Employee Development: to specialize or generalize?

Historically, the American education system, influenced heavily by John Dewey, has viewed a broader, more liberal educational footprint as the precursor to a well-educated society. To Dewey, education was life (not a preparation for life). Through education, students should have exposure and knowledge on a wide range of subjects in order to be good (as in effective) citizens. Dewey’s contribution to education continues to have an impact today. When a young person heads off to college for example, their liberal arts curriculum is intentionally broad in at least the first two years. It’s normal to have exposure to topics like Asian Political History, Demographics, Art of the Renaissance, or Gender Studies. To the student (and parents), it’s often frustrating to have to take courses that seem to be irrelevant to their major, but these seemingly disparate topics have the net effect of opening a young person’s mind to knowledge that was previously hidden from their worldview. 

This mindset has implications for employee development even today. As we think about the learning investment in employees, the question becomes Is it better to increase or improve an employee’s specialized knowledge or facilitate an employee’s broader organizational and industry knowledge? Because we’ve often been ambiguous about which path makes more sense, we are in effect, leaving this potential competitive edge to chance. 

Specialization. Specialization can be the bright and shiny object that throws us off the trail. Tiger Woods was hyper-focused on golf at age 2. Yo Yo Ma was hyper-focused on playing the cello at age 4. So there are certainly examples where specialization turned people into super-performers as adults. For organizations however, specialization has a dark side. Employees fixated on specialization can mean:  

• doing the same thing over and over, but gaining only incremental improvements,
• focusing too much on one discipline, but failing to see the connection to other    areas (the big picture), 
• becoming irrelevant when technology or society changes, and lastly, 
• identifying solely with the task the employee does best, thereby resisting change  with a vengeance. 

Generalization. On the other side of this dichotomy are those that have a broader range, with exposure to a wide variety of disciplines. David Epstein, in his 2019 book entitled Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, wrote that generalists are actually stronger than specialists in a variety of ways. 

Generalists think in terms of abstract concepts rather than the constraints of the standard explanation.  Generalized knowledge from working (for example), at several organizations helps the generalist to understand that there are often several ways of doing things, not just one and only one. Long-term employees that have rotated or transferred into several departments are also positioned to make social and cognitive connections about the way the organization works, the many subcultures within the organization, and understand unique and different perspectives, all of which could be accurate at the same time. 

The idea of ‘one way’ just doesn’t resonate with the generalist because they know better. Generalists are not stuck in a traditional way of thinking. They are not threatened by those who challenge the status quo with new ideas. 

When HR and L&D professionals think about developing employees, it is usually left to a conversation between the manager and the employee, focused on short-term development at the expense of broader (organizational) opportunities. I have seldom been in an organization where there was a strategic conversation about the overall purpose of learning and development. L&D was more about the illusion of something, -a gift from the organization. 

Generalization trumps Specialization. This HR/L&D/OD philosophical blindside to generalization and employee learning has downstream consequences. It means:

• we still have a long way to go before we see learning as a strategic differentiator
• we foster a fixed mindset in our employees (this is what I do, what I was meant to do)
• we facilitate a cultural resistance to change, and
• we play into those who would criticize the investment in employee development for adding little, if any value.