How Can Companies Develop Their Employees’ Metaskills?

Katerina Bogina

Co-founder of Insight Group – a group of educational companies.

Instability and uncertainty have become constants in our lives. Adjusting plans or completely overhauling them is also a common practice. At the same time, the incessant acquisition of new knowledge is not an option, but a necessity. But what are the factors that allow us to acquire new skills and adapt to a rapidly changing environment? Metaskills (not to be confused with soft skills) are the answer. Katerina Bogina, co-founder of Insight Group – a group of educational companies, will explore what metaskills are, why everyone is talking about them, and how mastering them helps along both career paths and in everyday life.

What are the challenges the world throws at us?

We live in an unstable world, and this is not a subjective feeling. Back in the 80s, the concept of the “VUCA-world” was introduced, one that combines four characteristics of our world: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Characterizing the environment is very important, since this is how we get an understanding of how to live in it and cope with current circumstances.

In 2020, the year of the epidemic, we were faced with a new reality and a more relevant acronym was introduced – the BANI-world, as brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible. It has become even more difficult for people to navigate in the chaos, to change and adapt, and to make effective decisions, because the level of stress is growing steadily. The epidemic of stress is also impacting the global economy, with stress-related illnesses leading to nearly $1 trillion in losses every year.

Brittle – requires us to be strong and resilient.

Anxious – requires us to be empathic and aware.

Non-linear – requires us to be able to adapt and understand contexts and relationships.

Incomprehensible – the world needs transparency, and people need a well-developed intuition.

For companies, the consequences can be quite dramatic, as employees burn out more often. At the end of 2020, half of working Russians reported burnout. Employees also have low involvement in work processes and are less productive. 37% of employees are worried about their jobs due to the development of automation, another 60% believe that few will have stable employment in the future. Workers who perform tasks that are still beyond the reach of machines are becoming especially valuable. Employers are paying more attention to cross-professional skills, such as creativity, imagination, innovation, and flexibility.

The competitiveness of companies no longer depends on the level of the skills of their employees, since just having professional skills and knowledge, including hard skills, is simply no longer enough. The future of the company directly depends on the ability of its people to adapt and learn, to determine their own vector of development and learn new things on their own in order to help the business create new products and stay ahead of the competition. But what if people fail to learn new skills?

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What are metaskills and how can they help adjust to the new reality?

Metaskills are the key to obtaining new behavior patterns and achieving new results. The term ‘metaskills’ was introduced by the American psychotherapist Amy Mindell in the book ‘Metaskills: The Spiritual Art of Therapy’. The author states that metaskills are the skills of the spirit.

The pandemic has exposed what people lack so much. Professional skills may be highly developed, but the ability to adapt to change is a metaskill that many need to master. After the pandemic, freelancing and flexible work formats have become more popular and, according to experts, the trend towards remote work will continue to grow. Companies are indeed hiring more remote workers as opposed to office staff. All this requires a certain degree of courage and flexibility from employees.

By possessing metaskills or super-skills, an individual can achieve results faster and develop other competencies, including hard skills. Emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman proved that people with developed emotional intelligence have better mental health, leadership skills, and they work more efficiently. EQ is more important than technical knowledge and double that of IQ. The Carnegie Institute of Technology discovered that 85% of financial success is associated with emotional intelligence, leadership and communication skills. Only 15% is dependent on technical knowledge. Unfortunately, trans-professional skills are not taught in schools or universities. The good news is that the development of metaskills is a lifelong process, and it is never too late to start. Here are the areas to work on:

Consciousness – this skill gives an understanding of one’s own self, one’s motives and emotions. A conscious person stops acting automatically, since they know their strengths and weaknesses and how they can be improved. Consciousness allows one to become the manager of their own self and their own life path. Research shows that consciousness practices improve employee engagement and performance, as well as promote team building and reduce stress levels. It is no coincidence that corporations like Google equip their offices with special rooms for meditation.

How to acquire the skill: through mindfulness practices, such as meditation, mindfulness eating, and intuitive motion. It is important to constantly ask the questions – what am I doing/thinking/feeling right now? Why? Why am I doing this? What are the sensations coursing throughout the body?

Proactivity – a proactive employee takes responsibility for their actions, without shifting it to others or relaying it to circumstances. Nor does such an employee use the wording “I did not succeed, I failed.” At work, such a person is actively involved in solving problems and getting results. They will thus be noticed by management faster, which means that they are ensured rapid career growth. This, in turn, affects their health and well-being.

How to acquire the skill: look for ways to solve the problem and never give up, ask your bosses and colleagues for feedback, ask yourself why something happened, what depended on you and what did not, where your zone of influence ends, how you can change the situation now, and what are the conclusions you can derive for the future so that such a situation does not happen again?

Thinking and decision-making – this skill involves the ability to avoid making logical errors by monitoring one’s own cognitive distortions, which helps make effective decisions.

How to acquire the skill: take note of your own attitudes, observe which of them really conform to you and which ones are imposed by the environment and society, check your decisions for logical errors and distortions, and rely on decision-making frameworks.

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Self-development and adaptability – this is understanding how one likes to study, the ability to choose an effective teaching method, find motivation, not get tired and not get bored.

How to acquire the skill: understand your goals, where you want to be headed, what you lack for achieving this goal, and how you can acquire the necessary knowledge. Make the educational process individualized: choose the appropriate style and format of learning, try different self-development techniques and find your leaders.

How to effectively develop metaskills

It is not enough to have certain knowledge and skills to master metaskills. The more important aspect is the psychological labor with one’s own attitudes, such as automatic thinking, the emotions that are reactions to thoughts, and behavior.

For example, you have a request – learning public speaking. Speaking in front of the public is one of the main phobias of regular employees. At the same time, this skill can be decisive in the course of selection for a vacancy. Let us take a look at how this skill is usually taught. As a rule, public speaking courses are limited to recommendations on how to speak correctly – make pauses, speak clearly and loudly, be confident, and make semantic accents. They will also tell you how to hold the right position – chin raised and gaze directed at the audience. You end up with a bunch of tips that do not work, because you focused on outward appearances in your public speaking skill.

What does success really depend on?

If you really want to learn how to speak in front of an audience and do it right, not in automatic mode, then you should take into account your condition and observe the system of attitudes that you have formed throughout your life. Analyze what you think about yourself on stage, about the audience and about the content of your presentation. If you seem stupid to yourself from the outside, no matter how hard you try to speak clearly, your voice will still tremble and falter at some point, because you are not confident in yourself.

You need to work through this uncertainty and become the designer of your own framework by first recognizing your own framework’s structure, tracking down problematic aspects, and starting to work on them. This is a long path to cross that opens up the possibility for you to reprogram your entire system of thinking.

Stages of working on metaskills:

Know yourself

Ask yourself: who am I, how do I think, what are my strengths and weaknesses? You do not have to become a different person. You need to understand and accept yourself as you are, and then develop on that.

Set goals

At this stage, you have already examined and understood yourself, your desires and reluctances. Think about the tasks you want to fulfill, the people involved, and the workplace. Think of how you can get from reality’s point A to the destination goal point B. What is missing, what do you need to be able to achieve that? You are free to change the vector of development, because you are in control of your life.

Personal development

According to Maslow, people have an innate need for personal development. Learning is a continuous process. You need to know how to be active, when you need to rest, when you can take on ambitious tasks, and when you need laid back ones. Continuous learning helps develop the brain, as well as remain in demand as a specialist.

Act!

Self-knowledge and self-development are both endless processes that can and should be practiced throughout life. The more attention one pays to the development of their metaskills, the better the quality life they can achieve, and the faster they can move up the career ladder.

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When it comes to workflows, the possession of metaskills helps make communication more pleasant, including the exchange of feedback, and the delegation of tasks. It also frees from fear of fatigue and makes it possible to distribute workloads in such a way as to result in effective execution of tasks.

Try taking a test to determine your psychological characteristics, since that will help you understand yourself better and faster.

Where can you start right now? Take note of destructive attitudes – that is half the battle. Test your propensity for irrational attitudes through testing. The more often you examine yourself, the better you can control and correct your thoughts and behavior. You will gradually be able to form new frameworks of behavior in place of old ones. In the meantime, direct your attention to automatic thinking and actions. And accept yourself the way you are, since a compassionate attitude towards yourself and a healthy self-esteem increase work efficiency and impact career success.