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Specialized Roles Have Limited Organization Value
When staffing organizational needs, teams often look for tightly tailored fits for open roles. "We need a DevSecOps engineer who has used GitHub Actions and can set up our Make job to run in GitHub and deploy the result using a Google Cloud Run,” they say. This quickly leads to the following series of events:
Weeks spent sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding the role (costing tens of thousands of dollars in total effort)
A few weeks spent working on the narrow need for which the team member hired
Weeks spent trying to keep this team member busy with something somewhat adjacent to their skill set (often with limited success)
On larger teams, this series of events often plays out multiple times, lowering job satisfaction for all parties involved while creating budgetary stress. There must be a better way to increase organizational value, long-run fit, and the happiness of all involved parties.
Baseball is Illuminating a Path Forward
These same challenges impact many Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. MLB has high staffing costs and luxury tax penalties for overspending on a team’s total salary, similar to the budgetary constraints of a typical software project. Most teams feel the challenge of fielding a team resilient to annual outages (injury, family leave, rest) and underperformance.
A new trend is changing how teams navigate each season: fill your roster full of as many shortstops as possible. Shortstop is one of the most challenging positions to play in baseball. It requires intense athleticism and a potent mix of skills, including a strong throwing arm, smooth fielding skills, and excellent range. This mix of skills also means that shortstops are prime candidates to fill just about any other position on the field. They can slide over to second or third base with ease. They often ably fill in at any spot in the outfield and play first base with aplomb.
With the ability to move players around with little negative impact on the team’s defensive alignment, these teams are not only inherently more resilient to outages but also gain the ability to optimize how they field a team on any given day. They can afford to match up more creatively against their opponents to improve their chances of victory.
Critically, this does not mean that teams only include shortstops on their roster. Shortstop is a demanding position that has limited supply. There are also many talented specialists on every MLB roster. Some positions, such as pitcher and catcher, are so specialized that they can only be performed by an expert (outside of emergencies). Moving players around doesn’t always result in the same top-line skills at a specific position. For instance, a shortstop may not be as good at outfield as your regular outfielder. However, having more multi-faceted players on the team dramatically improves fungibility and options when constructing a daily lineup.
Specializing Generalists are the Ultimate Fungible Resource
Software delivery organizations can gain the same benefits as MLB teams that leverage shortstops by filling their organizational charts with specializing generalists (also referred to as someone with “T-shaped skills”). With a strong population of flexible resources complementing organizational specialists that are great long-run fits, staffing project needs becomes less challenging. Filling one-off needs with someone who can get the job done even if they aren’t operating in their core skill improves organizational flexibility. This also reduces the challenges of fitting extreme, short-run skill sets into the long-run view of your organization.
Our next post will delve into finding and developing specializing generalists.
Similar Analogies
If you are not a “sports ball” fan or prefer a different sport, there are lots of similar analogies to consider:
Attribution: Social media Petco Park image by Megan Ellis on Unsplash