Becoming a T-shaped expert generalist

T-shaped skills describe a person who goes deep in one discipline and stays broad across several others. The metaphor is close to forty years old, it has survived every management fashion since, and it still gets treated as a personal quality that individuals either possess or lack.

I have been presenting this subject to organisations for a long time, and I have arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion. Almost everybody is a potential T. Very few people are permitted to become one.

The horizontal bar gets flattened by hierarchy, by silos, by role descriptions written for administrative convenience, and by performance reviews that only ever look down the vertical. The result is an organisation that advertises for generalists, hires them, and then spends three years turning them into specialists who cannot talk to anyone outside their own function.

This article sets out what the T actually describes, where it came from, why Australian workplaces keep producing I-shapes while asking for T-shapes, and what a leader can change without launching a programme.

The metaphor	What flattens it	The shift that transforms
T-shaped skills, definedT-shaped skills combine deep expertise in one discipline, represented by the vertical bar, with working knowledge and collaborative reach across others, represented by the horizontal bar. Australian workforce classifications encode the same split, separating universal core competencies from job-specific specialist tasks.	Organisational design, not personal ambitionSilos, rigid role boundaries, appraisal systems focused on the job alone and internal moves that stay inside one occupational band all compress the horizontal bar. The breadth an organisation asks for at interview is rarely resourced once the person starts.	Most people are blocked T-shapesTreating breadth as a character trait misplaces the problem. The productive question examines which structures currently prevent a capable person from exploring beyond their role, then removes them one at a time.

What T-shaped skills actually describe

T-shaped skills describe the combination of depth and breadth a person carries into their work. The vertical bar is the expertise that gets them hired and reviewed. The horizontal bar is the working knowledge and the relational capacity that let them collaborate outside their own discipline without needing a translator.

The letter refers to a shape on paper rather than a posture at the gym. Being T-shaped means being an expert in at least one thing, a generalist across several, and curious enough about your colleagues to keep the horizontal bar alive.

The vertical bar: depth, and why it keeps getting narrower

The vertical bar holds the technical knowledge that lets you do your job and get paid for it. It is what an employer assesses first at interview and revisits at every performance review. It is also getting harder to hold, because disciplines that were single fields a decade ago have since fragmented into a dozen specialisms each.

Take digital marketing. Ten years ago you could reasonably present yourself as a digital marketing expert. Today that title covers search optimisation, paid acquisition, social, e-commerce, marketing automation, content across text and audio and video, mobile, analytics, artificial intelligence, growth and brand.

Nobody holds deep expertise in all of those at once, and anybody claiming to is describing a job title rather than a capability. The honest version of depth today is expertise in one or two of those specialisms with credible working knowledge of the rest.

The horizontal bar: breadth, and the two capabilities that carry it

The horizontal bar is harder than the vertical, because it runs on human capability rather than technical knowledge. Two capabilities carry most of the load. Curiosity pulls a person beyond their own discipline, and empathy lets them understand what a colleague in another discipline actually needs from them.

Curiosity supplies the appetite. Without it, an expert digs steadily deeper until the trench walls block the view, and eventually they lose sight of the environment their expertise is meant to serve.

Empathy supplies the transmission. Understanding what someone else is trying to achieve is what turns knowledge into a shared asset rather than a private one, and it is what stops an ego from getting in the way of a cross-functional project. If you want a practical way to work on the first of these, my curiosity matrix maps where a person’s interest currently sits and where it could usefully extend.

How Australia’s skills framework already encodes T-shaped skills

Australia already classifies its workforce along the two axes of the T. The Australian Skills Classification, built by the National Skills Commission and now held by Jobs and Skills Australia, separates universal core competencies from job-specific specialist tasks. The first group is the horizontal bar. The second is the vertical.

The classification covers 600 occupations and sets out ten core competencies required in every occupation across the whole labour market, alongside specialist tasks that describe day-to-day work within a single occupation. Core competencies are universal. Specialist tasks transfer across some occupations and never across all of them.

Jobs and Skills Australia is now developing a National Skills Taxonomy that builds on this work, with the stated aim of making every skill visible, valued and transferable. The direction of travel is clear enough. Australian workforce policy has decided that breadth is measurable and that it belongs in the national data.

One detail in that classification deserves attention. Each occupation carries a required proficiency level for each core competency, scored on a ten-point scale. The breadth expected of you is therefore already assigned by your occupation before you have any say in it.

Where the T-shape came from, and why the origin story matters

The T-shape entered management vocabulary through recruitment rather than through development. It was a way of reading a candidate against a job, and it spread because it gave interviewers a quick shorthand for a judgement they were already making. Its origins are less settled than most articles suggest.

A contested paternity

The metaphor is commonly traced to internal use at McKinsey during the 1980s, to the writer David Guest in the early 1990s, and to Tim Brown at the design firm IDEO who used it to assess candidates. The claims are widely repeated and thinly evidenced, and serious sources still describe the attribution as an open question.

The most substantial published treatment came later, when Morten Hansen and Bolko von Oetinger set out the T-shaped manager in the Harvard Business Review as a knowledge management idea. Their version was organisational rather than personal, which is worth remembering given how the term is used today.

The soft and hard skills vocabulary that sits underneath the T is older still, and it comes from the United States military. The two terms were formalised at the CONARC Soft Skills Training Conference held at the US Army Air Defense School at Fort Bliss in December 1972, where hard skills were those involving machines and soft skills were those involving people and paper.

It has taken half a century for that vocabulary to reach the mainstream of Australian corporate conversation, which tells you something about how slowly useful language travels.

Why an interview shorthand became a development plan

A hiring metaphor describes a person at a single moment. A development plan describes a trajectory over years. Using the first as the second is a category error, and it produces the sort of programme where people are told they are an I, a T or an X and asked to change letter by December.

Telling somebody their shape is a slightly ridiculous exercise. Like competency frameworks and the skills matrices that surround them, it tends toward standardising people, and none of us is a stack of skills, hard or soft.

Your job is to help people find their talents and appetites, explore their potential, and identify the technical and social knowledge they need. The single aim is to help them grow enough to feel cramped in their current job, and eventually in their current organisation. Handing out shapes achieves none of that.

Why Australian organisations produce I-shapes while asking for T-shapes

Organisations flatten the horizontal bar through ordinary operational decisions rather than through any deliberate policy. Reporting lines, role boundaries, appraisal design and internal mobility patterns each remove a little breadth, and the cumulative effect is a workforce of capable specialists who have no structural reason to look sideways.

The structures that flatten the bar

Since I started presenting this subject inside organisations, I have wondered whether staff are all naturally potential T-shapes who are prevented from becoming one by the way their organisation runs. The list of obstacles is remarkably consistent from one engagement to the next, and none of the items on it is about the individual.

• Hierarchy, which routes every cross-functional question through two managers who have never met.
• Silos and small fiefdoms, which treat knowledge as territory.
• Management that keeps a person in a single post for the sake of operational simplicity.
• Rigid accountability structures that make any exchange outside the role an exception to be approved.
• Outdated motivation tools that reward output and ignore contribution to anybody else’s output.
• Appraisals that examine the job and never the person’s relationships with their peers.
• Pressure to perform, which makes any hour spent outside the role look like an hour stolen.
• The absence of a shared and understood picture of where the organisation is heading.
• A culture that gives no visible value to curiosity or to collaboration.

Each item on that list is a design decision that somebody made and somebody can unmake. That is the good news buried in an otherwise depressing inventory.

What Australian mobility data says about staying in the trench

Australians change jobs less often than they used to, and when they do change, most of them land in the same occupational territory they left. Breadth is not being built by movement, because the movement itself is narrow. The national figures make this unusually visible.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that just under 8 per cent of employed people changed employer or business in the year to February 2025, and that almost two thirds of those who moved remained in the same occupation. Among professionals the figure rises sharply: more than four fifths of professionals who changed jobs stayed within the professionals group.

Read that as a picture of the T and it is sobering. The most qualified segment of the Australian workforce moves the most conservatively, deepening the vertical bar with each move while the horizontal bar sees no new traffic at all.

Depth is maintained by study, which a person can do alone. Breadth is maintained by contact, which requires an organisation to arrange it. Take the contact away and the horizontal bar shortens without anybody noticing, because nothing in the appraisal system measures it.

The performance review that only looks down the vertical

Most performance conversations assess the job and ignore everything around it. They ask whether targets were met, whether technical standards held, and whether the person is ready for more of the same. They rarely ask who this person helped, whose work they made easier, or what they learned from a function that is not their own.

An appraisal is the clearest signal an organisation sends about what it values. When it measures only the vertical, the horizontal bar becomes discretionary effort, and discretionary effort disappears in the first busy quarter.

This is also where breadth is quietly punished. Time spent understanding another team is time not spent on your own numbers, and the person who does it anyway carries the cost personally. That arrangement will not produce T-shapes at any scale, whatever the recruitment advertisement says.

How to choose an approach to building breadth against your own criteria

Four approaches dominate: job rotation, cross-functional project assignment, internal secondment, and a training catalogue. They differ in cost, in speed, and in whether they change the work or only add to it. Choosing badly produces activity that looks like development and leaves every horizontal bar exactly where it was.

Four approaches compared

The four differ mainly in how much real contact they create. Contact is the active ingredient, and any approach that delivers information about another function without putting a person in the room with it will build recall rather than breadth. That distinction decides most of the outcome.

Approach	What it builds	Its blind spot	Best suited to
Job rotation	Genuine working knowledge of another function, held for years	Expensive, slow, and hard to run when every role is staffed to the minimum	Organisations with role redundancy and a real succession pipeline
Cross-functional project assignment	Contact plus a shared deliverable, which is where empathy actually forms	Fails when the person’s day job is not reduced to make room for it	Most organisations, and the cheapest place to start
Internal secondment	Deep exposure to one other discipline over a defined period	Returns the person to an unchanged role, so the gain often evaporates	Organisations able to hold a position open and to redesign it on return
Training catalogue	Vocabulary and awareness across many disciplines at once	Delivers information without contact, so it rarely converts into collaboration	Onboarding, and topics where awareness genuinely is the goal

Which signals point to which approach

Diagnose from what already happens rather than from what people report wanting. Look at how work crosses functional boundaries today, who initiates those crossings, and what it costs the person who initiates them. The pattern will point at the right instrument without much interpretation.

• Cross-functional work happens only when a manager forces it, which points to project assignment with protected time rather than to training.
• People know the names of other teams and nothing about their work, which points to contact rather than to information.
• Internal candidates keep losing to external ones for broader roles, which points to rotation or secondment.
• Your best specialists are leaving for roles that are barely more senior, which usually means they outgrew the job long before they outgrew the pay.

What to stop doing

Stop labelling people. Assigning a letter to a colleague, whether I, T or X, converts a useful metaphor into a verdict, and verdicts close conversations that development depends on. The metaphor works as a lens and fails as a badge.

Stop worrying about the expertise your people lack. Help them find and dig into the interests that overlap with your organisation’s activity and culture, because that is what will feed their curiosity and extend the horizontal bar without any programme at all.

Above all, stop locking your people into a single job and a single expertise. An organisation that does this efficiently for a decade ends up with a workforce it cannot redeploy, which is an expensive way to have been organised. The shifts already reshaping Australian work make that bill arrive sooner than most planning assumes.

How I can help you develop T-shaped people

I work with leadership teams and managers on the conditions that let breadth develop, rather than on convincing individuals to be more curious. The work usually starts with a session that reframes the problem for the leadership group, then moves into redesigning the mechanisms that currently flatten the horizontal bar.

Keynotes and workshops on breadth and depth

A keynote suits a leadership group that already believes in versatility and has not yet connected it to their own operating decisions. A workshop suits a management cohort that needs to run the drawing exercise, see their own horizontal bars on paper, and work out which structure shortened them.

I use the group’s own material wherever they will share it, including their appraisal template, their internal mobility figures and their project staffing history. Those three documents tell the story faster than any external case study.

Programmes for managers and internal communities

Manager communities suit organisations that have already run the workshops and watched the effect fade. A community sustains the practice through the quarters when delivery pressure would otherwise reclaim every hour, and it gives managers somewhere to bring the specific staffing decisions they are stuck on.

For organisations wanting to go further, I design leadership programmes that connect breadth to enableship, the leadership of innovation, which is my own frame for the work a leader does to make other people’s contribution possible. Hiring practices are the other lever, and I cover that separately in my work on hiring for cognitive diversity.

Conclusion: your people are already T-shaped, or would be

The T is a useful metaphor and a terrible label. It explains why professional success now depends on combining depth in a specialised discipline with enough reach to work across several others. It explains almost nothing about why a particular person in your organisation has a short horizontal bar.

For that, look at your reporting lines, your appraisal template, your project staffing and your internal mobility record. Those four artefacts drew the shape long before the individual had a view on it.

Help your people find and dig into the interests that overlap with your organisation’s work, give them contact with disciplines that are not their own, and never lock them into a single role and a single expertise. Do that and T-shaped skills stop being something you recruit for and start being something your organisation actually produces.

Frequently asked questions about T-shaped skills