What conversations do you have about skills in your company?

There are three that matter. And if you are not having these conversations you are putting your company at risk.

1. What skills lead to our winning work?

2. What skills lead to project success?

3. What skills will we need to deliver on our strategic goals?

What skills lead to our winning work?

This is one of those simple questions that hide a lot complexity. There are basically two perspectives, outside and inside.

From the outside the buyer wants to make sure that you actually have the skills needed to deliver their project and that they are not going to be subject to the bait and switch trick. In bait and switch a senior team with great skills and experience is used to sell the projects, and then a more junior team is brought in for delivery.

Buyers don’t always know what skills are necessary for their project and tend to default to generic skills. This is bad for the seller as it pushes the project towards commoditization. Generic skills are table stakes. It is the differentiating skills and the complementary skills that make a professional services company valuable.

Complementary skills are independent skills that when brought together enable new capabilities. A marketing example would be Market Segmentation and Price Optimization. Both are valuable in their own right, they are seldom found in the same person, and put together then can deliver exceptional value.

What skills will lead to project success?

When we analyze project skills on TeamFit and correlate them to success we find that generally speaking it is not the lack of technical skills that puts projects at risk. What really matters is if the team includes strong business skills (client management skills) and project management skills.

The other skills that lead to project success are connector skills a good set of connector skills and complementary skills between client and vendor. Complementary skills lead to value as each party realizes the value the other brings to the table. Connector skills ensure good communications.

Connector skills are shared skills that help people bridge different domains and communicate better with each other.

What skills will we need to deliver on our strategic goals?

Moving beyond day-to-day projects, the third conversation every company needs to be having is how to scale its skills to achieve its goals.

Here the best tool is a Skill SWOT (something TeamFit provides as part of its consulting offer).

A Skill SWOT answers four questions.

1. SO: Which skills give you differentiation and let you chase new opportunities?

2. WO: Which skills do you lack that prevent you from going after new opportunities?

3. ST: Which skills do you use to fend off competitive threats?

4. WT: Which skills do you lack that are needed to fend off threats?

Are you having these three critical skills conversations at your company?

The TeamFit platform gives you the data you need to answer these questions and turn your skills to strategic advantage.

The top image is a visualization of landing, orbit and escape velocities in a three-body system, from a paper by Professor Dan Scheeres at the University of Colorado.

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