The Value of Cross-Functional Learning
As an individual or organization, lifelong learning & cross-functional knowledge are key assets for continued success in business. 67.5% of executives rated the impact of lifelong learning on employee performance as a 5 on a scale from 1–5.
Table of Contents
- Specialists, Generalists, & T-Shaped Professionals
- Communication & Alignment
- Upskilling, Discovery, & Optimizing Human Resources
- Problem Solving & Innovation
- Conclusion
Specialists, Generalists, & T-Shaped Professionals
“Jack of all trades, master of none.” This indictment of being a generalist is widely circulated, and is essentially true. However, specializing does not mean you can’t accumulate broader knowledge outside of your functional area. In fact, in their esteemed programs for project management and UX, Google promotes this idea. More specifically, the programs explain & support the concept of “T-shaped professionals.”
A T-shaped professional is simultaneously a specialist and a generalist. The horizontal line in the T represents their broad cross-functional knowledge (including both hard & soft skills), and the vertical line represents their deep specialized expertise (in one or more disciplines). The T-shaped professional is adept at collaborating with others, creative problem-solving/innovating, adapting to new roles & stretch assignments, and seeing the bigger picture (all great skills for leadership & upper management). The “T-shaped professional” concept either originated from McKinsey & Company or IDEO CEO Tim Brown.
Developing T-shaped skills through cross-functional learning is a powerful route to professional development and progress in your career.
Communication & Alignment
Communication between the different functional areas of a business and an understanding of how each affects the other can help keep each function aligned with the business’s goals & best interests. Emotionally intelligent leaders with cross-functional knowledge are better able to communicate relevant information across departments in their organization. With their broad business knowledge they are also more aware of how their work impacts the business as a whole.
A good example of a company with a department that became misaligned with the business’s best interests is Lego. In the early 2000s their profit was in decline. Among other factors, this was because the product team began greatly increasing the variety of Lego bricks. A greater variety of parts meant higher unit costs for the Lego kits. Thus, profit declined. After they reduced the variety of Lego bricks again in subsequent years, profit improved. If the product team more regularly considered the financial impact of their work, perhaps the problem could’ve been avoided or mitigated earlier. This is just one example of how organizational alignment through cross-functional knowledge could help minimize costly mistakes.
Discovery, Upskilling, & Optimizing Human Resources
Cross-functional learning helps you discover what roles you’re best suited for/interested in, and makes employees more flexible to the labor & skill demands of the company.
Developing your knowledge of many different functions can help you discover what path you want to take in your career. You’ll figure out what’s truly interesting and fulfilling to you, and discover which skills are transferrable from one function to another. This means you can better strategize which roles to take in order to fulfill your career goals, and makes it easier to switch your career path if your interests or priorities change.
On the company level, an increasing amount of emphasis is being placed on upskilling initiatives due to the rapid pace of change in today’s economy. Encouraging a healthy amount of regular cross-functional learning can help prime employees for more significant upskilling efforts. Additionally, T-shaped professionals with cross-functional knowledge can be moved into new roles more flexibly. This enables you to optimize your usage of existing human resources. Lisa Stern Hayes (a top Google recruiter) is quoted as saying: “Think about how quickly Google evolves. If you just hire someone to do one specific job, but then our company needs change, we need to be rest assured that the person is going to find something else to do at Google. That comes back to hiring smart generalists.”
Problem Solving & Innovation
Cross-functional knowledge provides fuel for problem solving & innovation, and removes barriers to it such as functional fixedness.
Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits you to only think about or use something (such as a piece of knowledge) in the way it was originally intended to be used. A classic example of this is what happened when factories started using electricity instead of steam engines. Steam engines required production to be organized around a central drive shaft, preventing them from being organized in order of production steps. When electricity was introduced, the few factory owners that adopted it used it to continue powering their central drive shafts. Virtually zero efficiency gains were realized. 30 years later, they realized that electricity could power small electric motors in place of a central drive shaft. This freed the factory to be organized in a logical order of production, resulting in huge efficiency gains. The point here is that it’s very easy to get stuck in a set mindset about the way things work. However, if you want to improve a process or innovate, you must overcome functional fixedness.
Cross-functional learning can help reduce your tendency to have a functionally fixed mindset. Every specialization has its own blindspots, and often it takes connecting & adapting an idea or approach from a different discipline to solve a problem in yours. As Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things.” Cross-functional learning makes you more inclined to find connections between seemingly disparate information, and gives you more knowledge to apply to problems & fuel innovation. As a side note, memory & recall is associative. Finding connections between things helps cement them into your memory and builds more cues for recall.
To further corroborate the idea that cross-functional knowledge contributes to innovation & problem solving, consider InnoCentive. InnoCentive is an open innovation platform that uses crowdsourcing to find solutions to problems for organizations. The nature of the “crowd” is inherently cross-functional, as each person has a different background and knowledge. NASA posed a challenge on InnoCentive with a $20K prize for the best solution to predicting solar flares. A retired radio frequency engineer won the prize with a solution that could predict solar flares with 85% accuracy and a 3-sigma confidence interval 8 hours before they happen. This was a dramatic improvement from the previous solutions by the specialized NASA engineers themselves.
Conclusion
T-shaped professionals who engage in cross-functional learning are tremendous assets. Their capacity for innovation, collaboration, adaptability, and seeing the bigger picture is a competitive advantage for any organization.
Autopilot Learning is the best solution for quick, daily, cross-functional learning. We send you an infographic with a piece of knowledge from a different functional area each day. These infographics take 30 seconds to a minute to read, and are delivered conveniently to your text messages. The brevity of the infographics frees you up to focus on your chosen specialization while continuing to expand & reinforce the horizontal portion of your T-shaped skills.
