Don’t Forget the “I” in “T”: On Recommitting to Specialism
1st June 11
Posted in People, collaboration
Mashery's Circus Mashimus poster at SXSWi 2011
There are some very smart people arguing that generalists are the future. When we have much more to do in less time, then it’s better we put together teams of people who can all spin plates, bang a drum and throw knives at the same time, right? Perhaps there are some people who are so extraordinarily talented across so many disciplines that they genuinely can claim to be the ultimate one man band; a steel-alloyed, swiss army knife of creativity. For the rest of us, I would beg to differ.
In an era of collaboration – which we’ve written about at length and repeatedly - it may feel a little strange to hear a plea here for specialism, but hear me out.
When Ben asked Are You Ready To Form Voltron? here last year, he was celebrating T-shaped people. Yet all too often when we think T-shaped, we emphasise the bar in blue from his presentation below: the intelligent grasp of a range of different skills, married to a desire to collaborate:
T-shaped people
Yet of equal importance is the central pillar of ‘Awesome’ , or the “I” in “T”: the core skill we each bring to the table as individuals:
Saneel and I have been pondering this off and on over the past few months. Whilst Saneel’s post“Are the junior talent in advertising packaging themselves wrong?” (and a great response here from William Burks Spencer) examined the issue from the perspective of people at the start of their careers, our perspective here is that the importance of having a core, identified skill is applicable to anyone. Working together collaboratively, productively and at pace depends upon this, if we’re to avoid a) disappearing into Groupthink (when consensus rubs the edges off anything interesting), or b) wasting hours of our lives in meetings that never really end.
So, why is it worth asking yourself ‘what am I really good at?’ and what have we learned about re-focusing on the specialist skills of individuals within teams?
- Cast for the task. If people are asked to play a specific role and this is spelt out overtly at the start, they are much more likely to feel motivated to perform. This doesn’t negate the need for literacy in other areas. It just means everyone knows why they’re there and what they’ll be held personally accountable for.
- Treat ‘differences as an opportunity’. Flow is better when you work with people who share the same goal but who have different skills to achieve it. The process isn’t just faster, it’s a whole lot more enjoyable.
- Respect people’s time. If different members have clearly differentiated roles and the task is defined, don’t try and solve everything in a team meeting, do something radical instead: *leave people alone* to work.
- Keep re-evaluating. If the same group who solved problem A can’t solve problem B, it’s likely they’ve got the wrong skills for the new task. Forcing them to sit in a room with a problem they don’t understand day after day is a sure-fire recipe for burn-out. Instead, treat everyone as a respected specialist (they may ‘part of the team’, sure, but does that mean they have the right skills for this particular task, right now?). We fear that switching in a new team member will disrupt flow, but often it’s the thing that keeps things moving.
- Shut up and think. We spend the first 5-10 minutes of any idea generation session writing down our own first thoughts before we get into any kind of group discussion. Bizarrely, despite sounding so simple, it takes discipline to do but it’s worked for us since we began Labs. Check out Edward Boches’ blog for more on the whys and wherefores of this technique.
- Give people a road-map. I don’t mean a schedule or a gant chart, although they’re critical. I mean an answer to the question, ‘how are we going to approach this task?’. For example, we’ve been using an approach that forces us to dispel the myth that there’s only one answer to any brief. More on this to follow in a separate post.
- Make someone responsible for making this happen. We have a job spec at BBH for a role called “Team Director”. Their job is primarily about team productivity: making sure the right people are engaged, at the right time. It takes the skill of a 3D chess player, huge charm and a deep understanding of the skills and personalities of people across several different disciplines.
If this all sounds blindingly obvious, you are, of course, correct (and please go-ahead and award yourself Zen-Titan of Team Productivity status). This is often about fine-tuning cross-functional teams that are likely to be high performing, but who need to take stock and re-evaluate how they’re working from time to time. Either way, as always we’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts on what we’ve missed here. Please drop us a line and let us know.
Holy shit I just realised I think I may be a team director.
Does it pay better than a copywriter?
Jacks of all trades must be masters of some.
Lots of great stuff here, thanks.
Thanks Ben. Love that expression. May steal it…
A nice steal… tho as a “Jack” I am intrigued by the idea that problems get solved. Seems like a word we should rethink – we rarely ‘solve’ – we head in a direction (as you suggest) and we arrive somewhere. Somewhere is either interesting or dull. All of which fits rather nicely with the idea of roadmaps over gant charts. Every project is a roadtrip. x
Roadtrip has made me smile on a very rainy Monday morning. Like the sense of having a destination with discovery built-in along the way. Something else to steal.. cheers Tom.
Love all seven points
There’s many things we might end up doing at work, depending on the client, but there should be one thing we’ve been hired for, what we’re considered to be thought-leaders and thought-drivers for (or groomed to get there)
And the thing is, you can — should be a generalist — I think I am, but there needs to be something unique that the organization can tap into with you, specifically. And that may not always be something you can account for in a team structure template.
When I’m hiring strategists today, I rarely look at anyone who would fit into one. I look for people with “a take” / “an approach”. What’s important is that they come from an interesting place, and have the ability to take understanding and ideas to interesting places.
The rest, one might say, is process.
Nice. It’s interesting that your post begins as an evaluation of individual skill sets and concludes with the challenge of team workflow.
What I’ve learned from these “T” discussions is the top horizontal bar could be rephrases “listening” and the vertical element as “doing.” Collaboration or broad skill sets in the top of the T require looking beyond our area of native specialty. While not everyone has that aptitude, teams can be structured in ways that require everyone to play at the top of the T.
One tactic I use is simply to build a project plan with an outline of the sequence of decisions that must be made to achieve the final answer/deliverable/whatever. If everyone can see the big picture of all the inputs and how they are related, they are more likely to contribute tangibly to the overall solution. They will input their area of expertise at the appropriate time in the solution development, and be more likely to listen to others when they know it is time for others to play position. Basic, but it works.
Thanks for the provocation.
Hi Ben, thanks for your comment. Completely with you on the project plan. Writ large and made as visible as possible. I will definitely share the approach we’ve been using in another post soon. Hopefully also provocative (in a good way).
I also take your point about specialism vs team workflow – I guess I found I couldn’t write usefully about one and not talk about the other (ie what we’ve learned about making it work in practice).
This is a good read on the usually banal topic of teamwork. Surprising how often we sit down to solve a problem with the wrong people. It does still leave the role of leadership: who decides whether the answer is a good one? Does that still need a generalist who can judge how it fits together, even if they can’t deliver the specialist pieces?
Hi Tom. Very good question.. I like Aditya’s point that T-shaped means we’re all generalists – we just need not to forget there’s a core skill/reason we’re there in the first place.
Who then is best placed to make the decision? We like to say “take decisions at the point of knowledge, not the point of authority” around here (stolen blatantly from our friends at McLaren). However, the reality is that most teams need a leader(s) to make major decisions. I wish that weren’t the case, but perhaps that’s a debate for another day.
PS Check out Pelle’s post here for an interesting pov on creative leadership, if you’ve not seen it: http://bbh-labs.com/creative-direction-vs-creative-selection
Mel,
All great points. What I’ve discovered is that when you put a group of generalists in a room almost all assume that their work is done in the meeting and there’s nothing more they need to do. Hence, making people accountable for specific tasks and giving them time to perform those tasks is essential.
Can you elaborate more on the team director role? Is that person usually the account person or can it be anyone who understands the task at hand and knows the people? Do you assign a team director based on the team selected to work on the project or do you have a team of team directors and see who will fit best with the already assembled team? It’s a very interesting concept and I’d love to know more about how it actually works in a real agency?
Hi Andreana,
I can tell you that in recent experience its great to assign a Project Lead as someone whose primary role is to identify micro goals and indicate the road to achieving them.
And that project lead can be any person in theory, but is usually one of the core productive senior people. So on one of my projects, a head of UX is the project lead and when she has that hat on she isn’t speaking about UX, but about getting to consensus, tracking where we have gone and where we have to go. But she isn’t necessarily the decision maker on ideas or wires for instance. that happens at the specialist level. On another project the lead is strategy on another (and many) its creative.
Food for thought
Matthew,
Thank you for answering my question. Very interesting.
Another question. Actually two:
1. Couldn’t we bring in project managers early in the process even before any decisions are made about what will be made? At the end of the day they get paid to keep everyone on task and on track, but usually that happens after some time has already been wasted in long meetings.
2. Who is responsible for assigning a Project Lead and how is it done?
to your first question:
I definitely agree. I think its imperative for project managers / producers (I call them the same thing) to be involved from the start. The way it happens at my place is they are the ones responsible for pricing and building the scope in tandem with the account exec. So where our Producer makes sure the team is on time and on budget, the account exec makes sure the client is also on time.
So though mel’s #6 is more about setting direction for ideation and such, we can never forget how critical it is to roadmap against hard dates, and be transparent about the reasons why with the team.
As for your second question: we assign whoever wants to do it (in theory) and in practice it can happen in discussion, or in resourcing (“do you want to be on this project, and lead it?”), but usually its a person stepping up to take it.
Hi Andreana
Thanks for your comment and question. Very happy to explain the role a little more. We actually no longer have account management at BBH in London, nor project management, for that matter (often called traffic in other agencies). Instead, Team Management has assumed responsibility for process and productivity. Each team has a Team Director (and Team Manager as required) assigned to it, they are a consistent part of a team, not a floating resource. I hope that helps to clarify.
Particularly agree with the point about collaboration not equalling consensus. Collaboration works best when skilled opinioned people with a clear point of view work together to create something they all love. Sadly all too often people assume it is about reconcilling those points of view in an amorphous mess that no one loves but that everyone can live with. I am trying to live by John Berger’s rule “the only rule in collaborations is that one should never strike deals and never compromise” John Berger bit.ly/g6rPzk
Sometimes the most blindingly obvious things need to be re-iterated. Glad you have done so here. For me, points 5,6 and 7 resonate the strongest. Writing, drawing, sculpting and introducing one’s-self helps prevent anchoring or status issues. A vision is critical at a starting point, (and even at a continuing point). And someone has to check their ego at the door and simultaneously give way of ownership in exchange for guidance, probably the toughest job.
My additional take goes back when I first heard of T-shaped people and how Ideo would bring in the fabricator from the metal shop along with the anthropologist and the brand expert. All of this speaks to having real solid and deep “I” ability in the room, especially as prototyping and “making as strategy” begins to play a far greater role in what we do. As strategists I think we often have too much of the horizontal ability due to our deep interest in absolutely everything, which means that we may need to excuse ourselves from the discussion a little more often unless we can find or assign ourselves a core role that makes a difference.
Very good point. Strategists make natural hybrids, maybe because they tend to be curious about everything… yet sometimes we just need to shut the hell up and let an expert speak or do.
Folks that can’t do strategize
1. I love you Mel
2. nothing to add right now, but I can tell you that if any of these steps are ignored or underestimated it breds confusion, and possible conflict as people dont feel like progress is being made.
This is a great post for that reason: to remember that the value you can extract from multidisciplinary teams requires a certain kind of process and environment.
And also, that it reminds participants in the conversation about T people that they gotta have something they are final port of call for aka a core role.
thanks! prescient timing on this post I say!
Thanks for your comment Matthew.
1. You’re way too kind
2. You’re spot on about breeding confusion – and there is nothing more likely to disable a team than confusion. Especially when we’re reacting at pace / in real time, which makes that confusion ten times worse. It’s also almost impossible to identify and correct mid-flow.
Thanks Mel, perhaps the best read of me this year—all true clichés.
Love this post. Edward Boches sent me and if Ben Kunz and Dan Weingrod are here I am in the right place.
I come from a background of projects involving sometimes tens of thousands of people working on the same project at once with multiple tiers of subcontractors (think NASA programs, Missile Defense, Advanced Automotive Development).
I don’t believe in Generalists aside from very big picture stuff. But Project Management Awesomeness is important for the team leaders. Concept Awesomeness is important for the Idea Generator/Leaders. And Specialist Awesomeness is needed to make the tasks of the project work on their own and together.
And your 7 points are on spot!
[...] Don’t Forget the “I” in “T”: On Recommitting to Specialism—Mel Exon, BBH Labs [...]
[...] Don’t Forget the “I” in “T”: On Recommitting to Specialism—Mel Exon, BBH Labs [...]
Agreed. There’s a need for specialism that is very real – and a looming shortage of some specialist skills IMO which will also be very real in the near future (if it’s not already). But I’m also a believer in the power of that horizontal bar. For me, as well as a grasp of a range of different skills and a desire to collaborate, this is about empathy – a very undervalued quality IMHO
Hi Neil
You’re absolutely right. I wrote this to redress the balance a little, not to undermine the fundamental importance of the horizontal bar. Also 100% with you on empathy – frankly a skill most of us need to develop more deeply, right there.
eh oop.
Really interesting subject area, and tricky too. As a few others on here may consider themselves, I’m a generalist, or “jack” as Tom puts it, or perhaps blacksmith or “smithy”, which is one for another day.
And I’ve spent ten years in businesses with people telling me I have to specialise. “You’ll never get anywhere unless you specialise” is what a lot of people say. They are usually specialists, because there’s way more specialists in companies than there are generalists.
I would find it hard to recommit to a specialism, because I don’t know what that would be.
But the key thing you draw out is it’s not just about the individual, it’s about a team…
Something I stole from the Creative Generalist blog; generalist are great at framing problems, specialists are great at solving them. You probably want generalists at the begining, and specialists at the end.
Putting specialists at the beginning means people are preloaded to define the problem in ways they know exactly how to solve.
Putting generalists at the end means you’ve got peopel who keep loading new angles, options, reframing things, making more work.
Which in traditional ad industry model is BAD… we want to finsh, deliver, move on.
In agile, design-thinkery, iterative land, that’s maybe better, as the generalist sees, learns, shifts, sees, learns, shifts.
But nobody is used to that yet, by and large, and it doesn’t fit the established model.
Anyway, maybe it’s not about T-Shaped people. It seems like a decade since John Grant wrote about T-Shaped people anyway.
Maybe it’s just about M-shaped teams.
And you just have to make them up of whoever you’ve got to hand.