The Talents You Don't Recognize

Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.

  Career Development   Talent Management  

How do you promote your skills, enhance your capabilities and manage your talents?

Depending upon who you follow and the opinions that resonate with you, you might amplify your strengths. Or you might work on compensating for your weaknesses. You might round out your skillsets and adopt a more generalist approach. Or you might focus on and develop greater degrees of specialization.

The reason that all of this advice exists—and that each argument appears to contradict another—is that, within reason, they are all sound suggestions. They just happen to be sound suggestions for different circumstances. Once again, we find ourselves very quickly in the orbit of "it depends."

In more technical disciplines and more defined specializations, taking a narrower view of skill development makes sense. Building further expertise and insight in that specialization arguably makes you more valuable, builds greater relevance and allows you to further hone and refine your capabilities.

In more generalist occupations, though, building breadth may be a more successful strategy than building depth. Being able to leverage a wider range of skills and expertise may prove to be more appropriate, and allow you to be more effective in a broader range of situations.

This is true even in project management. I've made the argument before that project management is the…

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