A few years ago, I was a secondary school teacher with the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) in Niger State. During my service, I volunteered with a vibrant campus radio station, Search FM Radio (now Search Media).
I learned from the late Odafe Imogo (OD), a prominent on-air personality whose show, the Morning Ride with OD, was the flagship breakfast show in Minna.
He took a chance on me once and gave me several other opportunities to appear as a social commentator on the show. Working with him, I developed an understanding of communication as a development strategy. That experience was priceless, and I remain truly grateful for his lessons.
Shortly after we met, he challenged me: “Justice, I know you can talk, and you talk well, but the most important football player is not the striker,” he said one morning after an episode of the show.
"Do you know who the player is?" he asked.
I don’t remember my guess, but it wasn’t correct. I didn’t know much about football, and OD knew I didn’t, so he spared me further guesses and said,
“The most important player is the utility player, and if you want to grow in radio, you have to learn to do other things well."
This was my first experience in media. At the time, I was interested in research, writing, and presentations. But I couldn't even produce a show. So I saw this as a challenge and knew that doing as he advised would mean learning a lot more about the radio business.
Though I left Niger State upon completing my youth service the same year, I took his advice seriously, experimenting with it as I took up various roles in other sectors. When I started a podcast in 2023, I was reflecting on some of the biggest ideas that had inspired me. My experience with radio was one of them.
I had an early fascination with radio because growing up, my family lacked a TV set for many years (I had tinkered with the first one we had to ruin). Our attention inevitably shifted to the radio set as a primary source of entertainment, and I grew fond of that too. That fondness lasted long enough and led me to Search FM, where I met OD, and his advice has shaped my attitude toward work and personal growth.
Is the utility player truly an asset?
A utility player is adaptable and proficient across various functions (not necessarily roles) within an organization.
He or she is a versatile asset who can support other key areas of operations or transition between departments to add value across various organizational functions.
Though some think it is "a backhanded compliment, as it suggests the player is not good enough to be considered a specialist in one position." This derogatory sense is inadequate. It shouldn’t undermine robust conversations about whether multifunctional people are truly organisational assets.
I am not pitching a utility player (multifunctionalist, generalist) as a necessary replacement for specialists, as certain professions and industries should retain specialists as they deem fit. That said, even specialists can be utility players if they have a good deal of skill and interest in supporting other business functions.
Also, my position on utility players here contextualises my thoughts on the debate between generalists and specialists. I have found the work of David Epstein, whose book “Range” has influenced my understanding of this topic and addresses it better than I can. So in the rest of this article, I use the terms utility player and generalist interchangeably.
I believe utility players are undeniably germane for development organisations and others in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments.
For organisations, VUCA means an opportunity for advancement and agility, and utility players can meet such demands. Regarding these, a review of "Range" identifies "two distinct reasons for thinking the generalist (utility player) might have an edge over the specialist.”
"Generalists are better at navigating ‘wicked’ learning environments."
Utility players adjust to fill in gaps and provide needed support. Their openness and willingness to learn make them adaptable to uncertainty and ambiguity. Employees with these traits will prove valuable in complex, dynamic operations.
"Generalists end up with better ‘match quality.’"
Utility players may often find themselves in different contexts, whether learned or experienced. Still, they try to connect and integrate insights from those several domains and disciplines into a solid role they settle into later.
Here are 4 steps to consider
Becoming a utility player is more than just about how you change your organisational function. It's about exercising responsibility and making meaningful contributions to other areas of the organisation beyond what your job role requires.
Be genuinely interested in supporting your colleagues.
Development projects, for instance, usually focus on contributing to societies and often require cross-functional teams.
What makes a team so functional isn't that each person brings some form of expertise, but that each person is interested in supporting and contributing to others’ work.
Whenever I work from the office, I often pace around asking my colleagues what they're doing; some respond with a puzzle as if to say, "Are you my boss?" but some open up and share, and I have learned that those who do enjoy it because talking about your work is therapeutic. It always leads to an exchange of ideas that relaxes one's pressure to succeed and vets out low-hanging fruit.
Take Various Roles
Teaching, managing training and programs, broadcasting, recruitment, monitoring and evaluation, market research, and small business management are among the core responsibilities I have successfully handled in my previous roles. These experiences have taught me a lot about how research and strategy can inform organisational processes and outcomes more than I would have learned in one postgraduate course.
If you're a young graduate, consider trying out for as many functions as possible to become more versatile. You may not try various job roles across different sectors, especially if they are unconnected, but similar roles in diverse industries or within the same sector are just right. The duration is up to your discretion.
To thrive in VUCA environments, you must take professional development seriously; training and certifications will help you build skills and subject matter knowledge.
That said, your personal training isn’t a substitute for learning about what other teams are working on, supporting them, or trying out various job roles to build competency while testing your performance against your KPIs.
That’s because training and certifications are explorative and experimental opportunities, especially as you learn from experts. If they offer capstone projects, you'll get some experience, too. They also allow you to demonstrate versatility to potential employers or clients. Still, working with various departments and seeking feedback and guidance from more experienced or knowledgeable individuals in areas you want to learn will help you build multifaceted competence.
Join agile organizations
Some organisations are agile-oriented, so they breed versatility among their employees and help them grow into utility players. Agile organisations constantly identify, create, and maximise opportunities, wielding a “customer-centric, innovative, and collaborative culture [that enables] their employees to work in cross-functional and self-organising teams."
One study has identified dynamism and stability as the twin traits of agile organisations and recommends 18 practices, including continuous learning (structures that promote seamless learning) and role mobility (regular vertical and horizontal movements between roles and teams), which are the forte of utility players. The study also notes;
More than 90 percent of agile respondents say that their leaders provide actionable strategic guidance (that is, each team's daily work is guided by concrete outcomes that advance the strategy); that they have established a shared vision and purpose (namely, that people feel personally and emotionally engaged in their work and are actively involved in refining the strategic direction); and that people in their unit are entrepreneurial (in other words, they proactively identify and pursue opportunities to develop in their daily work).
There is no trick for identifying which organisations have a culture "of empowering teams to take responsibility and produce quickly to identify problems early."
Your chances of joining one increase if you examine the clarity of their vision and mission statements, how they structure their teams and processes, and how they measure performance. If you would like to join an agile team, here are five questions you might ask at your next interview;
Tell me a few stories of team and product failures and how the organisation responded.
How are decisions about products made at a team level? What approvals by leadership are required and why?
What are your company’s mission, vision, and values? What team communications are about getting to know each other as humans, not just as workers?
Are your teams releasing working software/products to your customers each sprint? If not, how often and why?
What experiments are your teams running to improve their collaboration, or how has your organisational design changed based on employee feedback?
Working in agile organisations can help you become a utility player soon enough because you would be working on different tasks, paired with experts in the same team, and churning out results sooner than you might in traditionally oriented organisations.
Be people-oriented
Now you know there are more opportunities to learn and grow if you're a utility player. Utility players thrive in agile organisations and VUCA environments by trying new ideas, measuring outcomes and performance, and iterating quickly with customer and client feedback, as well as input from other stakeholders for whom your products and services are targeted.
Being people-oriented will help you become more versatile and flexible, as you understand how your work affects the lives of the people you’re directly and indirectly responsible for.
Whenever I take on a new project, I constantly review how it impacts the target audience or achieves the donor's desired results. I do this by evaluating the project, reporting progress, and researching ways to improve my team's efforts.
The goal may vary by project, but it’s usually the same: how are audiences’ lives changing because of what we are doing? You cannot succeed otherwise because the success of your work hinges on the degree to which you reasonably answer this question.
One of the few things certain about my work is learning. I work with and for people with different backgrounds, experiences, and expertise. Little things are guaranteed because different projects yield different outcomes, and people usually have different needs.
What is certain is that you grow by working well, failing fast, learning quickly, and cultivating a genuine concern for people’s well-being.
Let me add that becoming a utility player is no guarantee of financial success. Today, most jobs are specialist roles, and recruiters prefer specialists. Yet those who are versatile and have a flexible approach to learning and working, who work in VUCA environments such as the development space, will find career fulfilment as utility players.
Reflecting on your professional journey, in what ways have you benefited from versatility?
As Frank Herbert once said, “One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.” — Frank Herbert.
