The real E-shaped people

How much of our day-to-day conversation at work is furnished in clichés?

Experience, expertise, exploration and execution are all still needed, but they are now table stakes

I often find myself marvelling at the things we say because ‘everyone knows’ what they mean without always stopping to wonder if, other than universally familiar, they are also… you know… still true?

The world is changing fast.

We literally say this every day.

And yet so many of our mental navigating tools are old and frayed with use. The ideas, clichés and throwaway comments that we use to sort through the world as we go about making decisions about what something means, how important it is and what to do with it.

In the workplace, those mental models are how we sort 80% of the situations we are in: from deciding whether something is a ‘crisis’ or BAU to how we read the vibe of a person or encounter.

Some of those clichés are as useful as ever: the adage of attitude over aptitude and ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ and all its variations are as true now as they ever were, if not more. Others, perhaps, less so. ‘Dress for the job you want’ is an interesting one, in the era of stained hoodies and greasy-haired millionaires.

But the one I have been thinking about recently is T-shaped people.

Someone proudly described themselves as a T-shaped person that became an E-shaped person recently, and my first thought was like, seriously? Of all the things you could choose to say about yourself, this is what you go with? You must be fun to hang out with.

But my judgment aside, the point was he was counting on me knowing what he meant (which I did). He was counting on me knowing that the market places value upon T-shaped people who know how to become E-shaped people (which I also did), and finally he was counting on that value being all the introduction he needed. Which is where we, mentally, parted ways.

But let me unpack this.

Let’s start with what he meant and why he believed it was a good thing to flag.

A T-shaped person is someone who has deep domain expertise and enough knowledge of the world around them to be useful in a scrap. So what he meant is that he was a recruiter’s dream: combining deep expertise in the required field with the horizontal interdisciplinarity that would make him a good team player. And his transition to an E-shaped person? He meant he is someone who has experience and expertise but also curiosity (a penchant for exploration, if you are wondering where the word starting with an ‘E’ is) plus the ability to execute. Four prongs. So OK, the analogy doesn’t totally work, but all those words start with an E to make your life easier.

So what he was saying is ‘I am useful in all the right ways and I speak the lingo to boot’.

What he was also admitting, albeit unwittingly, is that recruitment in our industry has been formulaic for so long that even our man here cracked the code.

And look.

All those skills are essential, so I am not dissing the formula or your T-to-E man.

The combination of deep expertise and interdisciplinary curiosity, collaboration and willingness to find ways to get things done is key. As is the bringing together of knowledge and knowing what to do with it. These combinations are essential and not as common as they should be given we are not institutions of learning and knowing what to do with your knowledge should be the true measure of whether you have it in the first place, inside our organisations. But I digress. That’s a topic for another time.

For now, I want to stay with E-shaped people, because the truth is: we need them. But they are a little more complicated and harder to find than someone who knows a vertical and is willing to play nice with the kids from the other silos.

If I look around me, the people who are successfully navigating the needs of the era and taking their organisations with them are a blend of all of the above. But they have one more thing: their deep vertical expertise isn’t singular.

Take that E shape and turn it on its side, is what I am saying. Because the people we need for this phase of the journey have all of the above plus expert knowledge in more than one field. If it sounds like the bar just got higher, that’s because it did.

These folks have the horizontal know-how. The ability to execute and learn. The ability to play nice with the other children. To strategise. To sing little songs. Whatever it is we have always put in that horizontal bar. They have it in spades. As it turns out, that ‘horizontality’ (it is a word now, thank you) is a personality trait more than anything.

So, they have that. Whatever it takes to operate cross-functionally and really navigate the constraints of the market, any organisation, any problem. They have it.

But, rather than having the singular domain expertise of old, the people we need for this stage of our lives have deep domain expertise in more than one domain. The three prongs of my E-on-its-side are just an illustration, you realise. This analogy has taken me as far as it will, but the point remains.

We have spent time and money assuming that the digital era could be successfully navigated by people who had a lot of horizontality and none of the deep, entrenched knowledge of how things used to be to hold them back as they glide into the future. We were wrong. So we then started looking for a new type of T-shaped person: someone with deep domain expertise either in the old world or the new and a working knowledge of the other. And we limped along. But that didn’t work either.

What we found through our trial and error is that, to get to the future, we need to keep moving forward… of course. But also: we need to build it. The future is not there to be discovered. It is not there to be arrived at. It needs to be constructed by the very people travelling to it.

And to build it, we need people who do the horizontality thing… armed with the knowledge of more than one vertical that they can synthesise with empathy and creativity to build the new world. It could be tech, business and risk. It could be an academic who worked in industry and is now a regulator. It doesn’t matter what the combination is. It matters that we realise that deep domain expertise in one area won’t cut it anymore. No matter how many Es you add to it: experience, expertise, exploration and execution. Those are all still needed, but they are now table stakes.

There is a whole host of things you need to bring to said table, and one of them is the ability to learn more than one thing, and then go on and learn yet another, and the ability to combine those areas of knowledge to build forward.

So, I guess we are back to T-shaped people: where the T stands for Teachability and that alone.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. 

Leda is also a published author – her first book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, is available to order here.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on X @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.