Developing the skills your team needs

As part of an advisory for human resources executives for 2019, Gartner described three types of skills that organisations need to be aware of. The categories are useful at a team level also. They are:

• evolving

• emerging

• expiring.

Let’s look briefly into these. I’ll give a few examples, but I’m not assuming that these are relevant for your team. As always with teams, the context is all important. The three questions on skills at the end of this note form a great exercise to consider what these might be for your team. You can do it alone, individually with team members or as a whole team – depending on the context, of course!

Evolving skills

These are the skills that have been serving teams and team members well that will need to remain relevant in the foreseeable future. This might be something like a marketing team that needs to continue to learn how to produce content for social media channels.

Emerging skills

These are the skills that are on the horizon for a team and its members as things change. That same marketing team may need to understand new social media channels or the use of artificial intelligence to better communicate with their target market.

Expiring skills

These are the skills that have become irrelevant (or are rapidly becoming so). For the marketing team, it might be the ability to design and deliver campaigns for traditional media such as print newspapers.

As an aside, apparently, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have the shortest average tenure of all C-Level executives according to a 2017 Forbes article that cites a Korn Ferry report. The main reason? Staying relevant. According to the article, ‘CMOs who stick with yesterday’s strategies deserve distrust and are themselves likely to be gone in a few years.’

All of this underscores that skills are never stagnant. We need to pay close attention to all three categories and ensure that our efforts are appropriately matched. There is no point investing in expiring skills or ignoring emerging skills if we want to maintain our team’s relevance and effectiveness.

Here are a couple of questions for you to get you started this week:

1. What are some skills that are evolving for your team – and how can you support their development?

2. What are some skills that are emerging for your team – and how can you support their acquisition?

3. What are some skills that are expiring for your team – and how can you support their retirement?