**Steven Forth** is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

Organizations are being redesigned as teams of teams. Use data on the Ibbaka Talent Platform shows that Team Roles are becoming more important than Job Roles and are a better predictor of skills and skilled performance.

Brandon Hall Group, a leading research firm in the talent and learning space, is currently conducting an important survey on How Do You Build Teams for the Future of Work?

Please contribute to the teams survey

This research will help clarify how organizations around the world are thinking about team development and how to support it. The survey also includes some useful definitions of different types of teams.

Self-managed teams – groups with complementary talents who work in an integrated and collaborative way because they don’t have a formal leader. Members may take turns taking leadership depending on the task and the talents needed to guide a particular mission.

Functional work team – all members belong to the same functional area and respond to a single manager, responsible for the management of the whole group.
Cross-functional team – comprised of members from multiple functional areas/disciplines. Members volunteer or are appointed based on how their talents/skills complement the knowledge of other team members. This type of team could have a specific leader or could be self-managed.
Trouble-shooting/Taskforce team – formed specifically to solve a specific problem or problems that are hurting the organization. This could be a short-term or longer-term team depending on scope of the problem.
Project team – These teams are formed for a specific purpose or project and usually disband once the project objectives are completed. Project teams can have a specific leader or be self-managed.

It will be interesting to explore what skill patterns exist on these different types of teams.

Note: Ibbaka uses skills as shorthand for KSAs (Knowledge, Skills, Attitude)

Ibbaka plans to go through and tag teams on its platform with these different types of teams and then see if there are any differences in skill patterns. This could show up in two ways.

1. Are there differences in concentrations for different skill categories?

Ibbaka’s default configuration uses seven different skill categories:

Foundational - the skills used to build other skills

Social - the skills used to work with other people

Business - the skills used to manage organizations and conduct business

Technical - STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and (Applied) Math)

Design - the skills used to develop and design new solutions, skills associated with creativity

Tools - the skills to use specific devices and software packages

Domain - knowledge and skills associated with specific disciplines and domains

Will we find different concentrations of skills in Brandon Halls five different types of skills? For example, might ‘Self-Managed’ teams have more Social skills, or ‘Functional Work Teams’ more Domain skills?

2. Are there patterns in the skill relations?

Beyond the seven skill categories, Ibbaka looks at relations between skills. The most important of these are associated skills, complementary skills and connecting skills.

Associated skills are skills that are frequently found together in the same person. They are often parent and child skills or sibling skills (skills with the same parent). An example from a technical domain might be the tools of HTML, Javascript and CSS and the technical skill of Frontend Programming. In cooking, Knife skills, Grill Skills and Arrangement Skills are often found in the Team Role of Line Chef.

Complementary skills are skills frequently used together on the same team but held by different people. Using the above examples, UI Design (User Interface), Interaction Patterns and Typography are often found in UI Design Roles and are complementary skills with those of Frontend Programming. Back in our restaurant kitchen, a Pastry Chef will have complementary skills with a Grill Chef.

Connecting skills are some of the most important skills, they come in two flavors, Internal and External. Internal connecting skills are the ones we use to connect different areas of expertise. In a team context, it is external connecting skills that matter. These are the skills that let people with different experiences from different disciplines work effectively together.

What are some of the hypotheses we might have about skill relationships and the Brandon Hall team types?

‘Functional work teams will share a lot of common skills.’

‘The most effective cross-functional teams will have a clear set of external connecting skills.’

‘Well designed project teams will have a lot of complementary skills.’

‘Teams with a high level of complementary skills and few external connecting skills will underperform.’

‘Troubleshooting/task force teams will have a lot of domain skills specific to the challenge.’

Any of these hypotheses could be wrong or only true in specific circumstances and there are many other hypotheses that could be generated.

What questions about skills and teams would you like to pose and see answered?

There are many things we need to learn about how skills work in the context of teams. The Brandon Hall research is one step we can take together along this path. Platforms like the Ibbaka Talent Platform that collect and connect data will help to answer these questions.