Specialist
Specialists are cautious, introspective, and highly loyal to authority. They value details and need to fully understand a topic before making decisions. Supportive and collaborative, they don’t obsess over having things their way—but they do obsess over getting things right.
Highlights: Precise Accepting of company policies Highly Responsive Matter-of-fact
Maximize your business potential by tapping into people’s natural strengths.
The Specialist Reference Profile—like all Reference Profiles—has many unique strengths and characteristics. Understanding the differences in your people can help you build a company that achieves the results you’re after. The same way you’d build a world-class sports team, knowing how your people think and work helps you optimize for success.
The Specialist on a team
Specialists are naturals at highly-skilled work. They’re known to be skeptical, factual, and analytical. They thrive in and help contribute to a culture that values efficiency and detailed work. Teams are often designed by default rather than intention. A strategic, data-driven approach to building teams is what helps organizations win.
Business strategy and the Specialist
Before you know whether someone is the right person for the job, you need total clarity and alignment on the results you’re after. What’s the goal or desired outcome? When we ask questions like this, we get a better understanding of the need to align people strategically for specific results.
When you put people in the right roles, you avoid turnover, toxicity, disengagement, and lost productivity. In the case of the Specialist, they naturally gravitate toward strategic activities that seek to produce quality work and increase efficiency.
Managing the Specialist
Often managers try to manage everyone the same way—and that’s usually the way they like to be managed. But this approach can backfire. People like to be managed differently—and it may not always be in a way that comes naturally to you. Even beyond the individual needs, teams require different leadership styles. You wouldn’t manage a sales team the same way you’d manage a team of developers.
When working with Specialists, remember that they’re reserved, respectful, sincere, and detail-oriented. They’re typically most effective with siloed work that requires exactness and accuracy with details. Specialists are great at doing things right and fast.
When managing this profile, consider some of the following suggestions:
Give them time to develop their specialty.
Provide clarity around rules and expectations.
Offer opportunities to work at a faster-than-average pace.
Let them work heads-down.
Recognize them regularly.
Provide them with as much information as possible to help them make decisions.
Explore talent optimization.
Companies that struggle to build high-performing teams are often missing critical people data. With our tools, expertise, experiance, and talent optimization, you can stop guessing at how to get the most from your people— and better align your people to deliver on the results you’re after.