The calling of a generalist
How to use this specific group of managers right
Read Time: 4.10 Minutes
"Generalists build, experts scale." - Andrew Gazdecki
This is a common but famous saying about the evergreen discussion about hiring all-rounder vs topic specialists for a certain position.
But when actually is it better to get a generalist to do the job, instead for a specialist?
Especially if you are starting out with an idea from scratch, you need people who can build reliable things.
At this early stage, there may be jobs-to-be-done which suit specialists, but most of the time if you are facing uncertainty, you need people who can bring in a broad set of skills then.
So many successful startups teams of course have co-founders as specialists, but always in combination with generalists in terms of business and technical development.
If you try to find something in a highly specialized market with the need of domain expertise, you need a specialist who understands the hard pains about that market.
Others are easy to understand markets. There are many examples, where a team of drop outs and noobs won against the experienced competition just by thinking of ideas which are uncommon in that field.
This is the beauty of a generalist.
Especially in the beginning you need people who can think creative and in new ways outside of the box.
Folks which can build things because they are not prone to perfectionism and maintaining the status quo.
Also generalists are usually better to connect different dots in uncommon ways, which can boost innovation and effectiveness against their competitors.
And just building is not enough. Because you have to sell the product as well.
And a main trait of a great generalist is to understand a range of different topics and boil them down so prospects can understand them easily.
A core necessity to build a great road to commercialization and success.
But generalists are also important in later stages, to identify gaps within the business to push new ways of growth.
So to summarize where you should use generalist, I would come up with the following:
Use a generalist for a part of your business if just a few things or nothing is built there.
Because this is the sweet spot for them.
So the generalist can build or implement the 20% of ideas and frameworks which drive 80% of the success.
To scale the rest of the 20%, which is probably needed to get big market shares you use specialists.
In already bigger companies, use the generalists to find new growth ideas to make the business faster, cheaper or just better.
So remind yourself if you make a new hire, do I need a specialist or a generalist. This alone will make your business driving into a great future.
PS One learning from my career, especially a bigger more mature company should be aware not having too many generalists.
Because some good ones bring in enough ideas for the specialists to work on and you can't fund every idea anyway.
-End-
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