This is part one in an undefined series…
I wrote in my last post about typing, and the dangers of getting caught in a pattern of becoming tied to the skills we are most comfortable with. Or the skills we are best known for.
This post is designed as the first part of breaking out of that mold, which is to map your current skills.
It is easy to caught in a pattern of becoming normalised, or typed. It is a natural way of the world, and we have to be conscious of it happening to do something about it.
One of the most startling statistics that we found with a team specialising in employee capability, is that in large organisations as your tenure increases, your rate of improvement decreases. Such that your development in capability and skills is almost static after a certain amount of time.
Shirlaws have developed a model called Stages, albeit for a slightly different purpose, which explains this perfectly:
The model was built for businesses to understand their growth phases, but also can be applied to individuals.
After a certain period of time, your business will hit a sticking point after a growth phase. Shirlaws call this a “brick wall”.
Depending on how you invest your time and money as a business is key to determining what the next phase will look like: do you go into another growth phase, do you plateau, or do you decline?
These stages are cyclical, so in order to grow continuously, you need to be constantly reviewing how you are investing in yourself, and growing your skills.
Businesss capability as shown here is pretty much analogous to employee capability.
You can read more about the stages model here.
What the data was showing us with my last team, was that the majority of employees remained in ‘plateau’ or even decline after 3 to 3.5 years of steady growth.
Put another way, after to 3 to 3.5 years working with the same company the majority of people will not improve themselves AT ALL if they stay!
Perhaps that is why it’s a good thing that employees in the US are changing jobs every four years on average. However, the average tenure of workers aged 55–64 is10 years.
There is a huge opportunity for our economy, personal productivity, and overall satisfaction and motivation levels to break out of these patterns, and to continuously improve.
But something needs to happen to jolt us out of this position.
This is why I designed the Amplifier model.
The value of skills
It is important to think about skills in terms of how they create value.
They do so in two fundamental ways:
1. They can be taught to others
Skills become truly valuable to you and others around you when they are taught.
A skill is something that can be taught, practiced, applied, and eventually, re-taught.
I am using skills to cover both technical competency (for example data analysis) and behaviour (for example the way in which someone communicates the results of a data analysis). In other words hard and soft skills.
Having a skill that you use in isolation is valuable to an organisation, and may even make you important, but your value is limited, or risky, because only you can do what you can do.
Mastery of skill, such that you can teach others who work for or around you, or even teach the broader industry, makes you a linchpin.
These levels of mastery have been built into a visual skills map I’ll show you shortly.
2. They combine with other skills to become amplified
Think of the best engineer that you have ever worked with. Why were they so good? Usually it is not because they are simply the best technically.
They combine coding with judgment, commercial acumen, and superior communication. These clusters of skills are what make an individual extremely valuable.
Have a look at this list of the “most employable skills” from 80,000 hours. At the top of this list sit Judgment, Decision Making, Critical Thinking, and Time Management — all skills that amplify other skills:
https://80000hours.org/articles/skills-most-employable/
The rule — the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — holds true here.
One of the first books I read when I started my first job was Seth Godin’s ‘Linchpin’, recommended to me by my boss. It is a brilliant book, that summarises how we have been taught to prepare for exams, keep out heads down and follow instructions — these are all traits that make us eminently replaceable. The behaviour of the linchpin is to create art, create new combinations, connections, to lead. The real work that will make you stronger, help you to grow, and create real value will mostly likely be found outside the skills taught in the day to day job.
In more technical roles, being a linchpin is becoming more and more of a necessity.
According to the great piece by Guru Sethupathy, the half-life of a skill is now under 5 years, making continuous learning and improvement a necessity.
You can find the deck he presented at the PAFOW (People Analytics Future of Work) conference here.
Creating a Visual Map
To move away from our types, and to create new forms, we can go through an exercise of understanding how our skills interplay with each other by creating a visual map.
The goal of this exercise is purely to understand the pattern as it is today.
Here is the exercise:
Write down the 8–10 skills that are needed to be great at your job.
I have added an example below for a Product Manager in a financial services business:
1. Leading teams
2. Idea storming
3. Agile methodology
4. UX design
5. Use of systems (eg. Email/CRM)
6. Presenting
7. Financial acumen
8. Data analysis
9. Networking
Next, assign a number to each of those skills, using this scoring system:
1. Understands the concept
2. Some evidence of implementation
3. Implements consistently and effectively
4. Teaches within own organisation
5. Teaches at industry level
Finally, order your skills from strongest to weakest, once you have marked each one against the 1–5 levels.
It might look something like this:
Review your Map
It is important to spend some time reflecting on your work, and your thinking.
- Share this skill map with a few people you trust to help to refine the skills, and to validate where you have marked yourself
- Be honest
- Notice what this shape says about you
- What are the words or phrases that come to mind that sum up what is going on here?
- Write these down
The map pictured above is a live case, and actually the main thing this person said on looking at the shape was this:
“It’s boring, I’m a solid product guy, and that’s what I’ve been now for the last 5 years, maybe more.”
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that observation.
This person happens to be very successful, perceived to be doing well. But they have been, and probably will be for the next 5 years of their working career (or longer), type-cast by their shape.
This is a perfect set up for a plateau.
Notice the Shape
There are multiple shapes that can be created by your map.
- Draw a line through the end point of each of your scores (as shown below)
- What does the overall shape suggest?
- Is this in line with your career development?
Here are some examples.
Shape 1 — Solid Performer
This is the shape from the example, and it is the most frequently seen.
These people know what they are good at, not good at, and a lot of the time have stopped improving. Like most people, in most organisations, they are good at a few things, OK at most things, and not great at a few things.
This person had a normally distributed group of normal skills, designed for a normal business. Left to its own devices, or even just improving the existing strengths that are there, this shape is a recipe for standing still.
The good news is, they have developed strengths, and a solid base from which to improve.
Shape 2 — Deep Expert
Typically these shapes come from individuals with more technical skills, and those skills are top-ended, leaving a shape which lacks some depth.
Often these people don’t need to worry about the bottom of the grid because they are so good at the top! But even just a little bit of amplification at the bottom and around the edges turns these people into superstars…
Shape 3 — All Rounder
OK so we all know one of these. Super valuable but unfortunately often undervalued, as their value isn’t particularly concrete or defined.
These people get pulled into projects because they are needed to act as the glue, and they can fulfil multiple roles.
To progress, if that’s what is needed, they must decide on a path, and understand which combination of skills will become most valuable in the future.
Shape 4 — Learner
Back to the Stages model, this is someone on the beginning of their growth trajectory, and they are likely to have been in their role or the business for a shorter amount of time.
There is great potential here to shape your future skillset.
If you have been in your role longer than 24 months and your shape looks like this, the question should be asked if this is the right role for you, or if you have enough passion and energy to work on the list of skills in front of you.
Be open to the possibility this may not be right for you, you may have the opportunity to change tack and find something way more fulfilling!
Notice your Skills Mix
Finally, notice how your mix of skills are currently balanced.
An article entitled, “We need a better way to visualise people’s skills” in Harvard Business Review, has this quote:
“By 2020, the US economy is expected to create 55 million job openings: 24 million of these will be entirely new positions. And 48 percent of the new jobs, according to Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, will emphasize a mix of hard and soft intellectual skills, like active listening, leadership, communication, analytics, and administration competencies.”
To create a strong basis for growth and progression, a mix of hard and soft skills will give you the best opportunity.
- Give yourself a % score for hard v soft skills
- For your top 3 skills, give a % score for hard v soft skills
- Note any oberservations about the weighting of your skills, are they heavier on soft or hard? Or do you have a balance?
So… overall 3 things to think about. First, create your map. Then, plot your shape. Finally, think about your mix of hard/soft skills.
This can be done pretty cleanly on one page, and I recommend using the flip side for writing down reflections.
Here’s an example:
This exercise will give you a visual representation of your skills today, and enable you to reflect on this.
At this point, I don’t want to talk about Amplifiers just yet, leaving you time to think about where you skills register today.
Once you have done some good thinking on this, we can go to the next stage.
In the next post I will share some techniques for breaking out of your existing shape, and find what I call Amplifiers.
Tom
