Do you think your team is low on skills?

Do you face a tough time with your direct reports? They seemingly ignore the tasks that you assign them and/or fail to produce results that they promise they will? Or you feel that your team mostly doesn’t operate at its optimum?

Let’s face it, you and your team is never going to have all the silks that are required to keep your business competitive. Or at best you’ll have the skills needed for today, but what about challenges of tomorrow??

Skill development often focuses on immediate needs, with little consideration for change management and future anticipated skills.

Below are some of the challenges and- probably not all –when it comes to skill development within organizations.

1)???Weak or no skill plan: Like mentioned above the skill plans often only focus on need of the hour than the long term strategical skill growth. This has an over bearing effect on costs, engagement and effectiveness of learning initiatives.

2)???Having no plan, also leads to reactive approach thus creating new roles (SMEs and specialists) for skill(s) when the need arises. However lean organizations are better in many aspects and always easier to manage. I’m not suggesting against hiring. In many cases it may make business sense to search the market and acquire the skill externally. However, before you start posting for that new role, it might be good assess internal availability of the skill, aspirations within team, long term strategy to analyse build/develop vs recruit decisions and prevent last minute haste.?

3)???Taking no risks or being averse: Inspite of best efforts the skill development plans may fail.?However this doesn’t mean that no effort should be made for skill development. If the focus is only avoiding losses than making gains, then it may lead to skills development and training not being viewed as a strategic priority. This further prevents formally institutionalizing skill development and training programs within the organization.

?Below are the constructive 5 steps that can help manage skills within your organization:

Step 1: Build a plan for learning and development, and create an internal buy from all stakeholders.

For building the plan take in consideration team profile and the skills, skill shortage in growth (verticals, planned increases) areas, and succession planning for growth and backup amongst roles.

Also align skill development plan to performance management. In my team we mandate trainings to be considered for next level roles. This can act as a motivator by ensuring rewards for personal development.

Step 2: Build ownership and roles once you’ve build the plan, as it’s important to define clearer ownership so that the initiatives don’t fall through the cracks. Some of the roles in skill committee can be:

1. Planning committee: May (but not limited to) consist of department head(s), leadership and HR/learning department. The goal of the planning committee is to identify skill development needs and create the management and stakeholder buy-in.
2. Research and Content creation: The committee can take internal vs buy decisions i.e. for the lack of internal content and/or if doesn’t match the desired quality.
3. Monitoring and Report generation: Apart from reporting, the monitoring committee will also be responsible for taking meeting minutes and keeping the required logs of decisions made.

Step 3: Create Risk plan: Learning programs may fail. However it’s good to fail early and learn. Leaving enough time for course corrections and having a risk plan can allow room for failure and learning.

The risk plan will also allow the learning committee to build up confidence and take required risks to make the program a success.

Step 4: Build up a culture: A strong stakeholder (management and the team) belief in the learning program is important.

Building up the culture can be done through encouraging staff for both learning and sharing, creating platforms like Peer review and Brainstorming sessions, mapping individual goals and objectives to learning and by appreciating sharing and collaboration through reward programs.

Step 5: Encourage critical thinking: Building and nurturing critical thinkers can have a positive impact on both learning (individual) and the learning (organization) program. Contrary to what may be commonly believed, I always find my team members to be individual critical thinkers.

To encourage critical thinking communicate openly/effectively through reports, dedicated forums, mailers etc., take constructive feedback with gratitude to enable openness, setup time for reflection by focusing on both achievements and failures.?

Above are only few ideas that can help set the team(s) on the path of learning and growth. However, skill development programs should be considered a journey of experimenting, failing, learning and improving, thus allowing it to progress in-hand with the organizational development.

Thanks for reading! It’ll be interesting to know if you have questions or any experiences to share from your learning journey’s and challenges.?