In Defense Of The Generalist
A number of years ago I was in a meeting with a new executive at the SaaS company I worked for who flatly stated, “I am interested in specialists, not generalists.” He may not have been talking directly to me in that room, but he might as well have been. As a Client Services Director, the statement was both alarming (in the job security sense) and even a little offensive since it was a fairly overt reference to the CS organization. My mind raced for a while with things like, “do I need to specialize in something, and if so, what?” to “what have I been doing my whole career?”
I have thought about this statement and sentiment a lot, never quite certain why it stuck in my craw. Was he right? Wrong? My logical side tells me that he didn’t mean what he said in terms of absolutes but was rather making a point. Another, also logical, side told me there was fallacy in this thinking. There are certainly instances where the bent toward specialists is unquestionable (like a NFL team, where all the players have distinct, discrete roles on the field), but it is never absolute even in that case. I don’t care if the nose tackle can bake a cake, but I might want to feel comfortable with my star running back being in front of a camera post-game. These are extremes, mind you, but to make a point.
As I’ve further reflected on the “specialist vs. generalist” topic, I have learned to stop worrying and love the job (Kubrick hat tip). Whether account management, CS, CX or whatever you call your client-facing teams, a generalist is an asset when done right. I can’t tell you how many status meetings and business reviews I have been in over the years, but I can tell you that it was rare to have all the various supporting players (Strategy, Analytics, Creative, Deliverability, Finance, Sales, etc.) in the room or on the phone with me during those meetings. If a client asks about developing trends in email creative, I better know how to speak to that topic (to an extent, at least). Same goes for recommendations around segmentation, inbox placement, lifecycle opportunities and digging a layer deeper into the story the metrics on the screen are telling us. And I haven’t even mentioned that the core responsibility of CS is building and managing relationships, escalations, proactive and reactive support and being able to read a room and adjust in real-time.
This comes back to the “jack of all trades, master of none” expression that I recall when thinking about the role of CS within organizations. There’s not just room but also a need for an optimal blend of generalists and specialists to truly make a company hum. You do not want me to draft legal documents and contracts (let’s leave that to, well, Legal and Contracts), but you also don’t want your SysAdmin to be on the other end of the phone when a client is questioning whether their post-purchase messaging cadence is optimized for best-in-class customer experience.
A truly great organization ensures that CS regularly receives input from other areas to continually learn from specialists and put those learnings to use when interacting with clients. In turn, client-facing teams need to ensure that specialists are aware of what is being asked of CS, as they are on the front lines.
To summarize, there is no real, hard answer to what mix of specialists and generalists makes a company successful. To dismiss one type of skillset in favor of another diminishes the reality that a broad range of abilities are required to run a business, even if some of those abilities are a little harder to encapsulate in three words. So, fellow generalists, hold your heads up high and let’s continue to do what we do, which is sometimes a little bit of everything.
Guest author – Kevin Furlong
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