When I started this series about The Great Skill Shift I knew I would be writing about you and your teams skills and how you work when them. But I wasn’t sure from the outset how much I would feel it touching on my own development journey and reflecting on the skills I have, I want and I need. Well, the fact is a lot and a lot about validation of the skills I have.
Along the way other things have also been strongly confirmed. Including:
- Our employees need a skills infrastructure to work with.
- HR professionals and people leaders need infrastructure to keep us on track to guide, develop and meet our goals.
The Visibility gap
And on the journey of identifying the skills visibility gap in you organization it will be helpful to ask:
- Do I know the skills in your team and are they all that is needed?
- Do my team members know their skills and what level they are at?
- Do I know the skills needed to achieve the organizational objectives and what it has?
I would suggest that the skills visibility gap is this is the biggest constraint on your AI investment right now.
When you bring your AI tools in and want to see the investment start to pay dividends it has to have something to build from and without an infrastructure it can’t build effectively nor intelligently.
The visibility problem
So the visibility problem that our teams are facing, that you are facing, and I have these raises three pertinent questions:
- What skills do we truly have in our organization today?
- Which skills are adjacent or emerging?
- Where are you over or under-investing in skills development?
Take a few minutes to answer these questions on a scale of one to six. I recommend it will be powerful if you jot down your answers as you go. And there is no judgment on how you’ve scored. Use a scale of 1 being absolutely not confident at all and 6 completely confident. Where do you think your organization is today?
I know when I ask myself, these questions it leads to further questions, as if often does…
- Do we have a skills bank to capture the data?
- Do we know what skills are in the organization (team, department, location, etc)?
- Do we know what level skills available today?
These are really, quite important questions to ask ourselves and supplement this with as you develop more trust your employees to share the journey as they might be seeing something in the marketplace you haven’t, or hearing something from their competitors or from other industry experts, and to trust that maybe that’s an area where it’s okay to invest in.
As to the question of under-investing or over-investing in skills development we have a few potential places to look for an answer. I proffer it can be found in your employee turn-over and hiring statistics; alongside our workplace engagement score, outcomes achieved or not achieved at every level, and what requests are coming in from the performance management conversations, notwithstanding individual learning and development requests.
I believe this questions and thinking about identifying the visibility gaps to leads to a significant point in your organizations growth. A a required cultural shift.
The Cultural Shift
Now we have this baseline regarding the skills visibility gap we must be prepared for what comes next, and that is a cultural shift. If we embrace the modality of a skills based organization (SBO), we can go from what we had before about shallow, temporary, short-term reactions, something far much more powerful.
At a high level the cultural shift to an SBO we can access these benefits:
- Shift from experience-based to skills-based decisions
- Breaking down workplace silos
- Access to talent on demand
- Amplified organizational agility
- Improved diversity
- Seamless future readiness
Let’s unpack these benefits.
When you move to being as a skill space organization, we actually move from the point where we’re trying to make decision, to be able to make skills-based activation decisions, that we want to move beyond those common markers 10 years in workforce, job tiles, needs minimum 5 year’s experience; to a place where we match people and the work. It also creates a truly democratized opportunity when you can activate the power of internal mobility because now we know who’s in the team.
Additionally, you can break down silos in the workplace. This visibility shows us who’s in the organization, where can we deploy talent! Gain insight where you can allocation someone onto just a project temporarily? It can start to remove your dependency on having to keep hiring and using contractors or consultants. Further, you get to create an internal marketplace where people can find jobs within your organisation.
Then we get to this point, we have a result of, we have increased mobility, we have faster response time to meet business needs, and we reduce micromanagement, because we’ve shifted it from questioning “Can they do it?” and asking “Do they actually have the skills?” As you’ve now recognized and identified employee’s skills. I believe this will also lead to significantly more trust in your organization’s decision making and freedom for employees to evolve.
Notwithstanding all of this the ecstasy of organizational agility! Achieving a level where you can quickly deploy employees based on their recorded skills and being bound static markers like job descriptions, but looking at good skilled the person is.
One of my personal favourites is this improved diversity. When you know the skills in your organization, we take away some of those biases, unconscious or otherwise, that might be impacting decision making. Therefore, moving from “We’re looking for this type of person or persona”, and working as an SBO you look at the team differently than before.
Finally, your capacity skyrockets in terms of being future ready. Instead of saying,
“What skills are emerging?” or
“ How can we activate this?” or
“How can we be ahead of the curve?”
Know the skills in the team you can respond to your rapidly evolving industry or marketplace you operate in.
In the opening of this blog I mentioned how this series is also having me reflect on my own skills. I appreciate when I can include them in HR platform profile, especially when they are auto added by the LMS and I also appreciate that you can include them on LinkedIn. But more than that I am growing in appreciation when others call them out and/or confirms them.
Okay, so my big idea of part two in this series is:
That when skills are visible, talent becomes fluid and organisations can become much more resilient.
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