Skill shortages come in many shapes and sizes. You may be trying to:
- Transfer critical technical knowledge from veteran programmers approaching retirement.
- Increase the retention of young CPAs in your firm.
- Recruit hard-to-find electrical engineers to a rural manufacturing plant.
You may know your organization is facing critical skill shortages. You may even have an idea what the solutions should be. But you won’t implement these initiatives successfully unless you pay attention to key principles of organizational change. Here are three rules for effectively managing the changes needed to develop and sustain the future workforce capabilities.
1. Solve the Right Problem
Different problems require differentiated solutions. There are a wide range of talent management problems that fall under the heading of “skills gaps” these days. You need to set boundaries of what is inside and outside your problem space.
You wouldn’t approach recruiting welders the same way you recruit engineers. Recognize the different contexts of different skill shortages. Some will be solved by outsourcing, some by improved knowledge transfer and mentoring skills, and some by more creative recruiting and retention strategies. Matching the best solutions to your specific problems may seem obvious, but it is often tempting to apply a solution that works in one area to another professional context where it doesn’t fit.
2. Make Sure Your Implementation Plans Are Realistic
Design implementation plans that will work. You aren’t going to create a mentoring culture with a two-hour workshop, or transform recruiting with a few visits to different schools, or retain more high potential workers by changing your retirement benefits. Executives routinely fail to understand the dynamics of creating lasting behavioral and structural changes in today’s crazy busy work environment. How you create new habits of knowledge sharing, for example, is a different problem than creating new processes (e.g. for onboarding) or structures (e.g. career paths). The first step is understanding specifically what you need to change in order to get the sustainable capabilities you need in your workforce.
3. Continually Revise Your Approach to Skills Gap Solutions.
Talent risks, such is inadequate succession planning or unwanted turnover in hard-to-fill technical positions, are often what leadership guru Ron Heifetz calls “adaptive” problems. These challenges are not well defined and resolving them will require continual learning along the way. For example, you might think you need to improve recruiting of engineers, only to discover the company doesn’t have adequate processes to support onboarding and retention to make your investment pay off.
Most serious skills gaps require more systemic solutions that only become evident after you begin working on the problem. Try listening to employees currently in key roles to better understand where the organization is missing opportunities to extend the tenure of its high potentials. Is it a lack of clear career paths? Lack of development opportunities? Poor supervisory skills? There is no silver bullet for solving most skill shortages. Being open to continually learning and revising your approach will be key.
To reduce the impacts of critical skill shortages, pay special attention to key elements of organizational change. Solve the right problem. Develop realistic implementation plans. And continually revise your approach to incorporate what you’re learning. Contact us if you want to discuss more practical implementation solutions for your skills gap problems.