Earning to right to learn – The T-shaped leader
Samuel Spencer
CEO & CISO @ Aristotle Metadata | Technical leader innovating enterprise & public sector data strategy | MBA(Executive)
As a manager and more so as an executive you are presented with challenges and decisions across every field in business – from finance, legal, HR, facilities management, technology, product development or marketing. As your career grows and you climb in rank what you see and are responsible for across the business grows.
The principle of a T-shaped leader is a good framework for understanding when you are ready to take on this responsibility, and what to do when you get there.
If you could rank your skills out of 10 for a variety of the skills required across a business, such as finance, legal, strategy, marketing, technology or any other field you can think of, you will probably find that there are some you will rank quite highly in and some you will sit lower on. This is not an uncommon result, and quite frankly we cannot all be experts in every field.
If you then put this on a graph, with 0 at the top and 10 at the bottom, you would see a shape like a large T. For example, if you mapped my skills in different disciplines, you would see a large spike against technology compared to other areas.
Your relative strength in one area, gives you the depth of knowledge to address a particular skill set for the organisation. While you may not have complete knowledge or skill in every domain, your area of strength provides you with a level of expertise from which your leadership stems. This is critical, because at a senior executive level where positions become political, your domain expertise gives you credibility both at the senior level, and also over the domain to which you are responsible. For example, while you may not have the knowledge to lead a legal team, an extensive background in marketing will give you the support of that area as a leader in the organisation.
This also provides some professional career development guidance, because if you move to leadership too quickly without strengthening this stem, you may not have the depth of expertise to build a network that will support your leadership in the organisation.
At a CEO and board level, the T-shaped leader model, also provides good guidance on how to compose executive teams. Ideally, each person on the board or senior executive team should bring their own expertise across a range of domains. A lack of diversity of experience will lead to blind spots in decision making and increase risk in decision making.
For example, as a CEO with a background in software engineering, when founding the company I saw my own blind spots in marketing and finance, and sought to build a founding team that complemented this gap. Had the board been comprised only of other software engineers, there may not have been the level market awareness to support growth, nor the financial maturity to ensure long term success.
This even holds some non-conventional settings, where you might consider the board for a hospital – in this case, you will often find the senior team will be comprised of people with traditional business backgrounds such as finance, legal or risk fields, but will also include senior medical and nursing staff to ensure that the skills of the business of healthcare are appropriately represented at the executive level.
Regardless of the field you are in, your t-shape becomes a key foundation that demonstrates your unique capabilities and specialist skillset to set you apart from your peers and builds credibility within your team. So if it feels like your “leg” isn’t long enough, keep building your specialisation, and if you feel like your “top” is broad enough start looking for new areas to expand your horizons.
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