Skill Shapes

Everyone is different (citation needed).  This part of our reality impacts every aspect of our interaction with folks, but in this particular piece we’ll look at how it impacts our work.  There are many different ways to try and quantify or qualify our differences, from things like MBTI personality assessments, to background degrees, to more.  Here, we’ll focus on our skillsets, and how our understanding of others (And our own) can impact our work.

One straightforward way to look at skill sets is to group them into “T”, “I” and “Broken Combs”.  These three classifications are useful to understand where an individual’s strengths lie, and how they can be best utilized to tackle any given challenge.  They can also be used to dig into past projects or events to better understand why things went the way they did.  I’ll start with a high-level of each of these, then dig into them more in the coming weeks.  Note that none of these is necessarily better or worse than any other - they’re just tools to help understand people a bit better (yourself included!).

Skill Shapes

I-shaped people

I (like the capital I or lowercase l) shaped people tend to have one deep skillset… and not much else.  These individuals are valuable where in-depth knowledge is needed for a particular area - specific programming languages or systems, business processes etc.  In my experience I-shaped people tend to be a bit more senior in their career or area, and likely ended up choosing to focus on a particular skillset because they find it interesting, or have a particular talent for it.  Note that this extreme specialization can make it challenging for them to adopt new concepts/ideas, which may lead to blind spots developing.

T-shaped people

T-shaped individuals are similar to I-shapes, in that they have one specific skill they’re much better at (the vertical line in the “T”), however, they also possess at least a passing familiarity with several other skills (the vertical line in the “T”).  This broader exposure of skills allows them to more easily flex between assignments, or to more easily interface with other groups as they may know some background concepts or parts of their systems.  Note that because they also possess a broader skillset, their in-depth knowledge may not be as deep as someone who is “I” shaped.

Broken Combs

Like T-shaped people, broken combs possess basic knowledge in a broad set of skills.  They differ from T-shaped people because they will possess at least 2 skills in more depth (this is where that name comes from… imagine breaking most of the teeth out of a comb).  This allows them to be subject matter experts in several areas, while still maintaining general knowledge of others.  Similar to a T-shape, however, their depth of knowledge in those areas may not be as great an I shaped person.

Each of these shapes offers its own insights, and I will be delving into each of these shapes over the next few weeks. Like many concepts these are not intended to limit or restrict an individual… instead they’re intended to be used to better understand how an individual or team will act (or to explain how it got to a specific situation).