Linear or Squiggly - What's the Best Route?

I first came across this construction when reading David Epstein’s wonderful Book Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. It appealed to me for a number of reasons, one of which was that my experiences in my first career of law were very much around the specialised, more linear route. I qualified at Magic Circle Firm Linklaters into the Corporate Department, and the focus at the time, particularly for the big City Firms, was to equip us hungry young lawyers with specialist knowledge as quickly as possible. Which is why I often found myself as part of a team of sometimes six to seven lawyers, just on our side of the table; all of us representing just one client, but each covering different areas of speciality.

Instinctively I wasn’t comfortable with this route, and so moved to a smaller London Firm a year after qualifying, where I knew I’d be able to get broader experience and build up a more generalist legal skill-set. Even if this did mean that I sometimes found myself on my own against a team of lawyers on the other side. The boot was truly on the other foot!

As I moved into my second career, re-connecting with my sporting roots, and as I started to experience sport more generally through the eyes of a parent, I had the opportunity to reflect on this specialist v generalist conundrum, and particularly its impact on development and long-term success. I always felt instinctively that breadth was important for my children’s experiences of sport when they were younger, for a whole host of reasons including: maintaining interest; enjoyment; lower risk of injury; each sport benefiting the others; and a greater number of opportunities. As I went on to discover, the research overwhelmingly backed this up.

Epstein’s book Range therefore was a particularly interesting read for me. Epstein starts the book with a comparison between Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, and their differing journeys to the pinnacle of their sports – Woods a specialised, linear one from a very young age (aged two he went on national television to show his skills, and entering his first tournament, won the ten-and-under division!). Federer taking a more wandering route, dabbling in skiing, wrestling, swimming, and skateboarding, and playing more formally basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, badminton and soccer.

Linking it to life and work more generally, Epstein notes that he started this work by finding a study that showed that early career specialists jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that late specialisers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities.  He then found a raft of studies that showed how technological inventors increased their creative impact by accumulating experience in different domains, compared to peers who drilled more deeply into one; they actually benefited by proactively sacrificing a modicum of depth for breadth as their careers progressed. There was a nearly identical finding in a study for artistic creators. Linked to this was work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even whilst becoming more confident. “if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.” And he was stunned when cognitive psychologists led him to an enormous body of work demonstrating that learning is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress.

One other story from the book that has always stayed with me is that of the artist Vincent Van Gogh. Mapping out his ‘career’ in detail, which in fact was more a series of jobs he didn’t stick at, jobs he wasn’t very good at, and jobs he was gently ‘removed’ from, Epstein highlights that if Van Gogh had died at 34 rather than 37, before his intense period of painting in his finally decided-upon unique style, he might not even have merited a historical footnote.

Epstein’s book partly inspired Chapter Eleven of my book, Staying the Distance, where I looked at How To Develop Your People in a Long Term Way. In the Chapter I feature the rather wonderful story of the Ostersund FK football squad, and their incredible rise from the fourth tier of Swedish football through to the EUFA Europa League in just seven years, under the guidance of our very own Graham Potter. Whilst as ever there was much behind this success, money was not one of them (they didn’t have much) but their innovative Culture Academy certainly was. This involved the players being pushed out of their comfort zones in all sorts of ways, including even a rendition of Swan Lake to their local community! As Club Secretary Lasse Landin shared in 2019, talking about putting the players in positions that were entirely new (and uncomfortable) for them: ‘At first, all new players and staff are apprehensive of what we do because it’s a new experience for them. It’s about doing things you’re not used to doing. No other club has done this type of thing before, so everyone starts off like a little child - they have to learn to crawl first, then walk, then finally perform.’ (Landin went on to say how these experiences improved performances on the pitch over time). This focus on a broader skill-set seems to have struck a chord, and it’s one of the areas of the book that I am most frequently asked to talk about, not least I think because of the competitive advantages organisations can see this might give them.

A five-year anniversary edition of Epstein’s Range has just come out in the UK. Epstein sent out an excerpt from the new Foreword in an email to his subscribers, and I think it bears sharing. In it he quotes a section of the 2023 Report from the Company O C Tanner – which helps businesses improve workplace morale – and puts out a ‘Global Culture Report’ each year.

“The post-pandemic workplace,” it reads, “is fluid, unsure, and ideal for workers with a breadth of knowledge and skills.” The report features stats about the influence of generalists in leadership and innovation, as well as anecdotes from companies around the world. It quotes a senior recruiter at Google explaining: “If you just hire someone to do one specific job, but then our company needs change, we need to rest assured that the person is going to find something else to do at Google. That comes back to hiring smart generalists.” 

Esptein goes on to say that the less inspiring part of the report is this conclusion: “Despite the demand for generalists, most feel unsupported….Some generalists feel it’s easier to see the goals and accomplishments of specialists, because their roles are more defined and specific.” Epstein ventures to guess that “some” is an understatement. And yet, Epstein says, the report notes that a 10-year study of 17,000 executives found that more than 90 percent of CEOs had broad management experience. Future CEOs in the study had often made lateral, or even what looked like backward career moves — going from a large, prestigious company to a small, unknown one, or even just to a smaller division within a company — which allowed them to develop a more diverse skill set than their peers. 

In other words as Epstein says: career zig-zaggers are more likely to feel unappreciated while on the path to developing a broad skill set, but also more likely (eventually) to ascend to the highest echelon in their work. This gets at a fundamental conundrum at the heart of his book: optimizing for the short-term feels safe, but often undermines development in the long-term.

There’s another really interesting point Epstein makes in this new Foreword about ‘hot streaks’ generally coming off the back of a period of broader exploration which very much backs up the argument for strategic meandering!

In these volatile, fast-paced and ever-changing times, I think there is an increased argument for a broader skill set, or at the least, employing people who are willing to learn, adapt, try new things, and work outside of their comfort zones. It reminds me of that wonderful quote from Alvin Toffler: ‘The illiterate of the 21st Century are not those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and re-learn.’

So what are you doing in your organisation to support this generalist skill-set? And could you be doing more?

For more on this or any aspect of leadership and performance, with a healthy dose of mindset, sport, and I hope usefulness thrown in, do feel free to browse through all the articles in the Huddle, or get in touch with me directly on catherine@sportandbeyond.co.uk. To order a copy of my book - Staying the Distance: The Lessons From Sport That Business Leaders Have Been Missing – click here . And to order the new edition of Range, click here