Hannah

We’re bringing you today’s episode from our international conference. It is day 2, our very own R&D director Rab MacIver, gave a thought provoking presentation on skills and the pivot to skills that is happening in many, many organisations around the world. And so we thought we’d take the opportunity to continue the conversation here. Rab, thank you and welcome.

00:31 Rab

Thank you, Hannah.

00:32 Hannah

So question #1 skills seem to be everywhere at the moment.

What’s happened? Where have they come from?

00:42 Rab

Probably 2 main things I think when I’m sort of thinking about why they’ve become so much on the top of everybody’s agenda. I think the first thing is that it’s come from the understanding that skills are changing. A lot of that I think has come from it and the development of new technologies and understanding that we need to change to be able to adapt to new technology and that sort of takes into the second point, which is the language that you use when you talk about skill instantly fits with what needs to happen in the world of work today.

So if you think about it, you can re skill. You can upskill. People can become de skilled and we talk about skills-based organisations. The whole language suddenly fits into something that the CEO understands, but also the candidate understands when they’re applying for a job everyone understands that you need, you might need a skill and that you can develop a skill. It’s a simple concept. Now you can’t say if you think of competencies. You can’t think of it like that. You can’t deskill decompensate, can you? You, you. You can’t up competence. It’s just ridiculous. So people always think struggle with language.

02:00 Hannah

Yeah.

02:08 Rab

In in that in that. So I think those are probably 2 of the the bigger sort of things apart and there are a lot of other reasons and a lot of other benefits to skills. But I think those are some of the reasons why I think it’s here to stay, and the skills are not going away.

02:23 Hannah

Absolutely.

02:24 Hannah

And what does this mean for assessment? And maybe we can break this into two buckets and and look at talent acquisition or pre hire and then talent development post high. So let’s start with talent acquisition. What would this look like recruiting for skills?

02:43 Rab

Well, I mean, obviously you can attempt to recruit directly for the for the skill and sometimes that is what you might want to do.

02:52 Rab

But also if you think about even doing that, you may be recruiting from a skill that somebody has and you can check that they’ve got it and you could do, for example a test of coding. Let’s say for example that somebody knows how to use JavaScript or a particular form of data back visualisation or a particular piece of software.

03:16 Rab

But that if you think about it, that Nice might stand you in good stead for a year. Umm, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you that the person will pick up other skills.

03:28 Rab

So if you hire somebody just on the basis of skills, then to do it. Having said that, there’s probably some benefit that maybe some things, for example related to experience, if you just focus on experience, there’s a danger that that’s even more open to sort of privilege and opportunities that might be given to you fewer people and not what you wanted to do as part of your diversity strategy. So that’s the first thing that you could do or the other thing that you could then sort of say, well, could I be looking for somebody who has the potential to acquire skills and if they’ve got the potential to acquire?

04:09 Rab

Skills in a broad area, umm, or even a narrow area, even like coding or something like that. Then you can instantly see that what would happen is that they have not potential for one year, 2 years, but for much longer in your organisation to be able to fit to something, and therefore I’m I’m I. I like this the concept of skills potential, the potential to acquire skills as a powerful mechanism when you’re hiring something.

04:39 Hannah

So that idea of hiring for potential, which I think is also getting quite a lot of airtime at the moment, feels like it’s sort of intrinsically linked to this pivot to skills that we’re seeing within organisations.

04:51 Rab

I think it is. I mean, that’s absolutely dead, right?

04:54 Hannah

And I wonder whether and I think I know that we’ve talked about this in the past, just to your your kind of earlier point on how experience is linked to opportunity and if you’re, if you’re hiring on experience, your social mobility metrics probably aren’t going to be great, particularly at the maybe more junior ends of the organisation, how does the skills, potential piece feed into that?

05:22 Rab

I think you’ve got probably got more of an opportunity. It’s not just experience. You know you, you know, you always have this sort of concern if somebody’s privilege, for example, they could go on some unpaid work to get some experience because they can afford it, whereas other people that wouldn’t have the privilege and the capacity to do something like that wouldn’t be able to so sort of experience and opportunities are often given to people who are in this situation of being nearer to the top of the social tree rather than people who you’re trying to lift up in terms of being socially mobile, so, and then if you think of skills, skills probably does that to a lesser extent because they’re probably smaller things to develop sometimes than bigger things like education or a long piece of work experience that you might be looking at.

06:13 Hannah

Yeah.

06:16 Rab

And but they’re still open to, I guess, some level of opportunity…

06:20 Hannah

If you’ve had the work experience, you’ll probably have built some skills off the back of it.

06:24 Rab

Yeah, exactly. Or, it may be that you can afford the online course on JavaScript coding or whatever it is that you’re trying to do. I think the idea then if you think about skills potential is that that’s not the case. That’s nothing to do with your experience.

It’s not even your skills you’ve got now. It’s what you could acquire, and therefore what you’re saying is who should I be giving?

The experience and the opportunities to when I’m hiding them, I should be giving them to the people with the most potential.

06:58 Hannah

Yeah.

07:03 Rab

Not the people who are most privileged.

07:04 Hannah

Yeah. So it helps really from a D and I perspective to think about skills potential.

07:10 Rab

Yes.

07:11 Hannah

And I also I guess it also starts to solve the problem of scarcity of skills in a number of different areas and having probably quite a small candidate pool to choose from, if you are needing to recruit on the skill itself.

07:27 Rab

Yeah. I mean, as soon as you’ve got skills to your skills, what you’re gonna do about it? Yeah. How are you gonna get to the point of finding people? Everybody will probably be chasing that skill because it’s probably a new skill and a critical skill, and therefore the cleverer thing to do is to identify people who could quickly acquire that skill?

That’s people with skills potential and that can get up to a higher level of mastery in that skill. That means that when they actually develop the skill, they can be brilliant at it, and that’s worth the organisations investment and it’s almost a safer strategy because you can go out to the market and look for scare skills, but all it all, all it is, is a a sort of arms race to chase after a small group of people, when a new skill comes in that doesn’t really exist.

08:18 Hannah

Yeah, and that’s probably quite a nice segue to the development side of things. So if we if we move away from hiring from talent acquisition and we think about developing skills within organisations and if we think about everything we’ve talked about around this move kind of like away from competencies more focusing on skills. What does that now look like in a in a development setting?

08:45 Rab

1. So I mean, maybe it’s also useful just to sort of shift to to give a different example, maybe we’ll move away from where a lot of that skills based thinking started, which is in this sort of coding space. So, so let’s move more into the sort of management leadership space and thinking what we’re doing in in that space.

09:04 Rab

Well, the first thing that you what you want to be able to do is if you think of what matters for a particular job role and there’s some skills potential, that means that you’re more likely to be effective when you do something.

So for example, if you’ve got, if you’ve got skills potential on convincing people, then what that means is probably when you come into a new situation, even if you don’t know too much about who you’re dealing with, you might not even understand too much about the topic. But you probably have quite a lot of skills, even though it’s a completely normal situation to perform quite well on in that situation and that will make you effective.

But there’s another thing that of course that can happen is how do we then develop the person who’s already high on convincing people to get to an even greater level of mastery and then you start to think of, well, what I then want to do is to say, give them some individual skills, and I think they’re much more granular than when we were talking about competence and everything individual, uh, separate things. So, for example, we could work in somebody’s hand convincing people and getting really good at some storytelling.

10:23 Rab

And that storytelling can really engage staff at work they can really understand through stories what exactly the organisation or the team’s trying to do and the difference it will make and how everybody can contribute to it, all of that can be very powerful, and of course it can be powerful in and external context or selling. But if you take the idea of that, then how do I develop that that work now?

10:43 Hannah

Yeah.

10:49 Rab

Additionally, how did how? How? How was that done? Traditionally? People think about that in terms of skills development, they think well, I can do a formal course. OK, 10% of the time, you’ve got to take people out of work it’s costly and both by not having people in work and because you’re paying for the course and travel and all of that type of thing. So maybe 10% of development actually gets done, but like another 20% is social, so that’s more peer-to-peer coaching and mentoring those sorts of activities where you might get sort of direct input and help from somebody else to help. You can do it. You could see how that would help with something like storytelling, although probably it’s helpful if the person’s good at that storytelling themselves.

11:36 Hannah

Yeah.

11:42 Rab

But if that’s 20%, we’ve got 10% for formal, 20% from social, we’re left with the other 70% and that’s on the job. That’s the experience that we’re all doing in the everyday. And if what we can do is help people develop skills, if we can help the manager in that situation, to be able to develop the skills on the job and practise the skills and become better.

12:09 Rab

At it and final trick if we can do that in a way that suits the manager’s own personality and style, then suddenly we’re helping them understand how to develop themselves by using the resources around them, just in the general flow of the work that they’re doing day-to-day.

12:30 Hannah

And so they’re more likely to a develop that skill more effectively and and probably do it more quickly as well.

12:36 Rab

Yeah, yeah. And you’re improving that work in real time.

12:40 Hannah

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And is there anything in also sort of the value of being able to understand somebody’s skills potential? So the example you gave there was where someone had quite high skills potential on convincing people, I guess if you if you had someone else and they had quite low skills potential on convincing people you might suggest that they go about developing that skill in a in a quite a different way, so I guess it’s quite valuable to know whether someone’s high or low.

13:11 Rab

Exactly. And it may be sort of hard fought and it may be there’s more of an element of that you should walk before you run in that and therefore we know that in skills development that practise is critical. So then therefore you may do more practise where you actually try out the skill not in a real context. First of all, but you really put it in and then you get feedback and you become better before you actually do it. So you learn and you accept. Maybe that’s just a harder fought thing.

13:47 Hannah

Yeah.

13:47 Rab

For you to do, but it still may be critical at times for you to do it. Maybe not so often and maybe you shouldn’t deploy it as often as somebody who’s stronger on it, but it may be critical for you to be able to pull that rabbit out of the hat sometimes.

14:00 Hannah

And so you’re really setting yourself up for success by understanding yourself a how you learn best, and B just the fact that it might be a little bit harder for you to do this thing. Yeah. So be gentle on yourself. Exactly.

14:14 Rab

Exactly. Have a bit of acceptance, yeah.

14:20 Hannah

Maybe another question thinking slightly more broadly I’ve seen a lot out there on skills we’ve already talked about, how it’s kind of everywhere and I’d be quite interested in your views as to what you think of what’s out there at the moment sort of model wise?

14:42 Rab

I guess when there’s a fast shift towards a sort of different perspective, there’s a bit of a danger that things that aren’t, skills, that things I would say some of them are competencies in the old language, that broader sets and groupings of behaviours are called skills and they’re not. And some of those, when you look at the definitions that.

15:04 Rab

Personality or they’re about attitude or more towards sort of motivational variable interest. Even they’re not skills. They’re not things that you develop mastery. So I think the test almost is a skill. Each time you look at skill is if I practise that thing.

15:11 Hannah

Yeah.

15:21 Rab

Would I get to a higher level of mastery and skill so that would be much better at it and it be more effective? And if I stop doing it, I mean would I likely to deteriorate and lots of things are more internal characteristics that probably are more stable or traits. They’re not skills.

15:39 Hannah

Yeah.

15:40 Hannah

I can’t go and practise extroversion.

15:43 Rab

No. Yeah, that’s a personality characteristic at the end of the day. And then trying to sort of tell somebody that they should change on on, on, extroversion, sort of. But you probably can tell somebody how to more confidently approach somebody you haven’t met.

15:44 Hannah

Yeah, yeah.

16:01 Rab

Yeah, to be able to hold eye contact and talk about conversation and smile and do all of the things that you might want to do, understanding that it will be much more difficult for that person to do it. And that recognising that they may not feel comfortable doing it.

16:19 Hannah

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I guess there’s something around the, the kind of the narrow like, skills are narrower than, say, competencies. Right? More specific.

16:29 Rab

They’re narrower and they work I think for development because you can give people little bits and Nuggets, you can break it right down as to how you can improve something. Yeah, you don’t just say ohh, go and get get a bit more confident, would you? That’s just not helpful to anybody.

16:50 Hannah

What do you think would get in the way of skills kind of getting effectively implemented within an organisation?

17:00 Rab

Uh, I mean, the number one issues, obviously you sort of go back to this as leadership is it working out properly? How leaders should be implementing skills, and I think there’s there is something about how leaders are going to have to lead to be effective at developing skills. I mean, I go back to the centre of Creative Leadership research 30 years ago showed that developing others and developing cells out of I can’t remember 70 competencies was the lowest, so people managers don’t know how to do that very easily. Leaders just don’t have that easily in their vocabulary. They can do this for themselves very well.

17:45 Rab

And they can do it for others. So maybe it’s them having a recognition that there is an approach that can help and it’s not always difficult and you can develop people and individual skills to make them better.

17:59 Rab

You can re skill and upskill and do things to change something.

18:02 Hannah

So do they need to kind of lead the charge and do it themselves and then show that they are doing it themselves.

18:07 Rab

Yeah. Oh, I mean, always, always the case and but it may be that there are certain leadership characteristics also and certain that make you more able to do that. There’s some skills you need to develop. To be able to implement that and maybe we need to focus on skills to make leaders better developers of people.

18:27 Hannah

We had some questions when you did the presentation yesterday on levels. So one of our favourite ever things, I think to get when we’re working with clients is a beautifully levelled competency framework which we probably both have quite strong views.

18:48 Hannah

How when you, when if we’re going to be saying goodbye to competencies and we’re picking up skills, how do you deal with different levels within the organisation? Do you have levelled skill frames?

19:01 Rab

I don’t think you should have level skill frameworks. I think that’s just going to cause a lot of the issues that happen in competencies and to stop their wider applicability and their usefulness and to grind to a shuddering halt. And I think what you can do about that I mean, I think a lot of the reasons is that sometimes it’s down to, like a grading system, so you have a grading and your grading system says, you know, this is level 43 and you’re a manager, and then you’re Level 42 and you’re a senior manager and you know, and so everybody’s put in a box of a level. And then we need to ascribe for the same competency.

19:44 Hannah

Yeah.

19:46 Rab

We need to say, you know, something like business acumen, then we say, OK, this is the definition of business acumen at this level. And then this is the business acumen. But you actually look at it and they’re just very similar and they’re not different.

I think with skills, what you’re then saying is, what are the skills just necessary for the role? Don’t think about level, think about the skills they want to the role. So maybe for the manager, they need to have commercial acumen or understanding, that’s a sort of narrower.

They maybe don’t have to make a judgement. They don’t maybe have to make a decision, they don’t. So they maybe have to do something that’s Narrower.

Whereas it may be that when you’re actually as a senior manager, there’s a different set of skills that you need to be able to understand the commercial information you may need to, for example, know how to develop a pricing model. Yeah, that’s a different skill that you do not need. So then you don’t call them the same thing and you don’t have these frameworks.

20:43 Hannah

Yeah.

20:45 Rab

And if you have an expectation that you say that everybody has to reach a level of skill for a particular role level, that just I think it will grind us to a shuddering halt rather and think we can have people who are at quite junior levels having an amazing degree at mastery of something that the CEO doesn’t have. Yeah. And we’ve got to accept that’s going to be the case. And that’s a good thing. You’re probably a fantastic organisation.

21:18 Hannah

Yeah.

21:18 Rab

If you’ve got these little pockets of gold in your organisation and in a way, we should treasure them and reward them.

21:25 Hannah

Yeah, absolutely. So by the nature of skills being narrower, actually it means you can kind of just do away with levelled frameworks because you’re matching skills to roles rather than having to worry about how you make 8 broad competencies fit across every single organisation, every single role within an organisation.

21:44 Rab

And I will say praise be.

21:48 Hannah

And on that note, Rab, thank you so much for joining us again on the Deep Dive. It was an absolute pleasure as always.

21:56 Rab

thanks very much, Hannah. Thank you.