Being a Generalist Is Killing Your Career — and It’s Ruining Legal Ops

These days, there’s a lot that keeps me up at night. I can’t seem to turn my brain off. My mind is constantly running. I’ve always been like this. I can barely sit through a TV show — I’m either writing down ideas or big questions or a bass riff that I’ve got stuck in my head. 

But right now, I’m obsessing over the shift I’ve been seeing in the last few years. It’s holding legal tech and operations back. It’s absolutely pouring sand on any fire.

I’ve seen people I mentor — and people I learn from — gravitate toward stepping into or creating roles with breadth across multiple pillars and disciplines, like financial management, technology, project management, and more. 

But this obsession with breadth, not depth, is ruining our field. And it’s holding careers back from reaching their potential. And as I look out at the future of our field — the future with stratospheric potential — I know that we have to leave this need for breadth behind. 

There has to be another way. 

Breadth might not seem like a bad thing — isn’t a broad scope what defines operations in the first place? But here’s the thing: So many employees are reaching for breadth before they master a single discipline in depth. Instead of having deep expertise in a variety of fields, we’ve come to rely on jacks-of-all-trades but masters-of-none. 

Right now, legal ops is becoming a five-headed monster that does a little bit of everything and — predictably — falls short of impacting growth. Goals get nebulous. Promotion chains get swapped at the last minute without transparency. Mandates become so fluid that they lose all meaning. And that lack of clarity is a direct result of a flexible, ever-changing scope. It’s an obsession with breadth for the field and for the people who make it happen. It’s grounding us instead of fueling us.

The future of legal ops needs a principled decision: Let legal ops do legal ops. Let legal ops do legal ops excellently, instead of doing 26 things with middling success.

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When I was on the road to mastering playing bass, I didn’t spend hours per day fiddling on other instruments. I lived, breathed, ate, and slept any information I could get about becoming a better bass player. I only read bass trade magazines and blogs, and I studied music exclusively from that instrument's point of view.

I played three to five hours a day, and building up callouses wasn’t particularly glamorous. Mornings were for woodshedding and performing scales over and over until I built muscle memory. I’d buy a new book every few months and spend afternoons learning new styles, like the thump of James Jamerson and other bass greats I learned from Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Saturdays were Paul McCartney days, where I’d take apart the charts of every Beatles song. At night, I’d run to a rehearsal or a live show.

I did this for five years straight, and I didn’t get good. I got great. And when I’d get antsy in one music genre I mastered, I’d jump to another one. I made it all the way across the rock spectrum from indie electro to garage, to classic, disco, hip hop, and even brushed up on alt country. I didn’t get great by trying to learn a thousand things all at once. I stayed laser focused. There was nothing else.

And those five years revealed what has become a deeply held, proven belief: We should all be obsessed with one thing — or, 1.2 things. (I’ll explain that .2 in a minute.) We should have absolute mastery. We can’t chase mastery of everything — that defeats the point.

Only a team made up of employees with absolute mastery over their specific craft can actually create impact. A pack of masters-of-none won’t move the needle. And legal tech organizations need to shift their thinking and structure around this new mandate: Teams need experts. 

Depth, not breadth.

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When I started my career in technology, my single obsession was to understand every single element of knowledge management. I wanted to live, breathe, eat, and sleep learning about tech, data, and new behavioral practices to capture a legal department’s knowledge into a digital space where other stakeholders could leverage it more quickly and efficiently. So with the same approach I’d used when mastering the bass, I dove in. And like the bass, it took five years of singular obsession. 

There was a ton of experimenting — and some blank stares as I struggled to articulate and conceptualize. But there was a moment when it all coalesced, when I had the understanding and expertise and depth. It meant that I could do what was actually necessary in the job: innovate. I could pitch an idea that would end up revolutionizing our organization. And I did it within an intentional constraint: It was all within my one, singular arena of mastery.

And then I got antsy and changed genres. After moving on from Cisco, I intentionally decided to leave all the knowledge management work behind. It was scary. I was not only fluent in it, but the industry got a hold of my slides and frameworks and made them theirs. I was speaking and advising to dozens of companies how to implement “KM” in their legal departments — as I stared at my remit at Spotify with complete fear: build the company’s first deals desk that moves over 300 contract types across from deal inception to signature in time for Spotify’s IPO.

I had no experience doing exactly this, but I had experience discovering how to master something. There were late nights, scales-filled mornings, and calls to my former colleagues at Cisco asking for help on top of some amazing teammates and collaborators at Spotify supporting the effort. Four months after I started at Spotify, the deals desk v1.0 was live.  

Now, about the 0.2 I mentioned earlier. It’s a nod to the fact that as knowledge workers, we’re expected to be good at several things. How can we avoid compromising our obsessive mastery for employability? 

It’s actually pretty simple. Your one, singular area of expertise is bound to have adjacent areas you could pick up along the way to complement the work and the outcomes. Think of it as learning the language of your related disciplines — can you have a coherent conversation with your peers who have related expertise? Do you have a sense of confidence during these conversations or collaborations? That’s your 0.2: It’s a way your area interacts with the organization at large.

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So, now what? As our field moves into v3.0 — or what I’m calling Space Travel — we need to reject the generalist and the creep toward breadth that I’ve witnessed. Individuals and organizations both have roles to play here: Individuals can commit to dogged pursuit of excellence in one specific area, and organizations can empower their employees to pursue depth. Organizations can and must narrow employee scope. It’s the only way to ensure impact. It’s the only way to create growth. 

As I look out at my next few years, I know that I’m leaving behind anything that doesn’t serve innovation. I’m leaving behind anything that stops growth. I’m simplifying. I’m pursuing mastery. I’m mentoring people and building teams that empower others to focus on their strengths, talents, and interests — and putting them into roles that work with their particular, unique thinking-styles.

I’m telling people to do their scales. I’m learning something new, too, and it’s going to take hours in the studio. 

Ready for laser focus? Let’s build some callouses together.