This is a quick productivity tip for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the over-abundance of information and obligations. Fold the towels first. I first developed this metaphor when I figured out how to “get around to” folding the laundry for my family of four. There was a big intimidating pile of laundry that I didn’t want to start working on. So, I just walked up to the pile and pulled out all of the towels, folded them all, and put them away in about five minutes. I came back to the pile two hours later, and it was about half as big as the last time I looked at it. There, not so intimidating. Let’s finish the rest of this work.
Similarly, I was able to apply this metaphor to large volumes of errors in spreadsheets full of workforce data. You see, there is a high likelihood that if you look at all of the problems you need to solve, there is typically one big problem that can be solved really quickly. Think of this as a strike-attack against the intimidation factor. Just wrap up one big problem then step away from your desk for an hour or for the day. Come back to your list of woes, and the remaining work should seem far easier. It works with laundry. It works with big data. And, it could work for you.
Unsubscribe to your biggest spam provider, request a deadline extension on your most unreasonable task, ask for help with that thing that is beyond your ability, or send a courtesy note to that one person you’re worried that you might have offended. It doesn’t always work out this way, but when it does work, it’s incredibly empowering.
James Bond might not be an explosives expert. Photo “EP-08-M007” by Johan Oomen.
Have you ever thought you could defuse a bomb in 7.3 seconds? Have you ever wondered if you could undo handcuffs with a bobby pin and break out of an isolated cell, beating down a dozen well-armed men? Those are specialized skills developed by super spies who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of espionage. And they are also fabricated in the movies.
But back in reality, we are left to wonder what variety of super
skills can one person develop over a lifetime.
To explore what it takes to develop diverse skills, we start with the Wikipedia article about Jack of All Trades. There is an implied dispute about whether it’s good to be a jack of all trades, as people forget the latter part to the expression which delivers the insult, “jack of all trades, master of none.” Interestingly, in Japanese, the expression is “many talents is no talent.” In Russian, one expression is “specialist in wide range” which can be a compliment or an insult depending on the level of irony. In Dutch, the phrase is “12 trades, 13 accidents.” It’s a fun read if you like insults.
But that’s just folklore. Maybe
we should seek some actual evidence on this topic?
Elite Athletes Provide the Data About Specialization
There is a custom that the title of “World’s Greatest Athlete” goes to the reigning gold-medal champion of the decathlon. Decathlon involves 10 track-and-field activities with varied measurements such as sprint-time and throwing distance. They can’t add raw scores, so decathlon has a points system that measures excellence and gives equal weight to each activity.
Decathlon points provide an opportunity to
compare the performance of decathlete generalists
to the gold-medal specialists in each
activity.
Usain Bolt posted the world record in the 100-metre dash – at 9.58 seconds – for which he would be assigned 1,202 decathlon points. The “decathlon best” or best performance by a decathlete is for Damian Warner who did that run in 10.15 seconds, for which he was assigned 1,059 points. Bolt’s performance is six per cent better than Damian Warner’s. But Warner also holds the decathlon best for 110m hurdles and won Olympic bronze for hurdles in 2016. Given the acceleration and deceleration required for hurdles, there is a prevailing view that Bolt could not win a medal at hurdles.
Would you rather be the best in the world
at sprinting, or the best of the generalists
in multiple sports?
Under the current decathlon scoring system, a 10-person team of world-record holders of each sport could get 12,568 points combined, which is 16% stronger than the 10-person team made of decathlon bests. In elite sports, generalists function at 84% of the effectiveness of specialists. Specialists are better if exactly one skill is needed. If you have the option of creating a team, a rag-tag band of specialist weirdos might give you that 16% bump you desperately need. The drama is in the exceptional teamwork.
Single-person efforts requiring many skills are best suited for a generalist. Otherwise, a diverse team of specialists will tend to outperform.
But teams are not allowed in the decathlon. For single-person efforts demanding many skills you are better-off assigning a generalist like Damian Warner. Movie series like Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Jason Bourne are built around the idea that one person has all of those special skills that are needed to save the day, if not the world. But there’s something off about those movies. The hero’s sidekick is stereotyped as a less-capable younger woman who might become sexually available in the next two hours. That might not be a viable model for a respectful workplace, career navigation, and statutory compliance.
Mathematics
in the Post-Soviet Era
But back to the math. In an article in the Harvard Business Review researchers looked at changes in the research performance of mathematicians between 1980 and 2000. The Soviet Union, which had exceptional mathematicians, had a political collapse in the middle of this time period. Soviet mathematicians were set free and unleashed onto the world, disrupting mathematics globally. This change generated a natural experiment for research outcomes before and after the Soviet collapse. It was also possible to categorize mathematicians into those publishing in a single specialization (i.e. specialists) and those publishing in multiple fields (i.e. generalists).
Generalists are stronger in stable environments and specialists are stronger in environments of change
The research question was, what is the relative performance of specialists vs. generalists, in those fields that were stable relative to those that experienced disruption? In brief, they found that generalists are stronger in stable environments and specialists are stronger in environments of change. In those fields that were stable and evolving slowly, specialists under-perform generalists by 22%. The generalists were able to draw from diverse knowledge in the broader mathematics domain and accomplish more. In environments experiencing dramatic change, specialists outperform generalists by 83%. Those specialists were able to use the new knowledge that was at the frontier of their specialized field, pushing the boundaries far more.
These findings are specific to scientific creativity, not to be confused with other types of performance. We have no idea how mathematicians would lead a team of staff in a wet lab, in so far as mathematicians understand wet labs, or staff. Also, publications are elite performance. There are areas of good-enough performance where very basic knowledge is the most important thing that day, such as choosing to be rude to a potential assailant or getting someone who is suicidal to a therapist. There will always be a place in the world for some general knowledge.
How
to Allocate Your 10,000 Hours
Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers asserted that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master a particular skill. Gladwell simplified and popularized research by a man named K. Anders Eriksson, who had devoted much of his career to identifying how people become excellent. I read some of Eriksson’s work, and he didn’t actually proclaim a 10,000-hours magic number. It was an approximation. Eriksson was also describing what is required to become world-class at something done at the performance or tournament level, such as piano or chess.
You’re still pretty good at 5,000 hours and you can become even better by putting in 20,000 hours. For example, “Sully” Sullenberger had logged 20,000 hours of experience as a pilot before landing US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River and saving 155 lives in the process. (Thanks again Sully).
In Outliers, Gladwell noted that you only have enough time and learning-juice in one life to completely master two fields, for a total of 20,000 hours of deliberate practice. Those trying for a third kind of mastery run out of time. If you need be really good at more than two things, you can’t really aim to be the world’s best.
In my review of Emily Wapnick’s TED Talk, I summarized what you can do if you become restless in your career: Get into a new field every couple of years. Wapnick encourages those who have found their true calling to pursue that one thing. But for those who just can’t stay in one lane, there are ways to make a good life with what you have learned in multiple fields. There are unique, one-of-a-kind ways of advancing a combination of strengths.
Is it better to be a generalist or a specialist? The correct answer is to listen to yourself. You are the best at learning those things that are important to you. If the drive comes from inside, that is where you’ll find real motivation. And that motivation is the magic. If you look around, nobody is filming an action movie in which you have to establish yourself as the hero. You’re the only one who is always watching, so play to that audience. Do your best, and do it for yourself.
Sigrid practicing. Photo courtesy of Victor Valore.
This is a provocative article suggesting that it’s a good thing if an employer loses good people. To be clear, it’s not a good thing if an employer loses people who quit in disgust. Rather, if you are cultivating an engaged work environment in which everyone is encouraged to move onward and upward, then there is a price to pay. That price is that sometimes employees take advantage of external opportunities.
The author of the article is Drew Falkman from a firm called Modus Create, a technology services company with a soft spot for people development. He suggests that if you are losing good people it is a sign of an engaged work environment that attracts transparently ambitious people. Ambitious people will regard your workplace as an exceptional diving board into the pool of life. These can be good people to work with.
What do you think? Could your new employer brand be “diving boards are us”? The reason I ask, is that most people are only familiar with what competitive diving looks like momentsafter the diver has taken flight. But in the yearsprior to jumping the diver will have put much effort into developing courage, strength, and skill. Would you have a better workplace if a larger fraction of your employees were constantly building towards a visible and transparent goal? This spirit of growing and striving would be a great workplace culture for employee and employer alike.
This change of attitude on the employer’s part redefines performance excellence as an act of motion amidst a growth mindset, not a final accomplishment that presumes a fixed state. A workplace that is always striving performs better than one in which managers treat their best staff as collectibles.
Managers are notorious for trying to hold onto their top-performers and keep them at their current level. It’s so convenient for the manager, having excellent people who are prohibited from seeking new opportunities, locked into place just-so, delivering double the productivity. These people practically manage themselves, and the manager doesn’t need to spend extra hours training them or replacing them when they leave. If the manager can cultivate a team like this, perhaps the manager could get the biggest bonus.
But thinking about the whole institution and the economy in general, locking-down high performers is a recipe for stagnation. Perhaps the millennials were right? Maybe we should stop tolerating mediocrity and take for granted that generalized career ambition is part-and-parcel of performance and workplace engagement.
Employers are increasingly desperate for good hires into the senior ranks, and they’re blunt that they should always be free to bring in good people from other institutions. So, as a society, the “correct” opinion is that employers and employees alike should be moving everyone upward and onward. Therefore, career-growth exits are a good thing.
But it gets better.
Falkman also suggests that former employees are valuable to your organization as well. Former employees can speak highly of their work experience at your organization, improving the employer and customer brand. Supportive former employees can also become committed customers, suppliers, or investors. You can go the extra mile and organize this resource of boomerang employees, building current staff to eventually be part of an alumni pool who continue to grow, keep in touch with their peers, and make themselves available as boomerang employees.
Every now and then a contrary opinion comes along that you really need to take seriously. This is one of the good ones.
Hear no evil, speak no ev… Well you know the rest. Photo courtesy of Barbara Burton.
Do you swear in the workplace? I bet you try not to, at least not too often. But sometimes it slips out, and sometimes it just feels right. What do we know about the effect profanity has on our candor and our emotional closeness to others?
Years ago, I was driving my two-and-a-half year old daughter to childcare. It was cold out, and she was safely bucked into the car seat in the back. We lived on a major street, and I drove Westbound a half-mile to the nearest red light. There was a car in front of us with the right turn signal on, but they weren’t turning. My daughter said “Get out of the fawa way.” My head tilted, and I ran the phrase through my head. “Sweetie,” I asked, “what did you just say?”
“Get out of the fucking way,” she announced. I contained my laughter. This was her first F-bomb, and I had just enough self-control to realize I couldn’t teach her this was funny. I had to keep this social.
“Darling,” I asked, “where did you learn to talk like that?”
“Mummy talks that way every time she drives.” I gripped the wheel and tensed my facial muscles, using all of my life force to resist laughing. The light changed, and we continued driving. I turned into the ever-familiar cul-de-sac, and we stepped into the childcare to take off her shoes and jacket. I asked our childcare provider, Liliana, if I could borrow her phone. I said there was something I needed my wife to hear. Liliana said she knew what this was about. She was experienced.
I phoned my wife who was at home on maternity leave bonding with our second child. “Hello?” she answered. “Hi, your daughter just said something and I want you to hear it” I said. “Oh, this can’t be good” she cringed. I handed my daughter the phone and prompted her to “Say to mummy what you hear her say every time she drives.” She was wearing a cute little dress with pink flowers. She held the phone to her ear and yelled: “Fuckin’ mooove!”
What the Science Says About Profanity
What does swearing accomplish, really? Citing excerpts from Emma Byrne’s Swearing is Good For You a Wired article from January 2018 described several behavioral experiments involving swearing. In one, test subjects were asked to submerge their hands in ice water until they could not tolerate it any more. Some were asked to state neutral terms describing furniture, and others were asked to say a profanity.
“…when they were swearing, the intrepid volunteers could keep their hands in the water nearly 50 percent longer as when they used their non-cursing, table-based adjectives. Not only that, while they were swearing the volunteers’ heart rates went up and their perception of pain went down. In other words, the volunteers experienced less pain while swearing.”
Enduring physical pain was also associated with aggressive game-playing, and a willingness to harm others in a simulation in which they could choose to shock others. There’s a cross-over between insensitivity, enduring discomfort, mean-ness, and profanity. Hence our vocabulary is so much richer when driving.
Swearing also makes people physically stronger. Athletes can attest to this. In one study cited by the Guardian people swearing while operating an exercise bike saw their peak power increase by 28 watts. In another test, profanity increased grip strength by 2.1kg.
We can envision a profanity-rich working environment where people exert physical effort and occasionally get hurt. I imagine construction sites, the armed forces, and resource sectors as places where swearing might just be a normal coping mechanism for the physical environment. But what about an office environment?
Directly quoting Byrne’s book once again, an article from the Cut noted
“From the factory floor to the operating theatre, scientists have shown that teams who share a vulgar lexicon tend to work more effectively together, feel closer, and be more productive than those who don’t,” she writes. …A study published earlier this year backs up this and other research, suggesting swearing with colleagues can help create “a sense of belonging, mutual trust, group affiliation … and cohesion.”
Referencing other research, the article noted that profanity “…does still carry some social risk — it’s still a little bit taboo — so it imparts a feeling of trust in whomever you’re swearing with.”
Profanity Must Be Distributed Fairly
It’s interesting that we would trust people who swear more. On one hand, people are going against the current to express a more candid emotional state. On the other hand, people who break all the rules tend to swear more… and those people aren’t more trustworthy. There’s a good review of the literature by Scott McGreal in Psychology Today, in which he looks at three different studies about honesty and swearing. McGreal concludes the findings are mixed and sometimes contradictory.
A frustrating feature of this trust and solidarity is the double-standard on the use of profanity. In the article in the Cut, Byrne noted men and women used to both swear with abandon until the early 18th century. Then women were encouraged to adopt cleaner language. Men, by contrast retained the right to swear, using their power to express a full range of emotion. To this day, there is more judgement when women swear, compared to the men’s presumed freedom.
My question is, if there’s a workplace that has a mixture of men and women, how are people to experience equality and camaraderie without a level playing-field for profanity? If it’s male-stereotyped work involving physical strength and the endurance of pain and discomfort, do we disadvantage women in those workplaces by discouraging them from swearing? And what about female-dominated work in health care, child care, and food services that often require strength and the enduring of pain and discomfort? Those are customer-facing work environments, so some decorum is in order. Are we discouraging full workplace performance by requiring lady-like vocabularies?
Besides, who ever said that women should swear less in the first place?
One thing’s for certain, this opinion did not come from my wife.
Stuart Murray Speaks 