Three ways to tap your people’s potential
Leverage unused skills – develop potential skills – combine skill sets
The capabilities you are developing will determine the opportunities you can execute on. One of the responsibilities of any leadership team is to develop capabilities and then to find the best opportunities to apply these capabilities to sustainable growth.
Capabilities come in different modes. People and their skills, physical infrastructure, business processes, software, data and relationships are all important. Here the focus is on people and skills, but of course value and differentiation depend on the integration of all of the different dependencies.
Sometimes, it seems like the default response to a need for new skills is to go out and acquire new talent. This is an expensive and high risk strategy. Understanding a person’s skills without working with them is difficult; cultural fit is hard to ascertain; it takes time to build a shared understanding. As demographics shift and the number of people in the workforce relative to the size of the economy goes down, hiring in new skills will be less important than uncovering and putting to use the skills that already exist within an organization. The key questions we all need to address are …
What are these potential skills?
How can we find them?
How do we put them to work?
This post is focussed of the first of these questions. What are the potential skills inside your organization? The question parallels the more personal question, “What are my own potential skills?” This is a question we should each be asking ourselves as we explore the possibilities for our own career.
Unrecognized and underused
Most of us have many skills that could be relevant to work but that never or rarely get used.
Pause for a moment and jot down some of the skills you have, and could provide evidence for, but that you rarely get a chance to use at work.
This is the first place to look for potential skills. The trick is to uncover these, which can be difficult. People sometimes don’t realize they have a skill, or that it could be relevant to the company. The company has no way to see the full range of a person’s skills and even if they did people are often locked into narrow career paths.
What can you do?
Adopt a skill management platform and encourage people to include their full range of skills, those used at work and those used in their community (to do this the company needs to have the individual own the record of their own skills)
Build cross-functional teams and let people explore new roles and contribute in new ways by participating in those teams. Generally all teams should have one person from outside their core function and 30 to 50 percent of your teams should be cross functional (see Scott Page’s important book The Diversity Bonus for the theory behind this).
Make career ladders into career webs, where there are many criss-crossing paths for people to explore rather than a linear progression.
Potential skills
Not all required skills will be present in an organization. Until recently, very few companies would have the skills needed to develop artificial intelligence applications. Another area where demand is growing rapidly is customer experience or CX. The default response has been to go out and try to hire these. As discussed, this is becoming more and more difficult as demographics shift and competition for talent becomes more intense.
All of us have many potential skills that we could develop given the right opportunities and support. A person with strong math skills, a knowledge or probability and statistics and basic programming skills can now work directly on AI applications using one of the many available frameworks (TensorFlow or Pytorch). Someone with high empathy and a knowledge of process design can step into a customer experience role.
This makes the cultivation of Foundational Skills critical for organizations. Foundational Skills are those skills used to develop other skills. Your skill management platform should help you to identify foundational skills and your development programs should invest in these skills and not just tactical Business and Technical skills. (My own learning plan for this year is skewed to Foundational skills).
Combine people in new ways
One of the most overlooked ways to spark new potential is by putting together people with very different skill sets. Many of the most challenging problems facing us will require this. Deep technical expertise in any one discipline will not be enough to help organizations find sustainable growth, to solve the challenges associated with shrinking population economics or to adapt to climate change, for example.
Cross-functional teams play double service here. They help people to develop potential skills and explore different career paths. Combining skills in unexpected ways can also bring into reality new and sometimes unexpected capabilities. These teams need a good mix of Complementary Skills (skills generally held by different people but used together on the same team) and connecting skills (the skills people from different disciplines use to communicate with each other). Try sprinkling some unexpected skills into cross functional teams. Also, train teams to recognize and find ways to use skills on projects. This is especially essential in innovation work; innovation is beginning to burble up in all sorts of unexpected places.
Perhaps the ability to find applications for unusual combinations of skills is a special kind of Foundational Skil! Here is a game you could play. Take a well established team, one with known skills and processes, then introduce a random skill, and brainstorm ways it could be used. Afterall, that is one way that evolution works to create endless forms most beautiful and wonderful.
