Do You Know What Your People Don’t Know?

By Hayden Jones
Managing Consultant

We all know how fast things change in today’s business environment. Technology is outdated before you get it out of the box, products change to be competitive or because the government is helping us in our business efforts, units experience turnover, and processes change quickly, which in turn affects functions and tasks. People who work for you must adapt to these constant changes, and adaptation requires new or modified skills and/or knowledge. Management often assumes that their people know what they are to do. This leads to management not knowing what their people do not know. Failure to track and monitor skill sets and knowledge within a unit can lead to a “Unit@Risk.”

Unit@Risk occurs when the unit’s skill or knowledge level is insufficient to complete a basic process or when all of a single critical skill or knowledge set rests with one person in the unit. What if that one person wins the lottery? The concentration can bring a process and a unit to its knees. Failure to recognize the unit’s risk can impact quality, customer service, and the cost of operations. To prevent the risk or at least minimize it, managers need to monitor their people’s skill/knowledge levels at regular intervals.

To effectively monitor skill levels, the manager must:

1. Identify and define the skills/knowledge necessary to effectively complete each process within the unit, and clearly communicate these definitions to staff.
2. Meet with the entire unit and ask each employee to score themselves on their skill/knowledge level. I use 4 as a high (meaning the person can perform the skill at an exceptional level, even training others when needed) and 0 as a low (the person doesn’t have the skill/knowledge as described). It’s always best to talk through the definitions to avoid confusion.
3. After employees have scored themselves, you should also score each person based on your experience with and observations of that employee. This will identify gaps between your perception of the employee’s skill/knowledge level and their own self-assessment.
4. Where gaps exist, discuss them with the employee and come to a consensus as to what level they really have.
5. Put the final results of the scoring exercise into a spreadsheet with the employee names on one axis and the skills/knowledge on the other. For any given skill/knowledge, the maximum score would be four times the number of people. If one skill/knowledge set scores less than 60% of the maximum, there may be danger of a Unit@Risk, and, to reduce the risk, steps should be taken as quickly as possible to complete training for some or all of the employees.
6. At the same time, you may evaluate each employee’s total score against a desired level and establish training programs for employees who fall short. Many managers start assessment programs but fail to follow through. At a minimum, these evaluations should occur once a year, perhaps as part of the planning/budgeting process. Based on the frequency of changes in a unit, quarterly evaluations might be appropriate. Also, it is very important to keep the training programs up to date and in line with the currently required skills/knowledge—otherwise, the effort produces well-trained people whose skills or knowledge do not apply to the unit’s needs.
    

Remember, it’s not what your people know that will hurt your unit, but what they don’t know. And, as Yogi Berra might have said, “If you don’t know what they don’t know, you can’t fix it.”