One of the important roles of a leader is to make sure their teams have the right skills to accomplish not just the current workload but to support the work that will be done in the future in accordance with your organizational goals and vision.
A helpful exercise for assessing your team’s current skills is to create a skills matrix. This allows you and your team to shine a light on what skills are overstaffed, underdeveloped, or completely lacking in your organization. Once you have a skills matrix composed of individual skills you can assess the composition of your teams and seek to create more balance towards the tasks expected of those teams.
Leaders fill skill gaps one of three ways:
- Develop the Skill
- Hire the Skill
- Outsource the Skill
These options are not interchangeable and each have their own challenges and benefits.
Develop the Skill
When to Use: Skills that will support the long term vision (1 to 5 year plan) of the organization and team members seeking growth opportunities. This should be used to shore up core competencies in your organization.
Benefits:
- Keeps skills in house
- Provides enrichment and development for your current employees
- Allows that team member to bring new ideas into the existing cultural context of your organization
Challenges:
- Takes time to develop a maturity in that skill set
- Costs money and productivity on current work to send employees to training
- Once trained the newly skilled employee doesn’t have any real experience and so you will be working with them through the learning curves and growing pains
Example: Video Training
Hire the Skill
When to Use: Skills that are needed in the next 2-3 months and are part of the future development of the organization (5 year plan). Skills that support products or services that have a low tolerance for mistakes (risk averse) and require a level of prior experience in industry or in producing similar work in other industries that translate to your organization.
Benefits:
- All levels of experience can be brought into the the organization to fill the gaps (no need to hire a veteran if you only need basic knowledge)
- New perspectives on how that skill can be used to support the organization’s initiatives and vision
- New Hire can help knowledge share and train their skill to existing team
Challenges:
- New hires take time to onboard and adjust to new company culture and processes
- Seeking candidates that are a good fit for the organization can be challenging
- May not understand how to value a team member (compensation mismatches)
Example: AI Developer
Outsource the Skill
When to use: skill gap is required to meet current work, augment current team’s capacity for that skill, Specialized knowledge and expertise needed for short term. Skill set does not align to a core competency of the organization. Strategic partner organization for supporting your long term vision (with a Clear Win-Win)
Benefits:
- Offload risk of delivery onto a vendor/consultant
- Deeper well of knowledge and expertise
- Allows for quicker onboarding of skill
- Scalable (depending on the partner organization)
Challenges:
- Costly contracts
- Organizational culture translation can be difficult to overcome
- Requires considerable oversight to ensure deliverables meet the needs of the organization
- Typically poor knowledge transfer of work done lost when contract ends
Example: Organization restructuring, Constructing new office building, Merger and Acquisition, IPO