase in productivity. We’ve built our entire society and educational system around specialization. When asked what they wanted to be when they grow up, no child has likely ever answered “a generalist”.

We’ve been trained to perceive Generalists as ‘jacks of all trades – masters of none’, in other words, driving little to no value in the business. The new breed of ‘Generalist’ that our organizations desperately need defies and deeply challenges these perceptions.

The new Generalist is in fact a master of their trade. They bring expertise and experience in several areas, fueled by insatiable curiosity and the ability to “hyper-learn” new concepts and ideas.

 

They practice empathy to fully understand and break down the nature of complex problems and collaboratively engage specialists in reframing the problem in order to arrive at potential solutions.

They complement specialists, by challenging them to think differently, but never compete with them or take credit for their ideas. They approach challenges with an open mind, using a “how might we” mindset rather than come with pre-conceived ideas.

As outstanding communicators, they reframe, package and present ideas, helping decision makers visualize the future.

Lastly, they encourage and promote change from within by understanding and diffusing resistance to change.

If it sounds like these Generalists need to come from another planet, don’t stress. While it is likely far from the traditional roles you will see in an organization, if you take a deep look at your talent, you will be able to identify individuals with the right traits to play this critical role.
Consider looking at the following attributes as indicators of potential:

Attitude first, not only experience. A “Can-do” attitude and a high degree of motivation are a must. The Generalist must note constraints, but has to creatively encourage ways to work around them.

Intellectually curious (to an extreme level). Can learn and (un)learn any topic (enough to be dangerous) in a matter of hours. Learns on their own as well as from others by asking questions.

Connects the Dots. Can bring in new perspectives and ideas from other disciplines, industries, etc.

Practices empathy. Can imagine the world from different perspective. Those of colleagues, customers, users, etc. Takes time to listen and understand before presenting their own ideas.

Leads by influence and collaboration. Can earn the respect of the specialists, influence new ways of thinking and an open mindset towards new ideas.

Constantly challenges the status quo and encourages new ways of doing things
Different companies will find different paths to solve their wicked problems, but every company will need to consider the new capabilities they require to solve them. By harnessing the full potential and experience from the functional organizations, and designing solutions we will continue to see the rise of Generalists (whether its called that or not), driving profound change in modern organizations.

Are you a Generalist? Do you see a void requiring new capabilities to solve problems?


Posted by:Reuven Gorsht

These skills will give you a leg up on your competitors

Rick Spence 

Getty ImagesDisorganized? It's a trait many entrepreneurs share.

 Successful entrepreneurs share many common traits, but they also share the absence of certain traits. And the latter spells opportunity for those who want to get ahead of the competition.

That’s because if you knew that you and your competitors were equally lacking at certain basic skills, you could consciously work to upgrade or delegate those abilities to leave the competition well behind.

Personal-assessment expert Bill J. Bonnstetter  of Arizona-based TTI Performance Systems Ltd. has been studying entrepreneurs for years. In a recent article for the HBR Blog Network run by the Harvard Business Review, Bonnstetter identified four common traits serial entrepreneurs lack. See if you recognize any of these deficiencies in yourself:

Empathy Entrepreneurs often build products and companies to help people meet needs or deal with problems, but their commitment is on an intellectual or market basis — not on a personal level, Bonnstetter says.  “They do this in hopes of a return on investment,” not to make friends or improve their personal relationships. But empathy is a key attribute for effective leaders and coaches. If your business depends on teamwork and individual effort, consider how a little more personal warmth and caring might help you reach your goals faster.

Self-management “Entrepreneurial-minded people are not proficient in managing themselves and their time,” Bonnstetter notes. “Often they need assistance managing everyday tasks and should hire or delegate them to someone who has mastered this skill.”
 

Planning and organizing It’s not that entrepreneurs are more impulsive than anyone else; they are so task-oriented that if they ever spent time planning every task or meeting on their to-do list, they would never get anything done. Once again, consider downloading this job on a dependable aide. Hiring someone to manage your calendar, organize meetings, keep you on schedule and de-clutter your office can help you overcome these weaknesses and achieve greater efficiency, Bonnstetter says. 

 

Analytical problem-solving Entrepreneurs believe in action and fast decisions. “By nature they do not have time to collect and analyze the data,” Bonnstetter says. “They see numbers as getting in their way, and they should — everyone who has told them an idea wouldn’t pan out has used data and logic to illustrate that point.” He suggests entrepreneurs focus on creating and promoting their vision and mission, and hire people to create an executable strategy and follow through on the details.
Bonnstetter’s firms came to these conclusions by comparing the attributes of a group of serial entrepreneurs to a control group of 17,000 people. The group was assessed on its mastery of 23 important job-related skills.

Of course, Bonnstetter notes that the serial entrepreneurs in his study display several key strengths, too. In a previous article for HBR Blog Network, he noted that the entrepreneurs scored well above average in four key skills: persuasion; leadership; personal accountability; and goal orientation. These skills obviously represent key advantages to entrepreneurial types, so you might want to work on upgrading these skills as well.

Anything your competitors can do, you need to do better.

Management Is (Still) Not Leadership

A few weeks ago, the BBC asked me to come in for a radio interview. They told me they wanted to talk about effective leadership — China had just elevated Xi Jinping to the role of Communist Party leader; General David Petraeus had stepped down from his post at the CIA a few days earlier; the BBC itself was wading through a leadership scandal of its own — but the conversation quickly veered, as these things often do, into a discussion about how individuals can keep large, complex, unwieldy organizations operating reliably and efficiently.

That's not leadership, I explained. That's management — and the two are radically different.

In more than four decades of studying businesses and consulting to organizations on how to implement new strategies, I can't tell you how many times I've heard people use the words "leadership" and "management" synonymously, and it drives me crazy every time. 

The interview reminded me once again that the confusion around these two terms is massive, and that misunderstanding gets in the way of any reasonable discussion about how to build a company, position it for success and win in the twenty-first century. The mistakes people make on the issue are threefold:

Mistake #1: People use the terms "management" and "leadership" interchangeably. This shows that they don't see the crucial difference between the two and the vital functions that each role plays.

Mistake #2: People use the term "leadership" to refer to the people at the very top of hierarchies. They then call the people in the layers below them in the organization "management." And then all the rest are workers, specialists, and individual contributors. This is also a mistake and very misleading.

Mistake #3: People often think of "leadership" in terms of personality characteristics, usually as something they call charisma. Since few people have great charisma, this leads logically to the conclusion that few people can provide leadership, which gets us into increasing trouble.

In fact, management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on budget, day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity, this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So, management is crucial — but it's not leadership.

Leadership is entirely different. It is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it's about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous, and it's a recipe for failure.

Some people still argue that we must replace management with leadership. This is obviously not so: they serve different, yet essential, functions. We need superb management. And we need more superb leadership. We need to be able to make our complex organizations reliable and efficient. We need them to jump into the future — the right future — at an accelerated pace, no matter the size of the changes required to make that happen.

There are very, very few organizations today that have sufficient leadership. Until we face this issue, understanding exactly what the problem is, we're never going to solve it. Unless we recognize that we're not talking about management when we speak of leadership, all we will try to do when we do need more leadership is work harder to manage. At a certain point, we end up with over-managed and under-led organizations, which are increasingly vulnerable in a fast-moving world.

John Kotter

Dr. John P. Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School and the Chief Innovation Officer at Kotter International, a firm that helps leaders accelerate strategy implementation in their organizations.

Management Is (Still) Not Leadership

A few weeks ago, the BBC asked me to come in for a radio interview. They told me they wanted to talk about effective leadership — China had just elevated Xi Jinping to the role of Communist Party leader; General David Petraeus had stepped down from his post at the CIA a few days earlier; the BBC itself was wading through a leadership scandal of its own — but the conversation quickly veered, as these things often do, into a discussion about how individuals can keep large, complex, unwieldy organizations operating reliably and efficiently.

That's not leadership, I explained. That's management — and the two are radically different.
In more than four decades of studying businesses and consulting to organizations on how to implement new strategies, I can't tell you how many times I've heard people use the words "leadership" and "management" synonymously, and it drives me crazy every time. 

The interview reminded me once again that the confusion around these two terms is massive, and that misunderstanding gets in the way of any reasonable discussion about how to build a company, position it for success and win in the twenty-first century. The mistakes people make on the issue are threefold:

Mistake #1: People use the terms "management" and "leadership" interchangeably. This shows that they don't see the crucial difference between the two and the vital functions that each role plays.

Mistake #2: People use the term "leadership" to refer to the people at the very top of hierarchies. They then call the people in the layers below them in the organization "management." And then all the rest are workers, specialists, and individual contributors. This is also a mistake and very misleading.

Mistake #3: People often think of "leadership" in terms of personality characteristics, usually as something they call charisma. Since few people have great charisma, this leads logically to the conclusion that few people can provide leadership, which gets us into increasing trouble.

In fact, management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on budget, day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity, this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So, management is crucial — but it's not leadership.

Leadership is entirely different. It is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it's about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous, and it's a recipe for failure.

Some people still argue that we must replace management with leadership. This is obviously not so: they serve different, yet essential, functions. We need superb management. And we need more superb leadership. We need to be able to make our complex organizations reliable and efficient. We need them to jump into the future — the right future — at an accelerated pace, no matter the size of the changes required to make that happen.

There are very, very few organizations today that have sufficient leadership. Until we face this issue, understanding exactly what the problem is, we're never going to solve it. Unless we recognize that we're not talking about management when we speak of leadership, all we will try to do when we do need more leadership is work harder to manage. At a certain point, we end up with over-managed and under-led organizations, which are increasingly vulnerable in a fast-moving world.

 

John Kotter

Dr. John P. Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School and the Chief Innovation Officer at Kotter International, a firm that helps leaders accelerate strategy implementation in their organizations.