Hi! Today’s essay is an experiment. It started as an editorial, authored by Ed Lepedus with contributions from Elizabeth Manning and Shern Tee, and well, then I went a bit rogue. I wanted to hear MORE lessons and insider tips. I wanted to understand who the heck these generalists were, and what impact they were generating. So, I put a callout for shapeshifters.
And, they came rolling in.
This essay will be one part education and one part connection; click through to the profiles of people who’ve contributed to get to know the (flippin’ incredible) network of generalist professionals.
There’s so much we can learn from each other.
So lets begin.
PS: screenshot your favourite bits, share them on LinkedIn, tag @generalistworld & we’ll help amplify you.
Let me tell you a story.
When a small nonprofit faced an unexpected funding loss, it was an existential crisis. Major layoffs followed, including the departure of their COO. In the chaos, an unlikely hero emerged: Sarah, a newly hired People and Culture lead. Sarah was hired for a very specific role, but suddenly found themself stretching far beyond their job description. First, they stepped into a combined People and Ops role. Then, as the dust continued to settle, they morphed again —this time into the full COO position.
Eight months later, this accidental exec isn't just keeping the lights on—they're thriving, successfully juggling Finance, Ops, and People.
This isn't a fairy tale or a one-in-a-million stroke of luck. It's just a generalist in action—leveraging their ability to adapt, learn, synthesise, and then excel in times of challenge.
Generalist skills are longer a nice to have. They’re essential skills for the next decade+.
While Sarah's story showcases the impact of a generalist in a small nonprofit, the value of these shapeshifters extends far beyond the startup world. This essay unpacks the idea that generalists aren’t just for startups. Generalists aren’t just built for 0-1 (though, they’re pretty darn good at it!).
You’ll find generalists in academia, like Shern. You’ll find generalists in 4000+ person companies, like Lucy.
You’ll find smart, talented generalists across all sectors, industries, and roles.
This essay shines a light on the many places you’ll find generalists creating real ROI.
How Beth drove change at a major pharmaceutical company.
A multimillion-dollar digital transformation effort was floundering. Despite significant investment, the initiative wasn't gaining traction, and stakeholders across the organisation were overwhelmed.
Elizabeth, a transformation generalist, was brought in to create a change effort. Elizabeth quickly spotted and defined key obstacles that hadn’t yet been named (💡 ), and implemented solutions that crossed traditional departmental boundaries (💡 💡).
Within months, Elizabeth had not only put the transformation back on track but had blasted cost savings and efficiency gains beyond initial projections. Most importantly, her work repositioned an entire division of the company, transforming it from a cost centre to a driver of innovation.
In a specialised environment where most roles were narrowly defined, Elizabeth's ability to adapt, connect dots across functions, and bring a fresh perspective proved transformative.
It's a powerful reminder that even the largest and most established organisations need their shapeshifters.
The Business Case for Generalists
📝 Use this section to learn about different roles that suit generalists, the impact they have, and to grow your own network
Meredith—Head of Impact & Innovation at Hatch Enterprise
“My generalist skillset has enabled me to master the creation of cases for support. Beyond winning funding for causes I care about, my cases for support have won internal buy-in to adapt strategy, adjust organisational design, and even saved team member’s jobs.”
Deja White—Marketing Operations & Implementation at TMWR Sports
“Building team processes from scratch, everywhere I go plus doing the work I was hired to do (usually something creative marketing related). It never fails.”
Lauren Zaslansky Conner—Fractional Chief Operating Officer for 2GO Advisory Group
“I grew eCommerce sales 200% by combining brand, customer experiences, sales, performance marketing and more. Currently working with various founders to understand, leverage and use data across the organizations, while building the structures to support growth.”
Alejo Stereo—Founder, Developer, and Creator
“Last year, as part of a single project, I planted over 1,000 endangered trees in Colombia. I coded the website, built a newsletter, wrote content, took photos, made videos, and learned both traditional and syntropic agriculture. I also created certificates, sold tree adoptions, planted and sold magic beans, and lost an eco-friendly corn crop. Additionally, I raised chickens for eggs, built a tree nursery, worked with a lumberjack, and ventured into the jungle to gather seeds.”
Brad White—Founder and Principal
“I was hired recently by a wonderful school team spearheading a turnaround that will impact thousands of underserved kids in Missouri. We have a targeted contract and a plan to accomplish all sorts of specific and diverse things, but a few weeks ago I just said I think we just need a room, a whiteboard, and a day together. With no predetermined agenda, I was able to navigate across dozens of potential specialist roles, equipping them to create an aligned, high potential, head and heart (and even visually-appealing!) plan. In 8 hours, I saved them 100+ hours, and set them on a viable turnaround trajectory.”
Katrina Honer—Corporate Engagement Operations Manager at Stanford University
“I’ve taken my background in marketing and operational excellence (life as a Project manager > Events manager > Employer Branding Program manager) to make pretty functional (I mean that literally) things such as elevating a static spreadsheet into a dynamic pretty Airtable interface making it easier for Sales teams and Program Managers to find the exact information they need, quickly and do their jobs more efficiently.”
Andrea Brewster—Change Expert and Internal Head of Communications at IG Group
“I've been able to bring my generalist skillset to help launch L&D solutions and innovation hackathons, run people change programs, coach leaders and founders, and bring a product-led approach to growing teams, no matter what my job title is.”
Maddison Pollard Shore—IT Business Analyst at Girlguiding
“I was able to help map the carbon footprint of our clothing supply chain, to provide data analysis that would help us set challenging but realistic carbon reduction goals for our green strategy, all because I had taught myself R when I got bored!”
The Fixed Mindset Trap
Let's zoom out from individual stories for a sec, and look at the bigger picture of how businesses evolve—and how their mindsets can calcify along the way.
In early-stage startups, even the specialists are generalists.
It's a natural consequence of having more tasks than people to do them. Throw in the constant pivots in the hunt for product-market fit, and it becomes clear to see why flexibility is a golden ticket.
This environment naturally breeds what psychologist Carol Dweck calls:
"A Growth Mindset"
But what happens when startups grow up?
When the chaos settles and roles become more defined?
As businesses mature, we often start prioritising specialisation and standardisation. We craft meticulous hiring plans, seeking out perfect fits for clearly defined roles. Thirty developers, ten account managers, fifteen salespeople, and so on.
Maybe we follow progressive principles and look for some T-shaped people to go with our I-shaped specialists. Maybe we go all in on the alphabet soup and bring in M-shaped and V-shaped folks as well. And an X-shaped manager or two.
This shift often coincides with a slide into a "fixed mindset" – a perspective that views talents and abilities as static. It's a mindset that sees employees as puzzle pieces with unchanging shapes, meant to slot neatly into predetermined organisational gaps.
This fixed mindset manifests in several ways:
Overvaluing specialisation: We become overly focused on finding the "perfect fit" for narrowly defined roles, overlooking the potential of adaptable generalists.
Resistance to change: When faced with new challenges, our instinct is to hire new specialists rather than empowering existing employees to adapt and grow.
Fear of ‘key-person’ risk: Generalists, with their broad skill sets and ability to bridge departments, are sometimes seen as too critical – and therefore too risky to shift.
Underestimating adaptability: There's a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be a generalist. Rather than seeing them as flexible problem-solvers, fixed-mindset organisations view generalists as jack-of-all-trades, master of none.
When infected with a fixed mindset, we squeeze our shapeshifters into rigid moulds, grind off their edges and carve off chunks of responsibilities, parcelling them out to more easily defined roles, until these once-versatile employees fit neatly into well-understood pigeonholes.
Our org charts look cleaner, but at what cost?
In our quest for organisational neatness and predictability, we risk creating a rigid structure ill-equipped to handle change. This approach might have worked in a more stable business environment, but that world is gone.
Finding Your Way in an Accelerating World
You’re not imagining it. Technological change really is getting exponentially faster.
One day, Siri can't snooze an alarm; the next, ChatGPT is writing Shakespearean sonnets about blockchain.
Today you’re a category leader; tomorrow, three kids on Discord have made your flagship product obsolete.
Now, let's put ourselves in the shoes of business leaders grappling with this challenge...
No matter how we arrange our neatly defined shapes, gaps invariably appear in our corporate jigsaw puzzle. And what starts as a gap ends in missed opportunities and existential threats.
Emerging tech defies categorisation, cross-functional projects stall in siloed departments, and strategic initiatives wither without cross-functional leadership.
This is where generalists shine.
If we're lucky, we've still got some of those early employees who have done every job in the business. Or if we’ve been wise, we’ve also hired some talent who’ve been kind enough to share their full - broad and diverse - skillset regardless of the role they’ve entered through. In the neat world of cookie-cutter roles with clean shapes like I and T, these holdovers from our organisation's more nimble past or unicorn hires who are more future-oriented look like swirly, spiky, bumpy irregular shapes.
While our org charts may resemble Swiss cheese🧀, full of holes between specialities, these versatile individuals are more akin to Swiss Army knives— adaptable, multi-functional, and ready to tackle any challenge.
These shapeshifters navigate the gaps in our structures, bridging departments and disciplines with ease. They're the connective tissue holding our organisations together; often without being noticed, almost always without being asked. We can hand them an amorphous initiative and trust them to figure out what good looks like and make it happen.
The generalist’s superpower isn't their squiggly or spiky shape.
It's not having a fixed shape at all.
They're stretchy enough to cover gaps we didn't know we had, squishy enough to plug the holes that startups have blown through our business model, and sharp enough to spike into new technologies and help us regain our competitive edge.
🌀 Lessons & Wisdom from the Generalist Crowd
Sabahat Naureen—Head of Growth for Simply Embedded
“Follow your curiosity (the new, unknown and exciting), and back it up with your already-established skillset (the foundation and what you are already known for). Secondly, don’t let anyone say you’re all over the place. There is always a theme if you use the right narrative and tell the right story!”
Lauren Zaslansky Conner—Fractional COO
“Don’t undersell yourself. Niching down may mean making connections or seeing the big picture. It shouldn’t be hiding your strengths to make others more comfortable.”
Zoe Piper—CEO, Founder, PhD Student
“Be open to big pivots. Every time I get really clear on exactly what my key skills are and the areas I want to focus my career on, something comes totally from left field and that's what I've moved into.”
Kit Sutton— Interdisciplinary Governance, Risk & Compliance Generalist
“You have skills that you don't know how to articulate and the world doesn't always recognise. Find your tribe, let them help you figure out your place in the world. Generalists are awesome, adaptable, and everywhere. If you don't feel like you entirely fit into a specialisation, then you don't have to.
Maddison Pollard Shore—IT Business Analyst at Girlguiding
“My top tip for Generalists is don't be afraid to step sideways, or 'down' in search of a cool challenge. I took a step down responsibility-wise, and it has exposed me to some of the coolest, and most engaging projects I've worked on in years!”
Andrea Brewster—Internal Head of Communications
“Never stop learning or networking, follow your curiosity, and find your tribe (a la Generalist World 🌀) - then be generous with sharing that intel and market insight! It makes you more marketable, helps others learn, and keeps your generalist brain engaged.”
Via Tendon—Senior Brand, Content and Community Manager
“Say yes then figure it out? Hah. I think following my curiousity, matching it up with my values and seasons in life has given me an anchor.”
Soooo, what do we do with all this? 🤷
Recognising the value of generalists is one thing; effectively leveraging their talents is another.
Today we have 3 calls-to-action:
Hire generalists!
Find your generalists and empower them.
If you're a generalist: own your strengths and cheerlead for your own accomplishments.
Here’s how to integrate + empower generalists at multiple levels
Firstly, to the generalists reading, own your superpower! Being a generalist is a feature, not a bug. Seek out opportunities to demonstrate your versatility. Be the one who volunteers for cross-functional projects, who connects the dots between disparate departments.
Know that you're the piece that can take any shape needed. The future belongs to the versatile, and you're built for exactly that.
To leaders and hiring managers. Look beyond rigid job descriptions. Seek out candidates with diverse experiences and a track record of pivoting, reinventing, and getting stuff done. Also, empower the generalists you already have—give them the freedom to cross departmental lines and take on those gnarly, multifaceted projects that don't fit neatly into anyone's job description.
Ask yourself: Who are our shapeshifters? Are they empowered to flex, or trapped in rigid boxes? And critically, have we got enough of them to face the coming storm?
And to organisations. Are you building a culture that truly values adaptability? Are you celebrating the employees who successfully take on diverse challenges? Are you creating pathways for generalists to grow without forcing them into narrow specialisations?
While this essay won’t go deeply into systemic change, we definitely recommend exploring how your organization might get started in creating those conditions for success.
Use your shapeshifters as the connective tissue that holds your organisation together, bridging gaps and facilitating collaboration across traditional boundaries.
So, generalists, your time has come.
You're the piece that can take any shape needed.
It’s obvious that the future belongs to the adaptable, and you're built for exactly that. Carry on doing what you do best—the world needs you now more than ever.
✍️ Author: Ed Lepedus
✍️ Contributing authors: Shern Tee & Elizabeth Manning