How well do you understand your teams’ skills and career growth path?
Understanding each other’s skills, experience, achievements contribute to a team being high -performance team. Without this knowledge it is difficult know:

• If the team is able to perform to the require level
• Who is best for each task
• Who to call upon to resolve challenging task
• What skills are lacking within the team
• Have a competency growth path for the team members.

Knowledge of the different skill and levels, creates a baseline for developing the team and the team members and shows a career path people can follow.
When I was a leading a team, in a demanding fast-moving environment, we would need to urgently investigate why a reporting tool had failed, or the reported information was inaccurate, or why a customer lost their system access. Resolving this was made possible by having an up-to-date skills matrix for the team.

Knowing who was skilled in analysis, finances, working with the reporting tool, customer relationships, I was able to pull together a subset of the team and rapidly resolve the issue leading to a happy customer. Afterwards we would review the process we followed, note any learnings, and acknowledge the good team work that had resulted in a satisfied customer.

For team members to understand each other’s skills and experience, hold a skills workshop. Ask the team members to write down their skills and the level of their experience e.g. learning to mature. Collate these in a Skills Matric. A spreadsheet is a useful tool as this makes it possible to filter on a person or a required skill.

The skills matrix can be uses as a career development chart showing people what they can develop and who they can learn from.
As a line-manager, use the 1-2-1’s to discuss any missing skills you have identified or where you believe the level is incorrect. It is really important you have defined what the levels are before the exercise to avoid ambiguity.

Ask yourself

• How well do you know your teams’ skills?
• How well do the team know what skills each other have?
• Do you have a skills matrix and how up-to-date is it?
• Do the team use the skills matrix to build a career path?

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