How difficult it is to spot excellent generalists?

Jeremy Lin is the new sudden star of the NBA and a player whose explosion of talent has surprised many  teams, coaches, and fans. It seems like the reason his skills had gone unnoticed before his super week in the NBA is because while very good in many aspects of the game, he does not excel at one skill in particular, making him difficult to categorize. As it is set up right now, the professional Basketball scouting system is designed to spot specialists, not people with multidimensional game personalities like Lin.

As Rex Walters, USF basketball coach, admits, “most colleges start recruiting a guy in the first five minutes they see him because he runs really fast, jumps really high, does the quick, easy thing to evaluate". Lin recognizes this disadvantage himself: “I just think in order for someone to understand my game, they have to watch me more than once, because I’m not going to do anything that’s extra flashy or freakishly athletic." 


With a quantitative approach, it is easy to evaluate one single skill: identify the key characteristics and behaviors of the skill, figure out ways and metrics to measure this behavior, measure historical data to set quality boundaries, and apply this measuring ruler to anyone you want to evaluate. In basketball you can uses many of the metrics available for every kind of player you are looking for: assists, points, turnovers, points per game, etc.

The same is true for innovation teams. It is easy to spot a great engineer, product manager, business analyst, designer. You can apply the 'discipline lens' to look at their credentials, past work, references, etc. to have a better understanding how good they are at that one specific skill.

HR business partners have been coached for years to be able to spot the best 'specialist' available but as the Jeremy Lin example shows, many innovation generalists do not comply with the established talent stereotypes and are so strange for the system that companies don't know exactly what to do with them and often their talent ends up being underutilized at a job that doesn't take full advantage of the their potential.

Specialist versus generalists. Does not have to be 'either' or 'or'. Companies will always need both but as innovation becomes more critical to survive, only the organizations who understand the shortcomings of their current recruiting systems and are willing to use a different measuring ruler will survive.



Update
The Washington Post has a great article about "How Jeremy Lin’s star power could go unnoticed for so long"

"N.C.A.A. and NBA scouts and general managers are like any leaders looking to identify talent for their teams: They rely too much on metrics and data. They look for people who remind them of people they know, and who they think will fit in with their teams. Having to limit their recruiting pools somehow, they don’t spend time looking for people in unexpected places. And perhaps most important, they get consumed by the idea of recruiting big names with big pedigrees."


Again, when looking for talent we are victims of our mental models, either created or inherited. It takes effort in getting out of one's comfort zone to question our assumptions and beliefs. It is easier to categorize people based the mental models we already understand and have mastered than to approach the person we have in front of us with an evenhanded mind and figure out whether they would fit an alternative better model.

Most will say the reason these habits exist is because of laziness but in reality it is mostly because of pragmatism. Existing models are probably valid for 99% of the cases. But like Lin's example in basketball demonstrates, or like many people you have probably met throughout your career, by not questioning existing and given assumptions constantly you could be passing on spotting the next big star.