Isn’t it funny how some terms enter the collective vocabulary overnight? A term so intriguing and so vague that has done just this is “generalist”. You have a generalist and its antithesis a specialist – right? Let’s find out from someone who knows better than most.

Milly Tamati recalls two things about the first time she heard the term “generalist”. The first is that people were talking about it in a negative way – as if it were a bad thing. Secondly, a thousand light bulbs went off in her head. She felt drawn to the concept and couldn’t understand why companies weren’t screaming out for this skillset. She has “accidentally” made it her mission to change that.

Tamati is the founder of Generalist World. She describes it as the community she wished existed for her a decade ago. With her previous role being director of miscellaneous, she found herself on a job hunt in 2022. Every community she found was specialised and “verticalised”, so she never really felt like they fitted her wide skillset.  

“I could fit in them. I could put on my product hat,” she recalls. “Or my growth hat. Or my community hat. But I wanted to put all my hats on and to be seen for all of the skills I bring.”

Having felt like she was the only person with this problem, Tamati started speaking to others who began to voice similar frustrations and challenges. What resulted was a collection of people who could “figure this stuff out together”. Today, it’s grown into a community of almost 90,000 members, running workshops, networking events and more.

What is a generalist?

“A generalist is someone with range, that’s how I like to put the stake in the ground,” says Tamati. It’s someone who has a broad range of knowledge, skills and experiences across various subjects. They are adaptable and great at problem-solving. Other generalist characteristics she has observed are that they often pivot throughout their career, they are future-focused, empathetic and quick to spot patterns.

“I think the generalist advantage is that you do have this broad experience, which means you have these different perspectives,” she says. “You’ve been in different seats, you’ve seen things from different sides and so if there’s a problem, a person who has really deep experience doesn’t actually see the solution because they’re so close to the problem.”

As the Generalist World community has evolved, she has begun to notice that specialists can often be generalists. She describes a demographic of people within the community that have PhDs. On paper, they should be a deep specialist. However, despite having an innate interest in one particular thing, they are open to pivoting and reinventing themselves.

“That used to be like a nice-to-have, but now it’s becoming essential,” she says. “Everything is moving so fast, particularly with technological change, so a generalist is an approach to the world and a career.”  

The irony of the negativity towards generalists is that if you’re running a scaling company, you have to be a generalist. You have to be able to put on different hats and know things well enough either to do them yourself or delegate and get someone else to do them. As a company grows, it’s natural to build out silos and specialities seemingly for efficiency but a generalist keeps that start-up ethos alive.

There may be generalists within your company that you may not even realise are there. To unlock their potential, you need to acknowledge their abilities. “Before Generalist World,” says Tamati, “I was starting the job search and looking through these job descriptions and imagining what my days would be like. I found it super depressing. It’s very restrictive and limiting. Some people love that and that’s fantastic but I guarantee that within your organisations, there are going to be people who don’t fit into a box.”

Chief of staff is an example of a generalist position, due to the breadth of functions and domains they will look at across the business. Another generalist position that is breaking through is XIR – or Expert in Residence. It has been popularised by the US fintech unicorn Brex.

“It basically merges sales growth, content and community,” says Tamati. “My bet is that’s going to be enormous. Marketing is getting expensive, the cost of acquisition is going up and it is getting harder to reach the people that you want to reach. Companies want to build a community but they don’t know how so you end up having a ‘cricket’ community where no one is really engaging. So, an XIR takes this approach of blending different intersections – in this case, community, content growth and marketing – and brings people together, letting them flex across those different intersections. That’s how they do their best work.”

How do I know if a generalist is right for my business?

Tamati says setting out with no parameters or measurable outcomes is a lose-lose situation for the business and generalist. So instead, ask what needs to be fixed in the business.

She says: “Maybe you need an operational generalist, which could be someone like a chief operating officer. Maybe you need more like a chief of staff who can offer more strategic support and can even have a bit of a finance background. Maybe you need someone like an XIR. There’s not a one-size-fits-all answer.”

Focus on the problem and what this person could unlock to take the business to the next level. You can then create a role which has clear deliverables and clear outcomes. “However, include flexibility and the open-mindedness to say that this role is not going to be traditional,” she says. “We are going to have to work with this person and have regular check-ins and milestones to make sure they’re on track. But ultimately there is going to need to be that trust because this is a different way of working.”

How do you get a generalist involved in your business? Tamati says for now, you can focus on recruiting for the roles mentioned above: COO, XIR, chief of staff etc. However, she predicts a total shake-up of the hiring landscape in the next decade, going so far as to say that we will be horrified at the miserable process we put people through.

“I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like,” she says, “but my hunch is that we’re going to be moving towards roles that can be a bit more fluid. Essentially, where you meet a person, you understand their strengths and create a role around them.”

She finishes with a tip for leaders and hiring managers: some of the happiest generalists you will find are ones already in your company. “They are high performers but they’re feeling stuck, stagnant and they’re feeling crushed by this rigid structure,” she says. “Create a role for them. You will get so much loyalty from that employee for not seeing them as just another number.”