Modern organizations are increasingly moving from hierarchical to knowledge-based organizations[1, 2].
If you are a leader or a specialist, it’s therefore valuable for you to know that companies increasingly express that skills gaps and availability of talents are the greatest barriers to their business transformation[3].
This is the market and the context you are part of in your job and career.
According to the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2023, organizations therefore need to become better at retaining and developing their internal talents to minimize skills gaps through training initiatives and learning over the next coming five years[3]. Because specialists are an increasingly scarce resource, they need development and clear career paths[1].
My prediction is that these challenges will continue to be a key future focus, but also a great opportunity.
I just finished reading the brilliant book The Specialist Pipeline: Winning the War for Specialist Talent. The book was launched here in February 2023 and is already well-received in many organizations.
I’m sure that you can also gain some new insights from the book.
The author, Kent Jonasen, is the CEO of Leadership Pipeline Institute, the leading provider of solutions based on the Leadership Pipeline and Specialist Pipeline concepts.
In this blog article, I will be discussing The Specialist Pipeline concept from the book, which introduces an empirically based, clear organizational architecture for specialist potential, performance and development.
Specialist role transitions: Development and career paths for specialist talent.
Many organizations voice that specialists are important and increasingly critical to their growth[1].
Yet, organizations often don’t have (m)any supporting specialist development activities or programmes.
This is quite common, also in my experience, that the main focus for development activities are on leaders.
However, better leaders will also be able to build teams with higher performance and well-being.
Improved leadership quality will in fact also help, when it comes to growing and developing individual team members.
The Specialist Pipeline is one proposed framework for how to rethink that in a structured way.
The Specialist Pipeline lays a foundation for how to differentiate between different specialist roles and their levels of domain expertise and set specific performance expectations for specialists in these roles to manage specialist role transitions better and more successfully[1].
In his book, Kent Jonasen argues that you don’t actually start out as a specialist in your first job in an organization after graduating[1]. That would be to deflate the specialist term and expertise required[1].
In fact, you need to first build your domain of expertise to become a specialist.
Being successful as a specialist is no longer only about your depth of knowledge and expertise, but also about how that knowledge can be utilized across the organization[1]. As a specialist when you change levels of specialist roles, your results become more and more dependent on others whom you have to guide, help, influence or deal with[1].
So, like for leadership transitions in The Leadership Pipeline concept, specialists also have certain transition passages between each specialist role in an organization.
Figure 1 shows the most common specialist roles in organizations that change with the size of the organization[1, 4]: Starting from Professional (your first job in an employee role in an organization), to Knowledge Expert (first specialist role with area of expertise and colleagues depending on that knowledge), from Knowledge Expert to Knowledge Leader (among few in organization with that deep area of expertise, dependent on others to achieve results) and from Knowledge Leader to Knowledge Principal (critical roles to maintain or build competitive advantage with uniquely deep domain area knowledge and extensively broad organizational insight).
These different passages between specialist roles then require new learning, unlearning and new behaviors to be able to transition well[1, 4]. The Specialist Pipeline concept introduces three key specialist transition areas[1]:
- Work values – how you believe you add value in your specialist job and to the business:
→ This is what you like to do and how you experience that you create value on the job.
→ The work values need to change with the role transition, otherwise no behavioral changes happen. - Time application – how you need to spend your time to be successful in your specialist job:
→ You make more and more time available to help your colleagues with each role transition.
→ You spend more and more time to develop your domain of expertise instead of creating short-term immediate results. - Skills – the specific capabilities required for you to be successful in your specialist job:
→ Developing the right specialist skills needed to add value and meet performance expectations, changing with the role.
This short video by Leadership Pipeline Institute introduces and expands The Specialist Pipeline concept and passages more:
Four dimensions of specialist roles: different for each role.
One of my big take-aways from the book was how four dimensions can be used to distinguish between each specialist role in an organization[1, 4]:
- Depth and breadth of knowledge (see Figure 2 for a simplified depth and breadth overview for each specialist role):
↳ Often organizations focus mainly on the depth of knowledge, not how to broadly bring it into play across the organization.
↳ Professionals have smaller depth and breadth of knowledge to be expanded to become a specialist.
↳ Knowledge experts have an area of expertise and a certain depth of knowledge used to support colleagues.
↳ Knowledge leaders often come in two forms in organizations:
a) The first with with a broad value-chain understanding and significant and deep domain of expertise.
b) The second with a broad value-chain understanding and several knowledge expert domains of expertise.
↳ Knowledge principals have uniquely deep domain of expertise knowledge and extensively broad organizational insight. - Result orientation (how each specialist role create results and should be held accountable):
↳ Professionals deliver results through own time prioritization, discipline and results from day-to-day tasks.
↳ Knowledge experts deliver results through their personal expertise.
↳ Knowledge leaders deliver results through colleagues.
↳ Knowledge principals deliver results through the organization. - Communication (changing communication requirements for each specialist role):
↳ Professionals are required to be team players and accept organization values, which affect their communication.
↳ Knowledge experts are required to build personal excellence and be able to guide and train peers.
↳ Knowledge leaders are required to influence without authority, so much more stakeholder management.
↳ Knowledge principals are focused on cross-functional navigation and strategic networking. - Innovation (maintaining and developing your domain of expertise):
↳ Professionals focus on own day-to-day tasks to do high-quality technical or professional work.
↳ Knowledge experts should represent their domain of expertise.
↳ Knowledge leaders should lead their domain of expertise.
↳ Knowledge principals should architect their domain of expertise.
These four dimensions interlinks with the specialist role transition areas of work values, time application and skills. It’s a great way to simplify the factors to consider when you transition from one specialist role to another.
It’s really interesting to begin thinking about career paths for specialists based on these factors.
In the next part, I’ll expand a few of the opportunities that The Specialist Pipeline concept brings when it comes to coaching and talent acquisition (hiring).
Benefits and expanding views on The Specialist Pipeline concept.
Some of the main benefits of considering specialist role transitions in this structured way is that it[1, 4]:
- Clarifies roles, responsibilities and performance expectations for each specialist role in organizations
- Highlights more attractive career paths and real alternatives to a common leadership track
- Makes transitions from leadership to specialist roles or vice versa simpler and more engaging as you don’t stagnate
- Improves attraction and retention of specialists as it provides clear career development paths
These benefits can actually also help you if you are in a leadership role, as I see it, because it becomes much clearer how to develop your team of specialists. What to expect in the different roles, how to hold specialists accountable and setting a direction on how they can expect to develop over time.
I see some clear opportunities for building on this to make better specialist role transition assessments for internal development and hiring as well as for building coaching support.
This short Harvard Business Review article shows that organizations from 2017-2019 reduced degree requirements for 31% of high-skill positions[5].
So, organizations continue to move towards skills-based hiring rather than “degree inflation” and credentialism to expand the availability of talent[5].
Therefore, a clear overview of specialist role expectations and how to develop into another specialist role can also make skills-based hiring simpler in my opinion.
I made this visual radar plot (Figure 3) to connect the different factors that are key for specialist role transitions.
For each specialist role, it would be possible to create an assessment form with selected questions to assess how far and well the specialist has transitioned into their current specialist role.
That’s useful for assessing your specialists in the team for whether they are actually ready to move into a new specialist role.
A good example could be for a Knowledge expert, who has to guide and train their colleagues within the domain of expertise, here it’s key to assess the performance of the specialist on the specialist skills of ‘giving feedback’:
- How well do the specialist provide feedback to colleagues on a scale from 1-5?
- What are examples of provided feedback to colleagues within domain of expertise that was well-applied?
I also believe that The Specialist Pipeline can come in handy when coaching specialists in transition.
I’ve outline below in Figure 4 how The Specialist Pipeline concept can be applied to a coaching process.
It’s a short and high-level example of how to build a supporting activity around specialist transitions.
Six overall coaching sessions is within the 4-8 session sweet spot to gain stable coaching effectiveness.
| Session WHAT: Coaching focus: | 0 Pre-session Calibration, 360° | 1 Goals / outcomes Alignment | 2 Assessment Walk-through | 3-5 Transition coaching On WV, TA, skills | 6 Way forward Commitment |
0. Pre-session calibration, setting expectations, make 360° assessment (depending on specialist role)
1. Aligning on goals and / or outcomes, building rapport and understand where you are at as a specialist
2. Coaching based on 360° assessment and drawing out perspectives and reflections from survey
3. – 5. Specific Transition Coaching based on work values, time application, skills and around the 4 dimensions
6. Way forward / next steps with focus on take-aways, learning and commitment
In fact a developed assessment framework based on the above Figure 3 radar plot can also be useful for such activities, but can also be in smaller scale and valuable for you as a leader as part of your daily leadership when coaching specialist talents. It can also be adapted to bring value in your career development conversations with specialists.
So, there are many opportunities for utilizing The Specialist Pipeline concept be it in your leadership, for recruitment and assessment purposes, for coaching etc.
Anyway, I warmly recommend you to read the book as a great source of inspiration 🙂
Now, let me hear in the comments, what specialist role transition challenges you see in organizations?
References.
[1]Jonasen, K. (2022) The Specialist Pipeline: Winning the War for Specialist Talent, Forbes Books, South Carolina: pp. 1-294.
[2]De Smet, A., Gagnon, C. and Mygatt, E. (2021) Organizing for the future: Nine keys to becoming a future-ready company. Available at: McKinsey (mckinsey.com). (Accessed 20 September 2023).
[3]World Economic Forum (2023) The Future of Jobs Report 2023: pp. 49-55. Available at: World Economic Forum (weforum.org). (Accessed 20 September 2023).
[4]Leadership Pipeline Institute (2023) Specialist Development in Corporations. Available at: LPI (leadershippipelineinstitute.com). (Accessed 20 September 2023).
[5]Fuller, J., Langer, C. and Sigelmann, M. (2022) Skills-Based Hiring Is on the Rise. Available at: Human Resource Management (hbr.org). (Accessed 20 September 2023).
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