Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard the whole “we want T-shaped people” speech that a lot of “Agile” companies, HR and management have latched onto. Woohoo for capability matrixes! 

For those not in the know, here is a very quick overview:

I shaped people

These people are specialists. They know one thing really well, but lack knowledge in other areas of the business. As I work in web development, my examples refer to this discipline. So a person might know backend development (perhaps in a specific language, e.g. ASP.NET C#) but have no clue when it comes to front-end dev, design etc.

T shaped people

Businesses LOVE T-shaped people. Here, a person is a specialist in one discipline, e.g. backend development, but also have a broad knowledge in other areas, e.g. design and analytics. A lot of ‘T-shaped’ images you’ll find online will indicate that they should have some knowledge in every domain relevant to them, forming the ‘T’ - this is not the case as they may have broad knowledge in IT security but no idea when it comes to Requirements gathering and specification.

M shaped (or comb-shaped) people

Here we have a person who is specialist in a number of areas, with broad knowledge in a few more. This person is underrated, often not appreciated by businesses until they leave. I consider myself to be in this group.

O shaped people

Someone with specialist knowledge in all areas of the team/business. A unicorn. Does not exist in reality.

So there you have it. A quick overview of these “shaped people” that I’m tired of hearing about. Unless you already have the skills in your business to allow people to become cross-functional - comb-shaped people, you’ll need to recruit some talented individuals to help you to achieve this. If you can’t afford to recruit? Don’t even try to shape people into something they’re not.