#579 How to build an M-shaped career

**Helen** (0:00)
Hi, everybody, it is Helen from the Squiggly Careers Podcast. And before today's episode starts, I wanted to let you know about something that Sarah and I have created for the summer.
We are going to be launching a series all about a career well spent. We're going to release four episodes, one every Tuesday, and it's going to be us in conversation with an expert who can give us a different perspective on what it means to have a career well spent. We'll talk about longevity, we'll talk about relationships, we'll talk about time, we'll talk about making a difference. We wanted this to be a community learning moment too. So on Thursdays, we're going to have a LinkedIn live where you can bring your questions, you can bring your reflections, and we'll discuss the episodes together as a community.
All the links you need are going to be in the Squiggly Careers newsletter. So if this sounds like something you want to get involved in, and we really, really hope you do, it's all free and it'll be a great learning moment, then all you need to do is sign up for the newsletter, just go to squigglynewsletter.com, that's squigglynewsletter.com, and we will send you everything you need to know to get involved. But for now, let's get on with today's episode.

**Sarah** (1:09)
You were never meant to master just one thing. You were meant to be the person who can see how everything connects. We've borrowed brilliance from lots of things in the past, but we have never borrowed brilliance from a letter.

**Helen** (1:24)
M-shaped people have multiple elements of mastery and they're able to connect the dots in their career.

**Sarah** (1:30)
Why we should care or why this might be interesting, it can make you more resilient. It perhaps feels harder to replace or to replicate.

**Helen** (1:38)
People that might succeed with a different shape can sometimes be quite confronting to other people's idea of success.

**Sarah** (1:45)
This is about having multiple areas of mastery. If you were picking one area of mastery today, Helen, where would you start?
Hi, I'm Sarah.

**Helen** (2:00)
And I'm Helen.

**Sarah** (2:01)
And this is the Squiggly Careers Podcast, where every week we borrow some brilliance from a person, a place, something we've read or something even more unusual, which is what we've got in store for you today. And we try to turn that brilliance into something useful for you and your career.

**Helen** (2:18)
And today's episode is another one in partnership with Post-it. We are going to be making use of Post-it super sticky, which is basically just a giant Post-it. And we'll be bringing to live today's ideas with their products.

**Sarah** (2:31)
And so we've borrowed brilliance from lots of things in the past, but we have never borrowed brilliance from a letter.

**Helen** (2:39)
I do love the randomness of our borrowed brilliance.

**Sarah** (2:41)
I feel like the ones that I come up with are often quite left field.

**Helen** (2:44)
Yeah, I know. I feel like at the beginning, I was like chairs and you're like, this is so weird. And now I feel like now you've gone with it. Yeah, now I've got a matrix and you're like, that's not new. We're going to go with the letter.

**Sarah** (2:54)
So the letter that we are borrowing brilliance from is M, because I had been reading a bit about M-shaped careers.
And some of you might have come across this before. So certainly when we started our careers, and there was lots of generalist versus specialist chat, people talked about I-shaped careers, which were specialists, like I've got deep specialism in one area, which I can't relate to, because I had none of that during the start of my career. And then I think as I progressed in my career, I definitely heard other leaders talk about this idea of like T-shaped leadership in particular, which was almost, you should have already had your specialism, like ready to go. And now you needed some breadth. So you've got depth and breadth. Depth and breadth, yeah. And I remember always thinking, oh, well I've got breadth, but I haven't got the depth.

**Helen** (3:45)
I remember that.

**Sarah** (3:46)
Oh, have I done that the wrong way round? And actually I was like researching this, and that's sometimes called like dash, because it's like a dash. And I was like, oh, it doesn't sound brilliant, does it?

**Helen** (3:55)
Dash shaped careers. I remember, I got feedback once, it was actually, I really remember I was at Eon. And because I had much more breadth, because even, I mean, I'm going back, but even then I'd worked in quite a few different industries, like mainly sales, marketing, innovation. So that was the kind of theme of my career. But I remember a senior manager saying to me, like implying your career is going to topple over because you've not got depth in a particular specialism. And I remember being like, oh, but I don't, I like, I like my dashiness.