In our recent webinar series on skill-based teams, we looked at three different reasons to begin identifying the skills needed for teams to deliver the outcomes they promise. The three themes were: 

• Identifying the right team members based on skill profiles

• Uncovering hidden opportunities and gaps for the team to learn, using skill coverage

• Facilitating learning communities and communities of practice using a team

You can watch any of these and download the supporting presentations from our website. It will be useful to explore the common thread that underlies these three use cases. That common thread is the value of identifying and sharing skills that are being used to deliver the team outcome. 

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Think about a day in your life when you’ve worked with any given person or group of people to produce a result. Over time, you come to admire and appreciate the people you work with for things they are great at. You’re also likely to spot some weaknesses. But do you really understand what makes that person who they are or what they can do in that particular situation? 

This understanding will likely occur to you in snippets, like, 

‘this person asks the best questions!’, or, 

‘I really love the way that person is great at identifying possibilities.’ 

If you are the person who convened the team, you might have had some of this understanding in advance, or not, depending on how much you’d worked with these team members. Regardless, once you see an ability demonstrated, you know someone has that ability, and you can call on them to use it.

Now let’s imagine a different day in-the-life of a team, where you’ve taken the time to understand which skills people are being asked to bring to the table beforehand. These skills have already been articulated for you in the context of roles people have played in the past. Three things happens as team members prepare to work together once roles have been assigned: 

• Right off the bat, team leaders and team members are going to understand the skills, and the levels of skill required to shepherd the project to success

• The team leader can see which skills are widely held in the team, and which are rare. This provides a deeper level of understanding and can be used to inform the risk assessments and mitigation plans. One of the main risks to teams is having a person with critical skills leave

• Each team member can understand who they’ll be working with in terms of the skills they’ve been asked to use, and not just based on a role title or reputation. This immediately leads to everyone understanding what they stand to gain individually by working with and learning from one another

• Individuals can understand what they have in common with other team members, as well as what is unique to them. Understanding the skills we have in common can help us connect with others by applying mental models and potentially experiences that we share in common; understanding our unique skills gives insight into the special value one can bring to a team

• A team’s skill profile can become a template for future teams, helping to identify new people in the organization who can deliver similar outcomes, without having to go back to the same group of people

The proof of value for identifying and confirming skill sets in advance or and throughout a team’s lifespan is in the outcomes the team produces. We believe that this kind of transparency about skills will enable teams to perform better because team members can self-resource based on the information they have about what everyone is bringing to the table. Additionally, team leaders can see where gaps may emerge as new skill requirements become evident throughout the course of the project. 

We hope you’ll watch this webinar series and let us know how you’re thinking about the value of profiling skills in teams. Please email us with your thoughts or questions at info@ibbaka.com.