A lot of business owners know that if you want to keep your business humming along without too many people jumping ship to start their own businesses, you have got to make sure that their skill sets are far enough from one another that nobody believes that they could do the entire business’s work all by themselves. If you can do this, you can keep your people around. After all, there is no sentence that is quite so powerful as, “I would never want to do that guy’s job” to keep people reasonably satisfied with the work that they are doing- and often to continue doing that work for you in particular. But there is also another reason why splitting up the skill sets is so useful to your business. And this reason is not quite as manipulative as keeping people happy enough not to create your competition.
The other, much nicer reason why it is good to keep people’s job descriptions and skills separate from one another is that you want everybody to be the very best that they can be. While the world is chock full of jacks of all trades, you do not want to go into the office and start playing with jacks. Jacks are a kid’s game, and you are an adult who needs to get a lot of things done in the real world.
You want your people to be aces in the hole. You want every member of your staff to be the very best that they can possibly be at their specific job functions. Maybe your accountant is as boring as a box of unsalted crackers- but if she can do her job to an exceptional degree, she might literally be worth millions to you. And after everything is said and done, that is what is most important to your organization. While you might want lots of skills from each person, remember what you pay them for.