The term jack of all trades is sometimes seen as positive, but the full idiom actually goes “jack of all trades, master of none” – meant as a criticism of stretching too broadly and therefore not being actually good at any one thing. Let me tell you why you should be a proud master of none as a business owner.
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Business leaders should be jacks of all trades. Hi I’m DJ from Rainbow Dragon Digital and in today’s video I want to talk about my opinion on how leaders should actually have a wide breadth of knowledge rather than deep knowledge.
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People throw around the term jack of all trades to as a bit of an insult because you know, “jack of all trades, master of none” meaning that if you know lots of things you’re no good at anything. And I think I would care to disagree about this when it comes to business leadership.
Now specialists are great and they’re really important as a part of business but as a leader, as the business owner, I think you should be a master of none. I think you really need to be able to learn lots of different things so that you know how much you don’t know about different things.
And this is the real key here.
Really understanding how much you don’t know about an area where you’re not an expert in so that you’re aware of how to ask for the right help. And I think it’s really important that as a business owner you should be really unafraid to ask for help. Ask for help in areas that you know you don’t know enough about.
But when you are really buried deep inside a thing, when you are a specialist in a certain area, it’s very, very likely that you don’t even know how much you don’t know about other areas of your business. And business has so many different moving parts that you really need to make sure are moving correctly from your marketing to your HR to your finances to your sales to your product development to your logistics – these are all areas and then there’d be so many more for many different businesses.
So it’s really important that you know what kind of depth all of these places are required for your business. So then you know where to use your resources most wisely in your business.
Now, a lot of people think that by trying to go and learn lots of different things it looks a bit like egotistical that you want to know everything and you want to have your fingers in all the pies. But, really, it’s quite the opposite. It’s really learning about how to drop your ego and when you learn lots of different things you will start to realise how much you don’t know and you should kind of automatically have a drop in ego and realise that this is an area that I need help in. This is an area I need to hire someone in. This is where I need a specialist.
So I don’t mean to say that specialists are not important or that business leaders are not important. There is a synergy that needs to happen here between business leaders who know enough about all the different things directing specialists to really utilise their skills in the best way that makes the whole business machine work well.
And that’s what you want to achieve. You want to achieve a business machine. And the key to that is being able to trust specialists with their speciality to do the things that you know need to happen to keep the whole business ticking.
So I hope that makes sense to you and I hope that it helps you a little bit in trying to figure out how to lead your business in the best way. And I would love to discuss this if you have the time if you care and so feel free to email me or message me on my website or find me on linkedin.