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Mapping roles to goals is critical to performance

Steven Forth

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

Many of us have an ambitious set of goals for our organizations in 2022. We will not be able to achieve these goals without a plan. Many of these plans will be focused on process and metrics. Planning will be organized around the processes used to achieve the goals and the metrics used to measure progress. Is this enough?

Experience suggests it is not.

Learn more about Ibbaka Skill Gap and Role Coverage

What is the missing link that prevents us from achieving our goals? One place to look is the skills of our people and how they are being applied. At the end of the day, it is not a process that achieves a goal. The process is dependent on the people executing it. The missing link in strategic execution is the capabilities of the people.

Skill coverage analysis helps you align people with their roles and skills to achieve goals.

How can we make the link between people, skills and goals concrete and actionable?

They key is to map people to their skills and roles and then to align both with goals. Moving back and forth between skills, roles and goals gives a holistic view of what is required to actually achieve a goal. Let’s take a concrete example.

At Ibbaka, one of our goals for 2022 is to simplify our processes and to shorten time to value.

This goal engages several different roles:

  • Proposal Writers

  • Consultants

  • Data Analysts

  • Service Designers

  • Value Analysts

Proposal writers need to make proposals based on the service design with a focus on shortening time to value.

Consultants need to be able to execute on the services designed and to keep focused on providing value as quickly as possible. They need to have a ‘value mindset’ to complement a ‘growth mindset.’

Data Analysts also need to understand the design of the services and have the many skills needed to execute.

Service Designers play a key role here. It is one of the key areas of competency we are developing at Ibbaka. There are a number of roles that require service design skills and service design is emerging as a role in its own right.

Value Analysts are another key role at Ibbaka. The value analyst role is to build value models (quantitative models of economic, emotional and community value) and define value paths. Defining value paths is also an important part of Ibbaka’s approach to service design so value path design is an important connecting skill for these roles.

Why focus on roles in skill management?

We have found roles to be the best way to connect goals and skills to people. The reason is that people often think of their work , and more than just work, in terms of the roles they play. Roles come in different flavors:

  • Job roles, think of a job as a bundle of roles

  • Team roles, the roles you play on a team

  • Ad-hoc roles, the things you are doing ‘off the side of your desk’

  • Community roles, roles you play outside of work

All of these different roles can be important to goal achievement. So the next steps are to know …

  1. Who currently has these roles

  2. What skills are associated with the roles

  3. Who could fill the roles

  4. Where there are skill gaps

  5. Where there are role gaps (not enough people with the required skills to fill the roles

Once one has insight into these five things one can develop a plan to make sure that people are aligned on the skills and roles needed to achieve their goals.

Performance needs the direction that goals provide. Execution relies on having people with the right skills in the critical roles.

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