“Certain departments have been caught without the needed skills present among the staff, causing issues, backlogs, or customer issues.”
“Some “good” employees are never invited to be on projects mainly because the breadth and depth of their skills is not fully understood, resulting in continually relying on a few people and overloading those people.”
Do any of these comments sound familiar to you? Are you and your colleagues having conversations about one of these topics with HR, the owner of the company, or between yourselves?
My guess is that you are because in an on-going survey of companies performed by Innovative Management Tools, these scenarios as a group rank #2 out of 28 groups as the most frequent challenges today.
If you have been “talking” about these scenarios and things don’t seem to be changing much, maybe it’s time to take a different approach. Talk about the topic in a collaborative, engaging, and comprehensive way.
Enter the Conversation Framework PROFILE – Skills Assessment Activity. PROFILE allows a department or company take a proactive approach to taking an inventory of staff across a variety of skills to better understand what talents each person brings to the table. Many of these talents might not be known to people because they were developed or learned at another company and have never been used in their current position. Untapped talent that could serve the company and enrich the employee’s contribution to the company.
Taking an in-depth inventory of employees (outside of looking at résumés or CVs) is a worthwhile endeavor. There is likely a goldmine of talents and skills deep across the company that is just waiting to be uncovered and leveraged.