Are you a “T-Shaped person”?
T-People
Let’s pretend:
A Customer Service Organization receives a barrage of customer feedback related to poor response times and lackluster quality. Leadership huddles, hears “slow and sloppy service,” and swiftly decides that training Customer Service Agents in communication skills will solve the problem. In this corporate fairy tale, training is treated as a magic wand. As the Learning Designer, I am tasked with building a comprehensive communications training program (not just a single shiny course, but a small communication curriculum tied to strategic goals) to address Leadership’s perceived base problem and their preferred remedy.
Big deal, so what?
The interaction leaves me turning over a few nagging questions. Has Leadership actually investigated the problem and demonstrated any meaningful understanding of it, or are they reacting with shallow, snap-judgment bias that outsources problem-solving to anyone but themselves? Are they defaulting to the familiar pattern of pushing interventions to internal or external entities such as Learning and Development (L&D), as if tossing a hot potato across the organizational chart? In practice, this looks less like collaborative problem solving and more like calculated, convenient distance from accountability.
In most of my career, L&D and its Designers sit neatly under the Human Resources umbrella. From that vantage point, I have had candid conversations with executives who unabashedly and intentionally funnel their assumed solutions straight to L&D. They plonk the solution and its associated responsibility onto a different organization, effectively manipulating the situation so they are disconnected from the intervention and insulated from the risks of an unsuccessful outcome. When things go sideways, the blame can be swiftly shifted to “training that didn’t work” rather than strategy that was never sound. This avoidance of responsibility is a popular and portable tactic that thrives anywhere relationships and reputations are on the line.
In the specific scenario, a needs assessment reveals that a cluster of causes is contributing to the mandate to “fix long call times and poor quality.” Outdated software, frequent system hiccups, and recurring disruptions drive a persistent backlog and delays in customer support despite the team’s best communication efforts. Employees experience the workplace as increasingly toxic, not because they cannot craft kinder sentences, but because core technical and process issues remain ignored. Over time, these unresolved issues drive up employee turnover, raise onboarding and ramp-up costs, and quietly erode institutional knowledge that cannot be easily captured or quantified. Every departure walks out the door with tacit expertise, customer context, and process shortcuts that no generic training module can replace.
The mess on the floor cannot be mopped up with the one-trick pony that is training. Leadership is often blinded by what psychologists call “the law of the instrument,” also known as the law of the hammer, Maslow’s hammer, or the golden hammer. Maslow famously noted that if the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as a nail. Leadership loves a good hammer: training feels tangible, controllable, and comfortably familiar. In plain terms, this cognitive bias leads to over-reliance on a single solution—in this case, training—regardless of whether it fits the actual problem. Whether executives want to acknowledge alternative perspectives or not, a thorough assessment can quickly reveal system constraints, process gaps, and cultural factors that cannot be fixed with the training hammer alone.
Rather than assuming that Leadership’s proposed solution is the best—or only—option, a more disciplined approach is to use data to buttress a case for non-training interventions and to suggest a better tool, such as a screwdriver instead of yet another hammer. A targeted data collection effort might show that there are simpler and cheaper levers to pull. The cost of investing in IT infrastructure, revisiting system architecture, or engaging internal IT professionals to design a more usable interface may pale in comparison to the direct, indirect, hidden, reputational, cultural, and opportunity costs of a sprawling training initiative that never touches the root cause. Uncovering these often-overlooked costs can help a project manager or change agent avoid dipping into contingency and management reserves to compensate for an ineffective solution. A well-designed needs assessment becomes the backbone of a recommendations package that showcases non-training options with better projected ROI rather than relying on “training by tradition.”
Sustained stakeholder involvement is crucial if the goal is to change performance rather than merely check boxes. Keeping stakeholders close to the process allows them to voice support, skepticism, or outright dissent early enough to matter. When feedback surfaces during the development stage instead of after launch, it can be examined, validated or invalidated with data, and integrated into the solution before expensive rework becomes inevitable. To manage this intentionally, a stakeholder engagement assessment matrix helps clarify who holds power, who has interest, and how each person prefers to receive information. From there, it becomes possible to design a communication plan that uses multiple channels—briefings, visual dashboards, narrative summaries, and working sessions—to ensure stakeholders actually understand the diagnosed root causes and the rationale for the recommended interventions. Ideally, the strategy highlights key findings, offers visually intuitive data views, situates the data in context, acknowledges the limitations of the analysis, and repeatedly invites feedback. That cycle of explanation and engagement builds shared ownership instead of silent sabotage.
Over the years, I have served as a Technical Team Manager, Training Designer, Facilitator, and Methods and Procedure Engineer. Those roles have repeatedly nudged, and sometimes shoved, me outside of the narrow “Designer” box where one is expected only to build polished, end user–facing learning experiences. A meaningful needs assessment is an invitation to step into a broader, bolder identity: becoming a more fully “T-shaped” professional. A T-shaped person brings deep expertise in one domain—the vertical stroke of the “T”—paired with a broad, working understanding of adjacent fields—the horizontal stroke. That combination helps someone contribute at an expert level while also collaborating credibly with specialists in other disciplines.
My vertical expertise lives primarily in Learning Development and Design. However, communicating effectively with internal and external stakeholders, subject matter experts, and end-user learners stretches the horizontal bar of my T. Every needs assessment becomes a doorway to wider worlds. The process lets me venture beyond the protective “walled garden” of design and wander into wild, unfamiliar fields—operations, IT, finance, change management—where I can listen, learn, and occasionally look delightfully, deliberately clueless while asking better questions. I relish the steep, serious learning curves that come with this cross-pollination. In truth, I do not just want to be a T-shaped person; I aspire to be a “TTTTTT” person, with multiple deep specializations rooted in a broad, generous understanding of how work really works.
Working closely with people outside my silo does more than widen perspective; it helps reveal what I do not yet know and what I have not yet thought to ask. When a call center supervisor explains how queue logic actually functions, or an IT analyst walks through system logs, or a finance partner surfaces hidden cost drivers, my mental model gets sharpened and expanded. That richer understanding feeds back into better problem framing, more credible recommendations, and more honest conversations with Leadership about when training is appropriate and when it is just a shiny, familiar hammer looking for another unsuspecting nail.
