Five Practices for Employee Skill Development

Wharton runs a format called Nano Tools for Leaders. Fast, practical leadership tools you can learn and start using in under fifteen minutes. This was my contribution.

The constraint made it better. There's no room for throat-clearing in fifteen minutes.

The premise: accelerated digital transformation and the shift to remote work have widened the gap between the skills people currently have and the ones they'll need. Everyone agrees on that. Where organizations go wrong is in how they assign responsibility for closing it.

Most land on an either/or. Either it's entirely on the employer to provide training, or it's on employees to work out which skills matter and go get them independently. Both fail, and they fail in predictable ways. Employer-owned development produces catalogues nobody asked for. Employee-owned development produces a gap between the people with time and confidence to invest in themselves and everyone else.

The five practices here are built around a collaborative model instead, with leaders empowering, encouraging, and enabling their people to close anticipated gaps, the organization providing structure, and the individual providing direction.

The word I'd underline is "anticipated." Most skill development responds to gaps that already hurt. The practices here are about the ones you can see coming.

Short, tactical, and designed to be used the same day you read it. Good for a people manager who wants something concrete rather than a philosophy.