Skill-stacking: How one long-term strategy can make you irreplaceable in the workplace

All lawyers know that becoming great at something requires the accrual of specific expertise over time. A narrow focus, and a deep knowledge. This is, after all, what our clients pay us for. Bespoke advice delivered relative to a specific fact pattern in the context of a particular client’s business or life.

However, what if I told you there’s another strategy to becoming irreplaceable at work, albeit one that appears contrary to the widely-held opinion, particularly amongst lawyers, that you have to be the best – or expert – at something to be successful.

What if I told you you could build a highly successful legal career – becoming perhaps irreplaceable – by developing a higher than average ability in a unique combination of skills, without necessarily becoming an expert in any one of them?

What, I don’t need to be an expert?

Does that sound too good to be true? Well bear with me.

Dilbert is on hand to help. Well, strictly speaking author and illustrator, cartoonist Scott Adams.

As Scott Adams says:

“My combined mediocre skills are worth far more than the sum of the parts. If you think extraordinary talent and a maniacal pursuit of excellence are necessary for success, I say that’s just one approach, and probably the hardest. When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.”

So whilst one career success strategy may be to become an expert above all else, another may be to combine a relatively deep understanding of a number of distinct subjects.

But, I hear you ask, we can’t just replace deep expertise in one subject with less than full coverage knowledge across more subject areas, can we?

Well, this is where building a skill-stack as a lawyer really comes into its own. Skill-stacking is not necessarily a contradictory strategy to becoming an expert in your field. Rather it can be complementary. The combination of deep expertise in one highly specific legal area plus a unique stack of additional complementary skills, is particularly compelling.

Going deep, and simultaneously broad in unique and uncommon ways can reap huge benefits in your career and elevate your professional brand along the way.

Ok, so how do I do it?

Skill-stacking is the deliberate combining of an above average ability in a number of distinct yet complimentary areas, with the resulting – and hopefully unique – package of skills making you inherently more valuable in the workplace.

The idea is to get pretty good at a number of complementary yet diverse skills. The aim is not to be the best, but to be a consistent say 8 or so out of 10 in each of them.

The trick is – over time – to become the only person (or at least one of only a handful of people) skilled in all those distinct areas combined, and therefore uniquely valuable to your place of work, perhaps even the industry itself.

It’s a slow-burn strategy in the sense that accruing the unique combination of skills may take time, but by allowing yourself to develop a breadth of skills, alongside the depth of the legal expertise you’ll be accruing through your daily legal practice, you’ll increase your knowledge and utility, and enhance your in-role value over time. It may also provide you with different and unforeseen career opportunities in the future.

Sounds simple enough. Can you give me an idea of what that might look like?

Yes! An example of skill-stacking in the legal industry might look like this.

Imagine you’re an intellectual property (IP) lawyer who worked in a call centre whilst at university, spent time learning about marketing and communications and have subsequently developed a deep interest in personal branding for entrepreneurs and online influencers.

Your prior experience plus personal interests could give you a skill-stack which includes sales and customer service, in the moment problem-solving, marketing and communication knowledge plus branding and strategy expertise tailored to current business trends.

Accordingly, you could, by leveraging your marketing knowledge, technical legal expertise and sales skills, be uniquely placed to support your firm’s expansion into a new client segment: advising creative agencies on IP matters for themselves and their clients.

Alternatively, you could leverage your skills by establishing your own boutique consultancy combining IP law with an advisory services for individual online creators.

A famous non-legal industry example of skill-stacking is the oft cited participation of Steve Jobs’ in a calligraphy course whilst in college. Dropping into the class, which had no relevance to his degree major, he drew from this typography knowledge and skill base years later when developing the Apple computer, by crafting beautiful typeface and design to influence the font and look and feel of the Apple computer. Had he not dropped in to that class the Apple computer and brand may not have become what it is today.

The possibilities of skill-stacking are both numerous and exciting.

Alright. I can see how building a skill-stack might support my employer, but what’s in it for me?

Well, beyond the obvious benefits of:

• becoming (hopefully) the only person with your unique skill-stack;
• becoming more knowledgeable or skilled in your chosen areas;
• making you a more marketable asset both within and outside of your current workplace;
• developing your professional uniqueness, and consequently, your professional branding,

there are plenty of ancillary benefits to skill-stacking, including:

• that fostering broad knowledge promotes cross-fertilisation of ideas: you’ll make new connections more easily, thereby enhancing your ability to think ‘outside of the box’, which can make work more interesting and engaging, spark your creativity and innovation and make you more adept at opportunity-spotting generally, all of which can enhance your own career development;
• enhanced discernment and decision-making: you may develop your ability to assess multiple possibilities and choose the best one based on the circumstances, rather than tending towards bias in favour of one, already known solution;
• it can future-proof your career, giving you the ultimate career insurance. If there are industry shifts, or you’re made redundant, you may more easily pivot to a new role based on your broader skill base.

You’ve convinced me. How do I start?

For many of us, truly understanding our innate unique skills and talents is a challenge, but that’s absolutely the place from which to begin building your skill-stack. So, the first step in the four part skill-stacking framework is to know where we’re starting from.

1. Look within, at the skills you already have.

Do you already have a unique combination of skills that you’re not making use of? Do a personal skills audit. Grab some paper and brainstorm your current skill-stack. In doing so, think about your previous studies, your interests in school, college or university. Consider your previous hobbies. In which areas do you already have specific knowledge? Also consider the transversal skills you developed as a result of your interests and hobbies. Consider what you’re already known for. What kind of knowledge or skill(s) do people already approach you for? Get it all on the page.

To enhance your findings, ask a friend or trusted colleague to name the areas in which they think you’re skilled. What are the specific skills they value in you? Note these down too.

From there we can start to do what comes more naturally: comparison! As such, step 2 is to…

2. Look outside at the skills people in the legal industry or your specific practice area commonly possess.

This purpose of this step is to avoid deliberately creating an obvious or common skill-stack. It should encourage you to opt for skill combinations which are unusual in your practice area, or within the broader legal industry.

Look around you and identify what you perceive to be the skills-breadth of others. Be a detective. What skills, knowledge or expertise do your colleagues, or others in the industry, or your practice area, possess?  Then use your analytical skills. Which skills are the most common? Which do you notice occurring most frequently? Which skills are the outliers?

Make a list of the skills which you’re identifying as regularly apparent in others. Also note down any outliers.

3. Look for Opportunity

With the results of steps one and two in mind, we’re now looking to identify gaps and opportunities. Ask yourself which skills you might add to your set that would help you stand out, be unique and give you a competitive edge? What skill combinations are not yet apparent in the market? What could be a sought-after combination in the future?

This can be done as a purely analytical, logical and systematic exercise. Fill in the gaps. Build a breadth of knowledge. Enhance your value. However, there can be limited interest and intrinsic motivation in gaining new skills in areas that do not interest, or (dare I say it) even bore, you. So, try to steer clear of these.

Instead remember that the magic of skill-stacking happens when it gets personal. Accordingly, I often invite my clients to use the two ‘I’s framework at this stage of the process. Consider both your interest and your instinct.

Ask yourself:

What am I interested in? When you’re thinking about it, what do you wish you already knew more about?

Then ask yourself:

What am I instinctively drawn to learning more about? What do I feel pulled towards learning more about? Which topics speak to me? With which topics do I feel an inherent connection?

This second question asks you to delve, not into your head-based, “interest”-level thinking, but rather into what your body, heart or gut are telling you. When you sit quietly and listen to the whispers from within, what do you hear?

This exploration can often result in topics not at all connected with your current role, or even in the legal industry. It may also result in you uncovering topics which were not identified in steps one and two. Don’t be disturbed by this. Equally, don’t dismiss these new ideas because they are ‘not a logical extension of what you already know’, or because it just ‘doesn’t make sense’ to spend time learning about x, y, z. Try to step away from judgment or realism for a moment and write down every idea which emerges.

Ideas that are coming intuitively from within, are likely areas you’ll be most motivated to learn about in sufficient detail and depth to build an above average understanding. These topics could be the very ones that result in you creating a uniquely personal and valuable skill-stack.

4. Take Action – build your skill-stack!

This is where the rubber meets the road and you get to start building! And it all starts with permission. Give yourself permission to explore and take that first step.

Avoiding overwhelm at this stage, is key. It’s easy to see a huge skill-mountain to climb and to lack the enthusiasm or energy to set about learning. To avoid falling into this trap start with just one (or up to a maximum of three) areas of interest which do not overlap too much, but which could compliment each other. Then think about what the smallest step might be to start to build that skill. Perhaps it’s to read a book, watch that TED talk, review a study or paper, register for an online course, visit a gallery, talk to a trainer, expert or someone in the know.

Write down your next step, and then set yourself a reasonable deadline by which to have taken action. Make a commitment to yourself right now to take that action!

Then, go and do it!

What’s next?

The exploration and application of skill-stacking of course doesn’t stop there. Once you have developed a unique skill-stack (or even whilst you’re building it), consciously look for opportunities to use these new skills in your current workplace and beyond. Start to build a resume (i.e. make a written or mental note) containing examples of when you’ve made use of, or relied upon, your unique skill-stack so that you can highlight it at your next appraisal, promotion assessment or interview.

And whatever you end up doing and however you end up using your skill-stack always remember: improving your skill-stack is a continuous career development process of looking outwards, not just upwards!

[Article Resources / References]

1. How the Scott Adams (Dilbert cartoonist) leveraged skill-stacking:

https://sourcesofinsight.com/scott-adams-success-formula/#:~:text=makes%20the%20difference.-,Adams%20writes%3A,like%20one%20big%20mediocre%20soup

2. David Epstein, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, Macmillan 2019

3. Online article by Tomas Pueyo, 2 Sept 2021, with excellent visuals conveying the concept of how excellence is achieved by skill-stacking:

https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/how-to-become-the-best-in-the-world