Human Capital Skill Set Mapping

Friday December 17, 2010

Faced with a forced situation where a product or service must be conceived, engineered, developed, manufactured, and brought to market in a very narrow period it is easy to pull a team together comprised of an organization’s most dependable, talented and loyal employees. Yes, but do they have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to get this assignment right. How does an organization go about linking the skills required by the assignment to individual team members? In the case of existing employees, an organization can rely on the past performance of those employees, for the most part. Employees have a strange habit of modifying their skills over time. An employee who lacked Interpersonal Skills a few assignments back may now have developed those skills. An employee whose Critical Thinking was pivotal on their last assignment may be experiencing an emotional setback due to a life altering event. The employee who was the Problem Solving engine on last year’s major project does not seem to be able to comprehend the fundamentals on the new assignment.

Mapping requires using the same basic three skills of interpersonal communications, problem solving, and critical thinking to get at what skills are needed and in what proportions, and by which team members. Mixing two strong individuals with interpersonal communications skills may result in a lack of coordinated communications among the team members and between cohort teams. The organizational leader must map the skills required to the individual team member or members. This is not to say that there has to be some rigid non-flexible reporting relationship, but there does need to be defined roles. A team with three leaders will go in three different directions and get no where fast.

The team leader: this individual must have the basic knowledge of the product or service, the development process, and the roll out and marketing required. The team leader will rely on team members for the technical and detailed level of product or service development. However, the team leader will have to have strong interpersonal communication skills to ensure that every other team member understands their role. The role of team leader requires communications both upstream to organizational leadership, clients, outside resources, and downstream to team members. At the same, they must take a role as an active listener to ensure that feedback from organizational leadership and team members is heard, evaluated, and when required, challenged and possibly implemented. The team leader must provide coaching in a manner that motivates and directs the energies of team members in the focused direction of the project. The leader’s interpersonal communication skills must allow them to define roles and support members and when appropriate, challenge, redirect, and coach members at other times.