Has your education and your work channelled you to become more and more specialised: knowing more and more about less and less? Or are you more of a generalist, adapting your skills to many different jobs? Perhaps you have already moved to different work roles so many times that you are a great adaptor?
The generalist plumber, one who has worked across a variety of industries gives great value to society. I am thinking, for example, of plumbers who have been employed not only in big construction projects (roads, or high-rise office blocks), but also in services for the home and the office (for central heating boilers, or air conditioners). Such generalist plumbers are outstanding contributors to everyone’s well-being in both winter and in summer.
This is not to decry the specialist plumber. Quite the reverse. If your central heating is on the blink in your home, you are probably rather glad when you call out an emergency plumber to find that the one who turns up is a knowledgeably specialist in boilers. Such plumbers are very often delighted to talk you through your problem, how to solve it and, along with a cup of coffee, regale you with their life stories in boiler repairs.
In 1776 Adam Smith’s two volumes described how the division of labour, which is a form of specialisation, could spur economic progress. Over the years, work has been broken into ever smaller tasks, performed by ever more specialised workers who are adjuncts to the production line. The factory system has put men and women into mechanised lines all over the world, where each person on the line does one small part of the whole job: whether it is producing cars (car-maker Ford being the first really big example of production line manufacturing) or baking and icing cakes.
Production lines continue, though with a lot more mechanisation built in. In the UK there is a weekly television programme called “Inside the Factory”. Viewers are taken to different factories in the UK and even Europe, where they can see that the production line still continues. Men and women are on conveyor belts making small, often very simple, physical contributions to the progress of the product.
In his Forbes article of 2012* Josh Bersin presents his case that the days of “great general managers” are over. His point is that successful leaders are now “great engineers, scientists and sales people”.
He then, however, changes tack. After his argument that leaders need to be highly skilled in their specialism, with lots of practical experience in depth, he then switches direction and argues that, to be an effective senior leader, (the emphasis on senior) you also need to become an expert in leadership. Well, what a surprise!
I agree. Leadership is a difficult skill - a specialism in its own right, seldom understood.
Most businesses, unfortunately, do not take preparation for leadership seriously. Men and women are usually promoted to become senior managers on the basis of their success in their specialist skills as they climbed the corporate ladder. They are not usually offered leadership training to lift them into their new senior role. Little additional on-the-job support is given with promotion.
Of course there are exceptions.
And so it goes on. Usually the higher you rise, the less training and development. Of course an aspiring leader looks for a good mentor, but this might only result in repetition of the mentor’s mistakes - unless your mentor can be honest, deeply honest, about their failings.
Everyone learns from mistakes - their own and other peoples. Mistakes are possibly the most valuable vehicle for on the job learning. Do you keep any kind of diary of your working life? A journal of your ideas? Even a brief weekly summary in your mobile of reflections on things that have gone wrong, as well as things that have gone well. While the latter is heart-warming and encouraging, it is probably the least useful for learning. Reviewing mistakes can be the path to great leadership one day.
If you have a mentor, especially in your immediate boss, you are lucky indeed. Such a person gives you time to reflect on your experiences and offer advice. Whatever your boss’s short-comings, whatever your own, a partnership in learning between you both is a bonus for you both to treasure. And when you are the senior one, surely it is good practice to build mutual learning into every working relationship.
Effective Intelligence shows that there are three core questions everyone can ask themselves when reviewing their failures:
“Was my mistake due to:
a) Failing to look beyond the more obvious options?
b) Failing to gather adequate information to inform each of the options?
c) Failing to gather together the options with the information to judge which way forward is the best of the bunch?”
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