Upskilling your team with the McKinsey tool-kit

The responsibility of thriving (not just surviving) under an ever-changing business landscape falls to a company’s leadership.

Even knowing this, too many owners and senior managers are so busy running day-to-day operations that they don’t have time to future-proof their businesses (and legacies).

If you are in a leadership role and find yourself facing one of the following situations, you should already know that something needs to change:

• There’s not enough time in the day. While being busy may make you feel good, it shouldn’t impact your ability to have a long-term vision.

• The business needs your involvement in day-to-day running. Your business should be able to run on auto-pilot for long stretches of time.

• Growth seems to have plateaued. It is becoming exceptionally difficult to will your way to the next level of success.

The good news is that there is tremendous overlap between solutions to future -proofing your business AND fixing the symptoms described above.

It all boils down to organizational effectiveness.

You and your executive team may be amazing, but unless that competence extends all the way down to mid-level managers (and even individual contributors) your company will never be nimble enough to build a lasting legacy.

This series of articles draws from years of experience working with high-performance organisations. Places (such as McKinsey & Co.) whose bread & butter depends on quickly training and continually improving the skill sets of its junior employees.

While training is a universe unto itself, this series deals with two skills that are particularly relevant in taking your organisation’s execution capabilities to the next level:

1. Ambiguous problem-solving. Or how to ensure your team can get decent ‘good-enough’ answers to difficult real-world problems in the shortest period of time.

2. Effective communication. Or how to ensure your team can communicate to an audience with a bias for action.

Specifically, we’ll learn more about the above two goals through a series of five modules:

MODULE 1: Framing the problem (Problem-solving)

MODULE 2: Structuring the problem (Problem-solving)

MODULE 3: Structuring Comms & Understanding data needs (Effective Communication + Problem-solving)

MODULE 4: Building data-analysis literacy (Problem-solving)

MODULE 5: Communicating the results (Effective Communication)

If you are a senior manager who thinks their employees could benefit from problem solving & communication upskilling, please read on.

Alternatively, you can reach out to me for a short discussion at anubhav@raikon.co