How Do We Govern and Measure Progress?

This is the 6th blog in the skills-based talent series dives into how to start, govern, and measure successful skills-based initiatives. If you missed the previous post, Where Do We Start?, be sure to check it out here.

How do we govern and measure the progress of a skills-based talent initiative?

How do we govern the transition to a skills-based organization?

In the big picture, skills-based transformations should be governed the same way any enterprise-wide change initiative should be governed. Skills-based transformations are an enterprise change journey that will touch many employees and functions in the organization. You should employ all the change management and governance best practices you would use on any other project. Some notable nuances for a skill-based initiative would include:

Leadership Alignment and Stakeholder Engagement

Skills-based talent strategies affect both the talent and operational ends of the business. We recommend bringing the entire talent leadership group along the journey and the critical business/operational leaders affected by new skill-based upskilling, staffing, performance management, leadership, and career development processes. Care should be given to ensure all critical stakeholder groups and user populations have been accounted for in the stakeholder engagement and leadership alignment plans, as well as identifying the critical sponsors, key influencers, change champions, SMEs, User testers, trainers, super users, and core project team members.

Culture Change and Communications

As with any change initiative, many people will be impacted and have questions. End users will have new talent processes to use and follow, talent professionals will likely undergo organizational and job changes, technology professionals will have new systems to manage and support, and leaders will have new reports and information to make business decisions. Some of the most significant cultural changes can come with resource management and career management impact. These changes impact people’s daily work and career advancement most directly. Communicating effectively and timely to address concerns and resistance will help engage stakeholders and ease fears.

Culture change is an especially challenging piece. To truly drive new skill-based talent behaviors, new systems and processes need to be supported by the entire enterprise. Developing a Skills-based culture aims to build adaptability into the fabric of everything talent touches. Culture is not prescribed with messaging alone; culture is created by a community living the message. Leaders need to communicate how much they care about adaptability and continuous people development through the consistency of their daily actions. We communicate what we, as an organization, care about through how our values are reflected in:

• The choice of assignments we make
• The tasks we prioritize
• The time we allocate in plans & meetings
• The initiatives we fund and support
• The training we require and enforce
• The activities we reward
• The people we promote
• The stories we tell

Organization and Talent Systems Alignment

Typically, the most complex part of a change initiative is aligning the organization and talent systems. In this case, the talent systems alignment will be the core focus of a skills-based transformation, so while admittedly complex, it is not an adjacent or parallel effort to the core project team but its primary focus. Skills-based talent initiatives require many new business policies to support the new processes. For example, policies about who has access and authority to post and manage assignments in the talent marketplace, who can update and change skill and proficiency descriptions, what standards and methods will be used when validating skills, etc. New skills-based talent strategies will also impact the talent organization. New talent jobs will likely be created, and some may be consolidated. New talent skills and job responsibilities will be inevitable as the talent organization is transformed.

End-User Training and Support

While business systems implementations routinely take care of planning and rolling out end-user training to support critical business functions, internal talent systems implementations are notoriously less vigilant. We strongly urge our clients to be as diligent in providing thorough end-user training and support as they would in any other business system implementation. We especially endorse employing networks of change agents (testers, super users, trainers, SMEs, help desk, etc.) to help effectively filter knowledge of the new changes throughout the organization.

Governance

The governance council is the group responsible for guiding and navigating the challenges of the skills-based transformation. As mentioned above, we recommend including critical sponsors and key influencers from across the business and Talent. Some critical areas the Council should oversee:

• The overall skills strategy and North Star vision—The council should develop and own the overarching strategy to guide development and hold the project accountable to the outcomes defined in the vision.
• Roadmap and implementation progress—The council should provide oversight to the PMO office, which manages the implementation plan and roadmap, secures resources, defines and tracks milestones, manages scope, defines guardrails to assess quality, manages key stakeholders, resolves issues, and provides all other support the project needs.
• Federation of responsibilities – The council should determine the extent to which skills are segmented into separate families or groups based on the patterns of different skill group profiles (e.g., core vs. function specific, technical vs. technology vs. professional, global vs. local, etc.) – and who should be responsible for managing different federated areas. If this federation in large organizations results in multiple sub-committees, the council should be the escalation point for all.
• The council should establish operational guidelines that provide ‘flexibility within a framework.’ For example, the taxonomy team will need guidelines to define the overall scope and complexity of the skills model, prioritize critical skills gaps, guide make vs. buy decisions, establish standards for development, align internal frameworks, and clarify the division of responsibilities. The council should similarly approve and oversee business policies that must be implemented to operationalize the strategy.

How should we measure the success of our skills-based initiatives?

The council should clarify and align the desired business outcomes and uses of the skills model to build reporting and analytics against it. Firstly, it’s important to remember that a skills-based talent strategy is about more than just skills gaps or L&D. It’s easy to confuse skills-based talent with L&D because the word skill is in the name but remember skills-based talent is ultimately about an adaptable Talent model. Each organization must develop a balanced scorecard that reflects its business KPIs. Still, if we were to give a general sense of what a balanced scorecard might look like at its highest level, it might start with something like this:

Before being cascaded down to specific, measurable KPIs that could be used to assess these objectives. For example,

This is an example; each organization must create KPIs relevant to its unique business objectives.

What kind of resistance can we expect to a skills-based transformation?

Talent concerns

Again, skills-based transformation would drive the same concerns and fears as any other significant talent initiative. Typical questions would concern: Why are you making us do this? How is it better? How will my job or career change? What will I be able to do that I couldn’t do before? What do I have to learn? Will this add work to my plate? And the like.

As specific to skill-based transformations, you are likely to encounter questions like:

• How do we define a ‘skill’? What is included or excluded? What level of detail is appropriate?
• How do we assign or validate who has what skills?
• How are skills different from competencies? Why focus on skills rather than behaviors, capabilities, attributes, or experiences?
• How will we agree on a taxonomy of skills?
• How many skills are too many?
• How do we keep our skills profiles and taxonomies up to date?
• How do we align skill definitions across different regulated jurisdictional definitions?
• How will we manage all this career mobility you are promising?

Management concerns

Again, skills-based transformation must answer the same questions any significant operational or business transformation would encounter. Questions like: Why is this needed? How will this improve my operations/metrics (efficiency/quality)? What additional burden will this put on my team or me? How will it affect those I have responsibility for? Will it provide more transparency? Will it make my success easier or harder? How much will it cost, and is it worth it? What will it add to my/our plate? What do I have to learn? Etc.

As for questions unique to skills-based transformations, you are likely to encounter questions like:

• Do we have to change the entire company? Is there no easier way to solve these problems?
• Is skills-based transformation relevant in our industry and department?
• How will this affect how I hire, staff, promote, or manage my team’s performance?
• Will all this career mobility make it even harder for me to hold together a stable team of people I trust?
• I haven’t had much faith in centralized training before. I’m unconvinced they understand our business or what we need. How will this approach be any different?
• When will my people find the time to keep their skills inventories up to date when they don’t today?
• Is there any proof that these skill-based approaches work? Who else has done it, and what benefits did they find?
• I don’t understand what happens to my team if there aren’t any ‘jobs.’ What am I managing if I don’t have a stable team?
• Who gets to decide if someone truly has a skill? Do I get a say?

End User Concerns

Despite being talked about in one form or another for nearly twenty years, the modern idea of Skills-based organizations is pretty new. The jury is still out on how people will embrace them. While many benefits have been highlighted for employees – including more career mobility, more voice and choice in staffing assignments, more equitable recruiting and development practices, more significant investment in one’s professional development, and specific remunerations for individual skill development – there’s still much to be considered.

We’ve been interviewing millennials (now aged 28-43) and Gen Z (workers under 28) attitudes toward skills that form the bedrock of the US workforce. Many millennials lack trust in large organizations, which poses a significant barrier to adoption. This gap in trust should not be overlooked, as decades of witnessing the impact of organizational change initiatives on front-line workers have left an entire generation mistrustful of corporate motives. In short, Millennials and Gen Z have doubts that large organizations can get anything done that benefits them individually. Many believe the best way to advance in one’s career is to jump jobs frequently as premiums are given to attract new talent over internal advancement.

Regarding skill-based organizations, this extends to a concern that good intentions will play out. They worry that sufficient time will be given to take new training. They fear this will increase the likelihood of being asked to perform tasks they don’t want to. They worry about punishment for pursuing alternate career paths.  They are concerned the whole affair may commoditize careers. They fear that ‘adaptable talent models’ mean becoming interchangeable, replaceable cogs in the machine. They worry employers will abuse talent marketplaces’ increased use of contractors to avoid paying benefits. A fundamental belief is that leadership will prioritize short-term operational goals over genuine investment in career development.

Many millennials see the only path forward as one that involves taking charge of their own careers or working within the system to drive what they care about – purpose, equity, and human-centered, humanely-driven organizations. It is here where the best opportunity may exist. A staple of change management is involving people in the change to facilitate adoption. The more we can do to directly engage millennials and Gen Z in the decisions that will drive the new skills-based organization, the more involved in the outcomes they are likely to be.

About The Author:

Craig Friedman has been a Human Capital and Talent advisor, executive, and entrepreneur for over 30 years. He is currently a Senior Talent Strategist with the St. Charles Consulting Group. He was formerly a Talent Development leader at Deloitte for nine years. Before that, he was a Human Capital Consultant at Deloitte Consulting for six years and a Human Performance consultant at Accenture for eight years. Craig led the development of two eLearning startups in the early 2000s and has served on the board of advisors for several learning-related non-profits. Craig holds an M.A. from Northwestern University’s School of Education & Social Policy and a BA/BS from Tufts University. Write to Craig at cfriedman@stccg.com. ©2024