Thursday, August 5, 2021

Generalist

Continuous learning and self-development are the foundation to become invaluable generalists with multi-core competencies.

We live in the world with abundant knowledge, rapid change, and the very characteristics of hyper-connectivity and interdependence. Generalists are in demand who can understand the big picture, with cross disciplinary knowledge, enriched experience, and versatile talent.





A generalist usually has a specialism, and a specialized generalist has “T-shaped” skills: People have natural talent and they start out broad and narrow. They are interested in different subjects, and they've gotten experienced in a specific area based upon where they work and the opportunities presented. As they progress through their career, they start to become T-shaped-established themselves as having a very strong reputation, in particular, topic area. Generalists are more interested in exploring related subjects and continue to explore interdisciplinary knowledge and integrate their “T-shaped” skills into differentiated professional competencies.

Strategic leaders and professionals are specialized generalists who present hybrid talent and versatile leadership capability: To be a good generalist, you will need quite some knowledge of quite some fields, focus on how the information-based insight can be actively used in gaining the contextual understanding of issues, especially at the strategic level. The more complex the problem is, the more specialized generalists are in demand to broaden viewpoints and deepen the cross-domain knowledge for insightful problem-solving. The global executives are business generalists who demand more comprehensive T-shaped skills in strategic thinking, cultural intelligence, empathy, relationship building, persuasiveness, crisis management and public relations, etc.

Continuous learning and self-development are the foundation to become invaluable generalists with multi-core competencies: Organizations become hyper-connected and interdependent, problems are intriguing with many puzzle pieces, continuously expanding the knowledge horizon becomes more strategic and tactical for business professionals to sharpen nonlinear skills and build transferable capabilities. The broader we can oversee, the deeper we can perceive, the more dots we can connect to generate fresh ideas and create new knowledge. In this regard, generalists are not so general, they are unique, influential and build a reputation as an expert.

We are all on the journey to the growth cycle of self-awareness, self-development, self-actualization. Would you prefer to be a specialized generalist or a generalized specialist? Some simply have a greater recognition of being on that road. By having an active learning and thinking cycle, over time, we become more conscious about ourselves, explore our own path to learn, filter knowledge, sharpen a set of skills and build our professional competencies.

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