Skill Building for 2016
Welcome to 2016. We hope you had a great holiday season and are back at work full of hope for the New Year.
At TeamFit, we are obsessed with ‘skills.’ We help people understand their own skills and the skills of the people around them and then how people use these skills to get work done.
Skills are built into our DNA as a company.
At the end of last year, we reached out to people and asked them about their plans for developing skills in 2016. We asked people to share with us
The 3-5 top skills you personally plan to develop in 2016
The 3-5 emerging skills that you think will be important in 2016
There were many and varied responses. One of the most interesting was a counterpoint from Paula Thornton, the founder of the Design Thinking Group on LinkedIn. Paula said,
“I’d challenge that the issue isn’t so much the skills as it is how we apply the ones we already have — where do we focus our energies?”
This is an important point. The skills that matter are the ones we use. This is true for individuals and companies. To execute on this, one has to know what skills one has, which is difficult enough for an individual and something that most companies fail at.
Test your own self-knowledge. Ask five people who know you well what they consider to be your top skills. Do you agree? Are you using those skills effectively?
Going back to the results of our casual survey, even with a small number of people we got a wide variety of responses. We are experimenting with a number of ways of organizing these. One framework that seems useful is a 2X2 matrix with one axis being Applied to Capabilities and the other running from Knowledge to Behaviors.
This grid is meant to describe how people express their aspirations about building new skills. One thing to notice is that the top right quadrant is not the ideal. A person whose skill development was focused on Building Capability and Improving Behavior would be gaining the knowledge they need and applying their skills to real world challenges. What one is looking for is rather balance and connections between the four quadrants. Here are one person’s aspirations mapped onto this grid.
IoT is the Internet of Things
Snippets are the Google Snippetsused at Google to help people know what is going on and to keep priorities aligned.
One can also look deeper into each of the themes. Take Knowledge as an example. Here we found that some people were primarily focused on enhancing skills used within their current job or company. Other people were more concerned with looking out to see what they could learn from outside their discipline or company. Both are important, certain people will gravitate to one mode or the other. Companies need to make sure they are investing in both.
Rob Attwell, COO of Mybesthelper identified one of the real challenges that all of us face when building skills and capabilities. “Creating Mindspace.” Most of us live in a world where we are saturated in information. We are also under heavy pressure to perform. It can be difficult to create the mindspace needed to step back, reflect on one’s own work, learn about what others are doing, and to start to see the whitespaces.
What can we do on a regular basis to open mindspace? Is this a solitary quest or is it something we can help each other with? Can a software platform like TeamFit provide clues and suggestions that will help?
In 2016, TeamFit will continue to research skills in all of their endless forms most beautiful.
Interested?