Chapter 14
Elephant: You Need to Re-Skill Your Teams—But How?
The Moore’s Law age is dead; long live the AI age. With decades of AI scaling ahead, we will be evolving faster than ever before. That means it’s more important than ever for people leaders to continually invest in their employees to keep a competitive edge in the marketplace. Providing skills-based training isn’t “a nicety; it’s almost a business imperative,” says Bill Pelster, a principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP, in a 2017 conversation with Talent Economy magazine. Failing to re-skill your teams means your organization loses its ability to evolve as fast as your competitors. You don’t want your employer brand and employees to be dinosaurs.
Yet I see the same problems again and again. Company leadership become overwhelmed by the smorgasbord of new technologies intended to aid their operations, so they don’t adopt any of them. Or, on the flip side, the C-suite goes gaga for every shiny new toy that comes on the marketplace, spends loads of money, and fails to properly implement the technology it has just invested in so heavily. When another promising new technology comes along, it’s Shiny Object Syndrome all over again.
There are two key components to successfully re-skilling your work force, which I’ll outline in the first part of this chapter. Then I’ll highlight some technologies that I’m truly excited about. The key is to keep your organization’s needs in mind when determining which tech to adopt.
Before You Decide to Re-Skill Your Team
The first component of successfully re-skilling your work force is to carefully consider where your organization needs to go. From there, you can determine if you need to implement a new technology or process and develop a plan to re-skill whichever teams most need to adapt. Leaders who take this important first step don’t fall into the trap of Shiny Object Syndrome. They deploy strategic thinking and something called appreciative inquiry to consider where their organization needs to go and how to get it there.
Let’s take a look at the appreciative inquiry model. Appreciative inquiry is a concept developed in the 1980s by David L. Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, both professors at Case Western Reserve University. It is a tool people leaders use for organizational improvement; they do this not by focusing on “problems” that need to be solved, but rather by appreciating the resources already available within a group of people and examining how those resources may be engaged for positive change. Appreciative inquiry consists of five components (read more at appreciativeinquiry.champlain.edu):
1. Define—What is the topic of inquiry? What needs to be achieved?
2. Discover—Appreciating the best of “what is.” This is an opportunity for you to remember and celebrate your company’s successes and strengths.
3. Dream—Imagining “what could be.” After considering what the organization is doing well, this is a chance to dream of how your company could further improve.
4. Design—Determining “what should be.” Combine the best of what is and the best of what could be to determine “what should be.”
5. Deliver/Destiny—Creating “what will be.” This identifies how the design will be delivered, adopted, and implemented across groups.
This framework is tremendously helpful for people leaders seeking to determine which technologies and human systems would best evolve their organizations. I like it because it takes such a positive approach to change. Rather than thinking, “Oh no! We’ve got to change everything or we’re going to be left behind by our competitors,” appreciative inquiry invites leaders to first consider what their companies are doing right. The focus is on moving from good to better. There’s a saying I’m fond of: “Terrified people make terrible decisions.” If you’re stressed out and scared, you’re likely to make bad decisions when it comes to implementing new technology and re-skilling your work force (or you’ll make the equally bad mistake of not getting your employees’ buy-in when it comes time to make the change). I find that appreciative inquiry helps dispel some of the fear that is often present whenever big changes are on the horizon.
Leaders considering implementing organizational change with the appreciative inquiry model might ask questions along these lines:
▶ What is working well?
▶ Where do we need to go?
▶ Which service are we currently providing that is likely to be automated soon?
▶ How can we re-skill the workers performing that job function into another area that will provide added value to the company?
This approach values everyone in your organization and celebrates the successes you and your teams have achieved while looking ahead and imagining how the future can be even better.
Once the C-suite executives have identified an area or areas in which teams need to be re-skilled, they can begin carefully selecting the technology or program best suited to their teams’ needs. How will they know if the new tech or program they’re putting into place is getting results? They must quantify the change they are implementing if it’s going to provide any useful information.
Getting Buy-In from Your Teams
The second component of re-skilling your employees is getting buy-in from your teams. Any time you ask employees to change the way they operate, you open the door for significant pushback. If teams are constantly asked to change the way they do things because of the C-suite’s whims, they will grow very frustrated indeed. That’s why the first component is so important: Company leadership must agree on the value of the intended change so that employees will have more confidence in it as well.
Rarely do I see companies tie re-skilling as part of career development. Companies focus on the issue at hand. If team members can see how the new skill they’re being asked to learn relates to the overall trajectory of their careers and ultimately the mission of the organization, they’ll perceive the value in it. Hopefully, you as a people leader have a record of consistently showing your direct reports that you care personally, so they’ll know you’re interested in their growth. If you’ve been having conversations with them in which you dig into their big picture life goals, as we talked about in Chapter 9, you’re halfway there already. Think about where your employees ultimately want to end up. Now, how will learning this new skill help get them there?
There must be a strong human element for individuals to trust the process. It should also be aligned with other talent management functions, not viewed as something extra that employees “have” to do, like homework. The C-suite must determine how urgent the needed change is. Does the entire sales force need to be re-skilled tomorrow? If the need is not extremely urgent, consider having employees opt in. You can incentivize it as you wish. Once these individuals begin to enjoy success, you can present them to your teams as case studies so that other employees are motivated to gain the new skill.
Ultimately, approach re-skilling with careful consideration for the desired impact on your organization and your teams. There’s no need to bury your head in the sand, totally overwhelmed by all the new technologies available. Conversely, it’s unwise to throw a bunch of things at the wall and see what will stick, which will only exhaust and frustrate your employees.
Technologies That Can Take You to the Next Level
We’ve discussed why it’s important to continually re-skill your teams, and the two key steps in introducing and implementing a process change. Now I want to introduce you to three technologies that will help people leaders discover talent and fuel your teams’ evolution to avoid dinosaur syndrome (falling behind in terms of the skill and functionality of your teams). Hopefully you won’t feel overwhelmed when we’re done. My goal is simply to direct you toward some extremely useful tech to explore that could streamline your processes and strengthen your operations while evolving your current talent in the organization. Let’s walk briefly through each of them.
Bias Avoidance Talent Matching
The first tool is SquarePeg (https://www.squarepeghires.com), a matching service for job seekers and employers. SquarePeg uses online assessments to measure a candidate’s aptitude, preferences, and character traits and determine which organization would be the best fit. Candidates take the assessment before they contact a recruiter (perhaps before they even formally begin their job search); they are then presented with a range of companies with whom they might enjoy working.
When founder Claire McTaggart was on my EI Recruiter podcast, she spoke of her time leading a recruitment team as a hiring manager for a strategy consulting firm. She found that her team was asking the wrong questions. Instead of, “Where did you go to school? What was your GPA? Which company are you at now?” they should have been asking “Do you enjoy solving analytical problems? Do you work well on teams? Are you interested in working with a large organization?”
The SquarePeg platform takes such psychometrics and preferences into account. How it works: The candidate takes the assessment, which matches her with jobs for which she is a strong fit. Each employer has already taken the assessment as well. When the candidate receives her report at the end of the assessment, it tells her, “You’re an 84 percent match with Company XYZ, and here’s why.” She can then choose to connect with the companies she matched with. On the employer side, the hiring manager now has a curated selection of people who are a good fit for the organization and interested in working there. The recruiter gets to skip the tedious work of scanning through resumes and can focus on higher-value human-to-human exchanges, educating the candidate about the role and telling her where she may experience success as well as which job functions might prove challenging. The algorithms that match candidate with employer are bias-free; recruiters are sometimes influenced by prejudices in the traditional “six-second resume scan.” The candidate may have her biases challenged as well; for instance, she might not want to work at a certain company because of a personal prejudice, but her job report suggests she’d be a perfect match. She has a chance to reconsider and perhaps embark on a truly rewarding opportunity. It’s a win-win.
Predictive Machine Learning Evolving at the Speed of Your Organization
Pymetrics (https://www.pymetrics.com/employers) uses neuroscience and machine learning to help companies hire in a way that’s predictive and diversity-friendly. Its creator, Frida Polli, a past guest on the EI Recruiter podcast, is a bit of a brainiac. With degrees from Dartmouth, Harvard, Suffolk University, and MIT, Frida had spent more than 10 years studying neuroscience in an academic setting. Yet when she began her MBA program to transition to the business world, she experienced the “problem” of recruiting for corporations on a firsthand basis. Everyone in her MBA program was looking for what came next after their degree. At the same time, Frida saw companies spending lots of money on recruitment technologies for little results. That’s when her idea for Pymetrics came about.
A candidate encounters Pymetrics as the first step in a company’s job application process. Pymetrics uses neuroscience games and machine learning to predict whether a candidate would be a good fit in the workplace. Here’s how it works: The candidate takes a 20-minute assessment in the form of computer games that analyze things such as memory, planning, attention, risk tolerance, risk and reward profile, and learning style. Prior to this, everyone else in the company had taken the assessment, too. Pymetrics then compares the data from the assessments to determine whether the candidate is a good match.
There are three especially cool features of this technology:
1. It is self-learning and adaptive. As your organization’s needs evolve, the tech can evolve with it. Pymetrics can anticipate the “future person” you’ll need to move your company forward and test candidates to see if they fit that future role.
2. It is designed to be bias-free. All humans have biases, whether we want to admit it or not. When a recruiter scans resumes, a candidate is less likely to get an interview if said candidate is a woman, a person of color, older, etc. Pymetrics selects candidates via an unbiased algorithm; the recruiter can then focus on human-centered aspects of the work.
3. If a candidate is not a good fit, it will direct him to other companies for which he might be better-suited. I particularly love this last aspect; what a brilliant way to elevate employer brand. If candidates go through the application process and do not end up signing on with the company, they still leave happy—now they have all these other options! Organizations using the Pymetrics technology can thus communicate care for the individual candidate, even if he does not become a new hire.
Evolving Your Current Employees
Your current internal operations need to be evaluated, evolved, and invested in. The Riff Learning technology (https://www.rifflearning.com) has the potential to transform them. Cofounded by Beth Porter and legendary MIT professor and entrepreneur Alex “Sandy” Pentland, Riff measures conversational dynamics and provides feedback during and after video interactions.
What percentage of your business do you conduct via videoconferencing? Chances are it’s a high number. Riff Learning works to enhance the satisfaction of participants in these conferences. In a meeting—whether in person or via videoconferencing—the goal is dynamic collaboration. You want an environment in which participants freely share ideas and opinions to arrive at authentic solutions. As a people leader, you want to know whether this collaboration is happening or whether one person is grandstanding and discouraging the participation of others, either consciously or subconsciously.
The Riff platform has three core features to make your videoconferencing as productive as possible. Riff uses the vocal activity and facial-gesturing patterns of participants to measure when people are talking, whether they are agreeing with each other, and participants’ levels of engagement (it does this without recording the content of the conversations). It also offers real-time feedback through a feature called the “meeting mediator,” which tracks “turn-taking” in the exchange and notes whether one person is dominating the conversation. Finally, after the meeting is over, Riff offers an analysis of your interaction and gives you a history of your interactions in past videoconferences.
For companies that do a significant portion of their business remotely, Riff is enormously beneficial. Conference participants who tend to take up most of the air in a conversation may not realize what they’re doing. Conversely, less talkative participants may feel there is no opportunity for them to share their thoughts—they leave such meetings feeling frustrated and disengaged. Riff measures these dynamics in real time and provides the data to the employee so they are aware of the behaviors impacting collaboration and other team dynamics that are skewing in a less than optimal way. Riff values the contribution of all your team members—not just the loudest. By measuring participation and engagement, team members are invited to rethink their conversational dynamics and aim for more genuine collaboration.
The Bottom Line on Re-Skilling, Recruitment, and Tech
Technology is evolving at a pace we can’t truly comprehend, and there is so much that still needs to be done. I’d like to see candidate-tracking systems upgrade faster. I’d like to see data scientists and ethicists working alongside HR departments. To get a little dreamy, imagine if future chief human resource officers actually had a background in ethics, organizational psychology, or philosophy. With the sum of prior experiences, they would be well-positioned to interpret future technology needs with a human lens and discern which adaptations would make the longest-term difference in the company’s direction. They would help organizations avoid the trap of adopting technology with no clear sense of purpose, wasting time and money on a system that employees don’t buy into and that muddles operations.
Whatever your organization’s current status, you needn’t see technological evolution as an elephant. When used correctly, tech can be a powerful unicorn-attraction tool. The situation is this: Remove the elephant to attract the unicorn—or become a dinosaur. Don’t go extinct. Pick the tech that suits your needs, and re-skill your teams accordingly.
The Emotional Intelligence Factor
From an EQ lens, the imperative to re-skill your teams engages the stress-management component. Leaders are called on to be flexible, one of stress management’s three pillars. They must adapt to the marketplace and be clear-eyed enough to see what’s coming on the horizon, making necessary adjustments as they go. The decision-making component is also in play here. Its three subcategories are reality testing, problem solving, and impulse control. People leaders must first be centered enough to test their beliefs about the future with what is actually likely to happen. Then there is the problem solving: Are we ready for coming changes in the field? Leaders must then control their impulses to take hasty action and determine the best steps to lead their teams forward, ensuring that they have buy-in from direct reports to implement the needed changes.
From the interpersonal component, empathy is also hugely important. Recognize that many of your employees are likely fearful about the advancement of artificial intelligence and the rapid rate of technological evolution: Will a robot take my job? Will I have to start all over again in a different field? How will I secure my future when so many jobs are moving to large metropolitan areas? This is where the onus falls on you, a passionate people leader who cares directly about your employees. No one likes to be told what to do or to master a certain way of doing things only to be told that it is now obsolete. Put yourself in your direct reports’ shoes. If someone were to tell you that you need to change the way you do your job, how would you like that information communicated? What assurances would you need? Wouldn’t you want to know the value in gaining a new skill? Such questions will guide you well when you find yourself in this delicate position. There is never a reason to abandon your humanity.
You don’t have to be a genius to figure out how to re-skill your teams. You simply need to acknowledge your biggest pain points. Ask yourself: Where could the job be easier? Where are your employees spending too much of their time? Turn inward first. Then seek the solution by asking:
▶ What is currently the biggest need in your company’s HR tech stack (the technology tools and apps that help your HR ecosystem run) to solve these challenges?
▶ How can you gather the right people to probe this need and find solutions?
▶ What growth and organizational company values would be supported by additional HR tech stack investment?
▶ Which leaders can you bring on to be the brain trust of this digital evolution?
▶ Exercise in imagination: Write a press release on your new tech solution. Address these questions: How will it impact the candidate and employee experience? How will it increase your organization’s potential?