Do we really have a skills gap?

Is it really a skills gap?

In this article, Johanna ponders on whether leadership has a role in the skills gap. 

Yesterday I had the privilege of being among various illustrious subject matter experts as a panel member on an international skills forum, where we were discussing the well renowned skills gap.  It was great to be able to kick around what I know is a real challenge for many business owners: getting in what can often be very niche skills into your business, keeping hold of them and keeping them effective, and delivering on your behalf for potentially years to come.

Now, my particular interest is all about the role that leadership plays in the running of our organisations – large or small.  I often see the skills gap talked about and hear many different options put forward into how we might fix it.  What I rarely see is the link between leadership and a skills gap.  But what is the link?

In my view, there are 2 parts to that link.

Number 1.  Is there a bait and switch?

What’s a bait and switch you might ask?  That’s where we promise one thing and deliver something totally different. And in the context of leadership that’s the tone and style of leadership in our organization. So are we telling our potential future talent what a fabulous employer we are, how much personal development they’ll get and how flexible and empowering we are as an organization, only to find that in 3 months’ time they are ending the probation period on the grounds of us not living up to our promises (IKR – it’s actually a thing!)?  If we are not “walking our walk” we will get called out on it and people will leave much earlier than we had planned.  Either giving us, or adding to, our skills gap. 

Number 2.  Is our mindset the problem?

So that's point number one. Point number two, do you know what you're looking for, really, when it comes to your skills gap? Now, this latter one in particular, is something I've been kicking around with some of my Help To Grow: Management mentees this week.  I was talking to a particular owner who has been really struggling for about a year to fill two critical roles in their business.  So what we did was spent a couple of hours kicking around how might we deliver the same outcomes, but in a really different way.  Now, from my experience in strategic workforce planning, I'm familiar with all of the different types of sourcing strategies you can use to get capability into your business. And also, because of my experience, and exposure to the Future of Work, for example, I understand what the future workforce is looking for when it comes to things like flexible and remote working.

So I was using all of this expertise and experience to provide some thoughts and ideas, offering suggestions to this business owner.  The thing is, it was their mindset that was getting in the way!   Every suggestion I posed, it was clear, went counter to what their mental model of an employee was!  When I talked about thinking about their workforce as Full Time Equivalents (FTE) rather than warm bodies, that literally blew their mind. When I told them that they could split their long days (they have to be accessible to clients outside of 9-5 hours) into ‘shifts’, that also blew their mind.

So for me, the second link between Leadership and the Skills Gap is: are we actually our own worst enemies?  Does our mental model of what a ‘job’ or ‘employee’ look like get in our way?  Does our view of what equates to a role or a ‘standard’ working day or working practice cloud our ability to see innovative skills gap solutions?  

It’s not a skills gap, it’s a leadership gap…….

In my experience, we don't necessarily have a skills gap. What we might have is a leadership gap. Partly leaders not recognizing that they might be inadvertently doing a bait and switch with their new talent.  And partly because their mental models of how they fill their businesses with capability could be outdated. 

So with my work with the Help to Grow: Management programme, I'm very privileged to have these sorts of conversations on a routine basis. And in fact, I've got a session next week where I'm going to do exactly the same exercise with another small business; helping them see what can feel like, at times, wacky ways that they can get the right capability in their business so they can deploy it in order to keep their business alive and growing and delivering the business in the way that they would like.

Now, if you are having similar problems filling critical roles in your business, I'd be really happy to have a chinwag with you to see if there's something that you haven't thought of that could be useful for you. If that sounds of interest, I'd love you to get in touch. You can see the details at the bottom of this blog.