What skills will you develop in 2016? Building, Connecting and Applying Skills
The new year is just around the corner now. Most of us are well into our annual strategic planning cycle and goals are getting firmed up for 2016.
But what about skills? Do you have a comprehensive skill development plan for 2016? If you do, at what level are you planning?
High-performance individuals will generally have some plan in place to build their own capabilities, find ways to apply them, and to win recognition.
A good individual skill development plan will have four dimensions. High performers organize their plans around learning new things, using their skills, meeting new people and developing new working relationships.
They want to
learn how to …
use my skills to …
meet people who know how to …
work with these people to …
That is a pretty good framework to use when organizing a personal skills development plan. Of course, it needs to go deeper and ask
‘What resources will I need to do this?’
‘How much time am I able to invest?’ and
‘What evidence will I have at the end of the day that I have actually learned how to apply a skill with other people?”
Organizations cannot leave skill development to individuals though. High-performance organizations plan skill development at all levels. They encourage and support individuals, help teams to learn as teams, have an organizational plan, and reach out to build up the skills of their network.
The network will play a more important role in skill development in 2016. Organizations that leverage their networks will outperform those with an internal skills focus. There are two reasons for this.
Speed of skill evolution: New skills are appearing every day. Top-down approaches to skill management are bound to fail (the old world of corporate competency models is dead). It is the people developing the skills and the clients demanding new services that are driving the agenda. You need to have connections out into your networks to know what skills are going to drive your business.
This does not mean that an organizational view of skills is unimportant. It is more critical than ever before.
What five new skills will your company apply next year?
What five new skills do your company need to build next year?
If you can’t answer these questions you are setting yourself up to fail.
The connectedness of skills: Complementary skills and connector skills are critical getting the most out of your skill base. Complementary skills are those that, when used together, are more than the sum of their parts. A/B testing and copywriting are two complementary skills that have become key to revenue generation over the past few years. Connector skills are those skills that connect two or three independent skill clusters. They are critical to innovation. Connector skills that will be important in 2016 are those that connect sales and marketing (companies like Hubspot have done a great job developing a platform for this), those that enable the Internet of Things, and those that connect data analysis talent to business problems.
There are several ways to leverage your skill network. Some companies are using TeamFit to get insight into the skills of their implementation partners. Others use TeamFit to find critical connector skills to drive differentiation and innovation.
What are the two key skill clusters in your company?
What are the connector skills that allow people from each cluster to work together effectively?
In 2016, TeamFit will roll out the second iteration of our skills management platform. Our goal is to help individuals, teams and organizations accelerate and become more connected. Speed and connectedness combine to make companies more agile. In a changing economy, agility is the key to success.
Top image from an excellent article on data clustering The Shape of Data blog by Jesse Johnson.