When to Hire a Generalist: 4 Situations that Break the Rules

There’s no shortage of leadership gurus who talk about the importance of hiring people with specialized skills and expertise. “Specialists over generalists” was a common refrain at my former employer, the renowned leadership advisory firm ghSMART. Peter Drucker has written extensively about the value of hiring in specialists with real expertise.

Having worked with hundreds of high growth companies, large and small, I agree…kind of. 

In most situations, specialists get the job done more quickly/effectively, enjoy doing it more (it’s their specialty after all), and therefore are less risky in terms of attrition. And in highly competitive markets, you often need real experts/thought leaders to build sustainable competitive advantage—an 80% job just won't cut it.

But there are exceptions—situations where I've found that high-performing, all-around “athletes” tend to be the right call. Here are 4 that come to mind:

(1) Early hires at seed-stage startups. Not every hire in a zero-to-one startup should be an all-around athlete, but some probably should be. In the early days, pivots are constant. The set of tasks to be done is broad and ever-changing. Generalists can be quickly redeployed to handle a wide variety of needs/challenges, keeping the team lean and agile in the early days.

(2) Standing up new functions. You need a data science function to handle enormous data sets, but you don’t know exactly what tools/technologies it will need? It may not make sense to hire that super-narrow Hadoop expert just yet. Consider a generalist data scientist who can wrap their arms around a variety of related problems and help you figure out what kind of specialist(s) you should hire next.

(3) BizOps teams (at least some of them). I’ve worked with a handful of high growth tech companies who have BizOps teams full of superstar generalists, most notably at Palantir. This works, because they are like “stem cells,” plugging into different parts of the org to fix problems and unblock growth. A specialist may be able to do one of these jobs better than a generalist, but once the job is done, they are far more difficult to redeploy on the next assignment. If you need dedicated BizOps capacity, consider having a set of highly adaptable/deployable generalists.

(4) CEOs (at least some of them). This one may sound like heresy to my colleagues in the executive assessment world. But at the end of the day, there’s a reason they call it “General Management.” If you know your strategy hinges 100% on driving a mid-market GTM strategy in cybersecurity, sure, hire the CEO who has built a career doing this. But if success hinges on excellence across a variety of domains, consider prioritizing breadth (and overall horsepower) over specialized expertise.

Closing thought: one of my favorite books of 2024 is Range by David Epstein. It’s an inspiring read and will definitely have you questioning the value of a world full of narrow experts. Give it a read! :)