We joined Claude Werder, Principal HCM Analyst at Brandon Hall Group, to give our thoughts on talent agility and how developing potential is a powerful driver of talent retention and growth.

In order to make the right talent investments, we begin by benchmarking where we are. Given this, we focus first on getting an inventory of where. We tend to concentrate on the present, reacting to the needs of the present state of our organisations. At this point in time, our key business questions related to talent are foundational. Albeit somewhat basic, we need this information to respond to what is needed to operate now.

What skills are available in my organisation? How are these applied?

This uncovers questions on whether an organisation has the skills they need to meet today’s goals and create value for today’s market. Skills being a primary building block to inform, measure, and execute the acquisition of and application of capability and competency (essentially how we put our talent to work to achieve results and outcomes).

As we move to be more strategic, the form of our key business questions also shifts to be more predictive. This leads to a need to make critical strategic choices, and we begin to imagine a world of possibility. We can begin to differentiate based on where we are, and what is happening in the market - a key to consistent innovation and disruption for industry leaders. Our key business questions necessarily become more future-forward.

Will we have the skills to meet tomorrow’s goals? Are there hidden pockets of potential we can deploy?

Connecting an individual to business goals helps balance personal interests of the individual with the wider interests of an organisation. It also helps unlock potential through investments in areas of growth and learning. (For more information, please see our slide deck ). As we are tasked with transforming our organisations, our main goal is truly to execute on and reach our aspirations (from the viewpoint of the individuals of our team, our team, or various business units, as well as our organisation as a whole). To get high performance, we need to be able to engage our talent in ways that will meet their aspirations in the context of our businesses..

The webinar stimulated a series of questions and we wanted to take the opportunity to answer a couple of these here.

With the emphasis on relationship and teaming, does proximate vs virtual teaming have any more or less favourable impact on outcomes?

Reflecting on this question now, we believe that there are a number of inputs that have to be considered in terms of whether proximate of virtual teaming will have either a more or less favourable impact. Still we believe that the advent of technology advancements lessens this gap, meaning that organisations are now getting better at teaming virtually and by doing so there can be even greater benefit as firms are leveraging greater diversity as well as being able to transfer strengthen regional strengths to other locales.

If we are to take learning and development as an example, we find that certain delivery models can be built for specific purpose. For instance, when looking at building learning into the flow of work, this is where platforms that can be accessed on need to inform decisions and behaviours becomes are great resource. When it comes to mentoring, there are certain forms of mentoring that are done better in person but still a great deal of mentoring can still be done remotely. Here, as we look at the space of virtual reality technologies, people can still observe good practises without necessarily being in the same locale.

However, if we look at certain types of job tasks, being proximate to colleagues can make a huge difference. This is why for example for high stakes, high collaboration, alignment situations, like strategy development (an area where choiceful decisions are to be made) there is a preference to conduct these face-to-face to get commitment and buy-in.

How does an organisation surface skills for the future based on the list of skills available today? Can you give a few more examples of how skills connect to each other in a complementary versus connected way?

At Ibbaka, we believe skills are the building blocks that inform an individual, team, and/or an organisation’s capabilities. Over the course of time, skills build on top of each other as well as evolve. Many of us have heard about transferable skills, but the relationships between skills are much more complex. When thinking about surfacing potential through skills we need to understand the relationships between skills and how we can leverage these relationships.

One of these relationships is the concept of a parent and child relationship of a skill. For example, when we look at the skill of “negotiation,” “negotiation” itself can be seen as the “parent” skill to its “child“, the skill of “contract negotiation.” Another example of the “parent-child” skill relationship is that of “storytelling” to “presentations.”

Next, let’s explore what is meant by complementary skills. Complementary skills are those skills that frequently used together but not generally found in the same person. A good example of this that we’ve illustrated before is in the case of leadership and executive teams. We often think of the dynamic team at Microsoft and Apple. Imagine comparing the skill profiles of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. At Apple, Steve Jobs, the visionary and marketing genius was complemented by Steve Wozniak’s technical and programming prowess and John Ives ability to lead design teams. In the context of software, front-end development and user experience design skills are usually combined. In the context of sales and marketing, demand generation and deal qualification work together to drive revenue.

The third relationship type we recommend paying attention to is that of connecting skills. Connecting skills are shared by members of team so that they can collaborate. Many product managers ask if they need a technical background, but what they are looking for is a way to speak to and work with engineers. Here technical communications and business requirements are common connecting skills. Customer success professionals need not be fully proficient in the breadth of sales skills, but they do need to be experts identifying and qualify expansion opportunities. In fact, customer centricity is a key connecting skill that many innovative driven companies are developing to drive value and performance outcomes.

To understand future skills and how we position our talent’s value and differentiation, we can leverage technologies to forecast what is trending in terms of skill needs from within our industries. It is our ability to see the gap between what we have now and what we predict we will need that is what enables us to make the strategic talent investments. Understanding where we can accelerate the growth of our talent needs based on where we are now to the speed to develop capabilities helps us to carve our our niche.

How can we make continuous feedback on performance and adaptive investments into learning intersect in the daily flow of work?

Adaptive learning experiences must be built in a person’s flow of work and the same applies to feedback mechanisms. There are two main components of feedback that inform this:

1) Social feedback - the assessment we get from others. We interact with others to get work done. It is in our nature to learn from others as we perform our jobs. We naturally seek relationships with people we can learn from, people who can complement our capabilities, and with people whose point of view we trust. As such when we seek feedback, we respect the feedback from people who know us as a person but also have the credibility in the domain space. This credibility is based on the evaluators experience, training, and their own standing in terms of credentials.

2) Machine based suggestions. Platforms such as Ibbaka Talent make use of data to provide feedback on the status of our skills. When we put skills records at the core of our talent ecosystem, we can use our assessment of our skills to inform what learning content is relevant to us to impact our learning and application of that skill. We can also use this information to inform us on potential areas of growth to better perform on job tasks. Technology can provide us with the analysis to identify/bring to clarity those skill relationships we described above (parent-child, complementary, connecting) to help us uncover pockets of opportunity to increase our differentiated value.

We always need to self-assess; and, our self-assessments are better informed with the context of those around us as well as what can be revealed by technology.

In summary, the key takeaway of our talk is that organisations need to be agile to respond to evolving needs and the shifting dynamics of the environments in which we operate. Our talent is responsible for recognising the opportunities, and converting these into potential, and to then execute to achieve business outcomes.

Be sure to visit our booth at the Brandon Hall Human Excellence Conference. We look forward to hearing how you are tapping into your potential for talent and mapping your talent development to measurable performance outcomes.