Specialist or Generalist?

Exceptional performance requires prolonged commitment to a particular activity to the exclusion of other pursuits. As such, the well-rounded strategy is only effective if standard performance is adequate for the task at hand. Where is standard performance adequate? Standard performance is fine in endeavors where there is no meaningful competition. Professional athletes, professional musicians, leading surgeons, there is considerable competition for elite status in these professions. There is also considerable specialization. Musicians only play one instrument and doctors specialize in a few different surgeries.

Standard performance is frequently adequate in the huge swathes of management that populate large organizations. This makes sense as management is best performed by generalists. A middle manager takes care of his staff, the projects assigned to his group, helps chart the strategy of the group, and may work to acquire some new technology. Those are activities that require being good a several skills but not excellent at any one of them. As a successful career is usually associated with promotions up the ranks of management, companies tend to encourage promising employees to pursue a variety of projects that will expose them to a number of different functions within the company.

In effect, companies discourage excellence and superior performance in employees because the prolonged effort in one area that is required for exceptional performance will never be encouraged or promoted. There is too much risk associated with focusing on a single skill. Broadening a skill set, either at the individual or corporate level, minimizes exposure to the risk that a highly refined skill will not be needed as a company evolves. A broader skill set is also more useful in that a number of tasks can be handled adequately by one person rather than having one person who is very good at one or two tasks.

The choice is not whether to be a specialist or a generalist. The question is whether to compete in a field where elite status requires developing a highly refined (and thereby rare) skill or whether to work in a position that accepts good enough in a range of skills.