Simplifying Talent Management by Defining Core Skills

In my recent articles, I’ve been discussing Dan Pink’s outstanding new book To Sell Is Human and its basic premise that “Everybody’s in sales now!” Pink notes that almost all people, regardless of job title, are to at least some degree engaged in the business of “moving others” – i.e.,  getting them to change their behavior and/or attitude in a certain direction. Pink then sets out the skills and attributes that support anyone in his attempts to “move others.”

I’m sure that many people who want to become more effective in their jobs intuitively understand the universal importance of “moving others,” even if they’ve never thought of it in those terms. More likely, though, they’ve probably thought of their development challenges in terms of distinct situations such as:

·         Influencing others to adopt a certain point of view;

·         Managing up, i.e., influencing their direct managers;

·         Negotiating with suppliers and vendors;

·         Inspiring others to get behind an initiative they’re spearheading;

·         Motivating direct reports to improve their performance.

And of course:

·         Selling goods and services to customers.

Depending on how a person defines her development challenge, she’s likely to go looking for a training class that targets the specific situation – say, “Being an Inspirational Leader” or “Motivating for Results.” (I made up these titles, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are actual classes by those names.)

I think Pink’s book highlights an important fact: Regardless of the specific content of any of these types of programs, there exists a set of core skills that are common to all of them – in this case, the “moving others” skill set.  Some of these core skills include:

·         Seeing the world through others’ eyes;

·         Showing curiosity about others’ point of view by asking powerful questions;

·         Addressing people from their own frame of reference;

·         Avoiding regarding others as “adversaries” or “resisters” but instead thinking of them as potential partners in a joint search for solutions;

·         Showing people how an idea will benefit them and make their lives better;

·         Communicating ideas and concepts in the other person’s language and seeking to connect your idea to something they care about.

Identifying a set of core skills such as “moving others” can help establish connections between individual development planning and organizational talent management. For example, a curriculum could be established that focuses on conveying the core skills first (say, Moving Others 101). Learners could then “major” in more specific areas that build on the core set, such as influencing, motivating, selling, and so on.

Defining core skill sets can also facilitate the identification of performance expectations for each role within the organization. For example, a project manager could be held accountable for using the “moving others” skill set in order to secure resources from functional managers and motivate team members to complete tasks. By contrast, while a group manager would still use the same basic “moving others” skill set, the results to which she would be held accountable via that skill set would look very different – say, getting functional managers to work together, or inspiring others to get behind an organizational change. In this way, the exercise of the skills doesn’t become an end in itself but is seen as a means to achieving goals that can be measured in operational terms.

Finally, defining core skills can benefit succession planning, career pathing, and individual development by highlighting the similarities among skills in different job families and/or levels of responsibility. In the above example, the project manager can see his role as providing an on-the-job development experience for the "moving others" core skill (and other core skills) that can prepare him for a wider scope of leadership responsibility within the organization.

In my next article, I’ll elaborate on this concept of core skill sets.