why you want many “i”’s in “team”: the "I"-shaped teammate
Design firm IDEO popularized the concept of a “T” shaped employee. This is someone who has a breadth of skills (the top of the “T”) and deep expertise in one particular skill (the vertical stem of the “T”). When you have a “T” shaped employee, you’ve eluded a challenging old either/or:
hiring a generalist, who can do lots of things but none of them at an expert level, or
hiring a specialist, who can do one thing exceptionally well but may not have the skill or will to do other things.
A T-shaped employee offers you breadth and depth: game for lots of things, great at a particular thing.
In recent years, I found myself disappointed with “T”-shaped teammates. They let me down and threatened the mission-first, hungry-for-challenges culture I wanted to build.
Most of my career so far has played out on relatively small and scrappy teams. Mission-driven, with few resources, hustling against improbable odds. Turnaround schools, long-shot campaigns, startups. I love an underdog.
On these kinds of teams, there’s always lots of unglamorous, granular stuff to do. Someone has to set up payroll. Someone has to take out the trash. Someone has to print off the birthday card tracker so we know everyone has signed Antonio’s bday card. Someone has to call all the customers whose order got messed up when the website crashed.
Stuff like this comes up. Shrewd teams can find a way to automate or eliminate many of these things over time but often you only have the chance to automate or eliminate it once it has happened in the first instance. In the first instance, a human being on your team is gonna have to do it. It’s probably a thing that isn’t in their job description. It might not be in anyone’s job description. (If you’re really a scrappy and hustling team, you’re going to get yourself into situations regularly where you’re doing something for the first time or surprising little interventions are needed - these are lagging indicators of your team’s energy and creativity.)
It sucks to work on a team where people avoid doing this stuff or have bad, beancounting attitudes about doing this stuff. It’s fun to work on a team where people attack this stuff with generosity and zest. (this is true in families, too, in my experience; my very young momma told me a long time ago that keeping score at home means you already lost).
To work on the second kind of team, where people chow down on the unappetizing stuff without complaint, it’s best to ask this of your people, set it as an expectation, right in the hiring process.
On my last couple teams, we did this by riffing on the IDEO concept. We told candidates that the only kind of people who enjoyed working with us were “I”-shaped teammates. Like the “T”-shaped teammate, the “I”-shaped person has a breadth of skills and a depth of specific expertise. The crucial thing an “I” shaped teammate adds is enthusiasm for work at the top and bottom of the I. Top of the I is the high-status, high-stakes work most organizations reserve for leaders. Bottom of the I is the gritty, unglamorous, often unseen stuff that keeps the team moving forward and sometimes crops up unexpectedly.
“the i’s have it”, Micron 03 ink on Strathmore sketch paper, 2023.
At its best, this concept democratizes leadership and legwork. Everyone has chances to do flashy or high stakes stuff. Everyone has a responsibility to do the small stuff. We all clean up our mess. We all talk to customers. We all box up the merch.
I’ve found it’s most important to emphasize this when you’re talking to candidates for leadership roles, especially if you’re talking to candidates who see the role you’re hiring for or the organization you run as a step up in status for them. (If you’ve got a mission worth fighting for, it would surprise me if you’re talking to someone who doesn’t see the role that way - why would they be seeking it, otherwise?)
Some folks can assume (and earnestly hope) that securing this role or getting in with this organization means they won’t have to do this “entry level” stuff anymore. They see this job as a chance to escape the bottom of the I.
If you’re in the start-up phase, this attitude can be cancerous. Best to identify it and remedy it (if possible) before their first day. Better yet to find the folks who come to you “I”-shaped in the first place and have the receipts to prove it.
This can sound like:
“On this team, there’s lots of stuff we all do that isn’t glamorous or even in our job descriptions. Other orgs might even be like “why in the world are you wasting your Chief [Whatchamacallit] Officer’s time on that?” Here, we don’t just tolerate stuff like [examples xyz] - we bring enthusiasm to it. It’s part of what we get to do. We expect you to be enthusiastic, too.”
When you’ve got many “I”s in your team, you’ve got the human ingredients of a culture that can move fast, get loads done, and build outsized trust. A pile of people willing to scrub the floor somehow raises the ceiling on what you can accomplish. Look for them, tell them you see this in them, celebrate them when they deliver it.
-Eric
