Should you specialize or generalize your management career?

To use a cricketing metaphor, a good manager is like an all-rounder. All-rounders also have a certain tilt toward batting or bowling and include skillsets like fielding and what is in general called game sense i.e. understanding and acting not only for the moment but also how best to use their own or their colleague's talents to mould the game to their team (organization's) advantage. Thus a good manager has to have an above-average understanding of their talents and limitations and use it for their organization and their own well-being.

I am grateful that I have a bachelors degree in Security Management. While my tenure in the Security Industry was concluded in 2021, many concepts studied were applied throughout my HR Tenure. Particularly, the components of understanding behavior, knowing when a threat is likely and components of understanding varying personalities. I sometimes find myself thinking the cheesy phrase "Wow, good thing I attended that class" when I find a similarity.

Effective management is about how to organise your teams to get the work done effectively. How you do that is through motivating, inspiring and leading your people or yourself (if you are a high level individual contributor.) to understand what skills are necessary to deploy in the most efficient way to get the job completed to the highest possible standard.

Both General & Specialized approaches are complementary as 1) General is holistic - End to End view 2) Specialized is focussed view - Specific aspects eg Technical , Regulatory,Process level etc Both the approaches are value add to the decision making process It ,helps to identify and mitigates the associated risks and lays down a clear roadmap of What ,How, Who, by Whom and by when Knowledge , skills and application of expertise assures success and mitigates potential risks 👍 It is therefore important that you keep upgrading on skills on continuous basis to be future ready 👍

In my view, being able to continually add value - as a specialist or generalist is of prime importance. There could be situations demanding extremely high levels of skill application, for example, by a surgeon in an operating theatre. The same surgeon might need versatile management skills if they own, operate and manage a hospital. So the context of skill application determines the balance between being a specialist or a generalist.

Skills and expertise have a contextual relevance and finite lifespan. Being acutely aware about the need to keep learning, acquiring and sharpening new skills and competencies is key to transitioning to a new role. This also enables us to apply learning’s and experience from an earlier space and context to a new one.

The challenge in many organizations today is that they have flattened their layers over time, which has created a scarcity of opportunities for generalist to learn the requirements of a GM role. Typically an individual doesn't need to put all of the areas together until they get to the CEO role, making development of talent within an organization more difficult.