When Expertise Becomes a Cage

Being good at something can become a surprisingly effective way to stop doing anything else.

You solve a difficult problem. Then another. Eventually, you become “the person who does X”. Your reward for developing expertise is permanent custody of it. Occasionally, you’re allowed a holiday, provided nothing happens.

Specialisation has value. Deep knowledge matters, and some work genuinely requires rare skills. There is no single right balance, and people should have a say in how they develop. Expecting everyone to become equally capable at everything is its own peculiar ambition.

But we can specialise too early, while the work is still changing and we’re still discovering what it requires. We divide responsibilities before understanding the problem, then wonder why adapting involves so many handovers.

Consider a team where only Steve understands the deployment process and only Alex feels confident exploring the user experience. Every relevant decision passes through them. The team’s ability to experiment depends on two calendars and the continued good health of two people.

That is a fragile arrangement, however efficient it looks on paper. Sharing specialists across teams can make sense, particularly when skills are scarce, but I think the savings often deserves a closer look. A data scientist allocated across six teams may spend so much time switching contexts that they rarely get to explore any one problem deeply. Everyone has access to expertise. Almost nobody has enough of it.

Cross-training takes effort. It takes time from both the person learning and the person teaching, and it won’t remove every need for a specialist. Still, a team gains options when more people can contribute beyond their usual boundaries. That’s the useful promise of being T-shaped: depth in an area, with enough breadth to collaborate and help elsewhere. *appropriate breadth will differ by person and context.

I’d want to be careful about turning someone’s strength into a boundary they never chose. I think expertise should create opportunities for people as well as the organisation.

Listen out for things like:

• “It’ll be quicker if Sarah does it. We’ll cross-train someone next time.”
• “We can’t spare him to learn anything else. He’s too important where he is.”
• “Just send it to the central team. They’ll fit us in when they have capacity.”
• “Dave is the only person who can do that.”
• “We can’t take this on. Our specialist is busy.”

Sometimes those can describe a genuine constraint. Sometimes they describe a dependency we’ve become rather comfortable maintaining.