Managing Skills in Your Business

In a professional service company, like an architecture or engineering firm, the people drive the company’s value. Your people win the projects, do the work and manage the processes. They also ensure your customers are happy, balance the budget and protect the firm from risk and liability. An effective skill development program increases the leverage on your most valuable asset, allowing companies to grow faster, keep more of the profits, and stay ahead of the curve in a changing business landscape.

As a business leader, you want to ensure you have the right skills to be successful today and to allow you to be nimble in the future. An example of how this can be done well can be found in professional sports franchises. On these teams, a coach and a general manager come together to strategize how to be competitive with other teams, bring in the right mix of players, assign them to roles and train them the behaviors they need to execute the strategy. In football, the quarterback and the offensive linemen have different skills, but they need to use those skill sets together for a successful team outcome.

Things are no different in your business. You have several distinct teams, who need to execute a strategy for successful business operations. Those teams are compilations of people with various different skills and behaviors. To be effective, they must bring a specific skillset to their work, which must coordinate with other skill sets on the team to generate an effective outcome. Identifying the skills and behaviors for optimal team success begins here. If you don’t have the right skills on the team, you may find that the individuals feel they need to work eight days a week to make it work.

Think about the team for an architectural project. They will need leadership so the team has direction and they will need a vision for the future (IE - what will this building look like). They will need expertise on local regulations and on building methods. Plans will be made, so they need skills in using the design softwares to create those plans. To be successful, there needs to be some financial skills in understanding how the feed is spent and management skills to ensure enough fee is left at the end of the project to make it through closeout.

You should go through a exercise where you brainstorm all the skills required to complete a team’s mission. You business will have a unique value proposition and thus a unique set of skills to deliver that value. Leading, managing, financial, and communication will be required on all teams. Take a look at this skill requirement exercise for a yellow submarine to be designed:

This project will require a couple people with skills to lead and manage, lots of people with design and drafting experience and technical expertise on codes and coordination. Now you can compare your unique players and their skills to the ideal skills for the team. You may find that your team is perfectly matched for executing their work. More likely though you will find that they are over skilled in some areas and lacking skills in others. Here is the team analysis for this project:

This group of guys fits most of the criteria, but they might yell, “Help!” completing the task without another person to support the design, drafting and coordination shortcomings. This could be solved by adding another team member with the rivght skills or by asking the team to work a few extra hours to cover the difference.

When you look at your business through this lens, you will be able to visually see where skill shortages are. You will also see where you are oversaturated in other skills. This perspective will inform decision making about who to train in which skills. Remember, though, that even if people learn more skills, they only have so much availability during the day. Leverage tools like this one to ensure you target the right skills for development.

This exercise will be very helpful for today, but you should also consider how your industry is changing and plan for future skills which are going to be required. AI, digital twins, 7D BIM, and computational design are just some of the trends which are gaining momentum in the AEC industry. Each of these emerging technologies requires different skills to be able to leverage successfully. When you are thinking about your skill mix, make sure you consider incorporating emerging technologies into your calculations. A breakthrough in any of these could be the next opportunity for your company to grow.

All of these steps could also taken for an individual. If you are considering your place within the industry, think about your current skillset and how it compares to the industry needs. On an individual level, you should also consider which of the skills resonate with you as a person. If you focus on learning about the things which you are interested in, it will be much easier to put in the effort.