Suyin Aerts
May 27, 2022

Pieces of a puzzle

In a way I love puzzles, but I hate them as much. Because the pieces all are made in a way they can only have one place in the total image. It is always a big challenge for my patience. I do not feel like a piece of the puzzle myself. Which used to make me a little sad, trying to find my spot. Wondering what to choose, and maybe loose.

As a generalist I always felt as if I could fill in more than only one spot in the puzzle.

At first, that was not something  that I saw as an opportunity, but working with different coaches: sport coaches, personal coaches and business coaches I started to understand that what I thought as a negative point turns out to be rather positive.

If you imagine a company or a project team as a puzzle, what I think we should do first is give the specialist their spot. It would be such a pity to break a piece of a specialist to make him fit in the puzzle. They are the pieces with exact angles that can only have one place to make the puzzle work.

But luckily a company is not a puzzle which you buy with some pieces you need to put in the right spot. A company is a blank page, where we should find a good place for specialist. Then we will have some open spaces left which we need to fill.

To find the right specialist to fill these gaps it would be very time consuming, it is as if you need to find the missing piece of a puzzle in between pieces of a totally different puzzle; rather impossible.

When I was a kid there was a successful series called “Barba papa”, these colorful characters could become anything and any shape they wanted. That is what generalist love to do, blend in and become the glue in an organization. When a generalist is able to find a spot and lead, they are able to connect people with one another.

As a company leader and project leader myself I look for the barba papa’s because they come with an extra, when you need them at a certain moment to fill another gap, they might even accept to take that challenge and love it.

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