The race to develop talent is changing its focus.
Historically, success relied on developing extraordinary leaders to inspire and lead large groups of people. But today, and in the future, the new challenge for learning teams is to create an edge for their organization by radically improving their development of technical specialists.
Engineers, economists, researchers, software developers and data scientists — they’re in the vanguard of innovation. No other group has the same potential to create value, cut costs or introduce better processes. This trend is seeing early adopter organizations in the vanguard of a shift to rebalance the annual learning budget toward developing technical experts in nontechnical capabilities.
A western Reserve Bank is building nontechnical skills among its super technical financial experts. A global information technology powerhouse is building business, collaboration and innovation in its software and hardware developers. A global insurance broker is building enterprise skills in its broker and actuarial teams. A global oncology health care provider is building influencing and changing skills among its various clinical craft groups. Two national broadcasters are building strategic and value-creating skills in their technical workforces. And, of course, many of the global powerhouses at the forefront of IT and engineering innovation have been investing in building up nontechnical skills in their experts for years.
What is the payoff?
Investing in experts requires a significant shift in thinking about employee potential. For several decades, talent assessment exercises have focused on the nine-box grid, which defines potential as the ability to lead more people rather than create more value. But leaders in the talent field are now recognizing that it’s often the technical experts who have huge untapped potential to add more value, and that is more important than their ability — or, indeed, desire — to lead teams. The global pandemic has demonstrated in many industries how the ability of technical teams to pivot, innovate and react quickly to changing circumstances is often the difference between organizational success and failure. The traditional nine-box grid, where technical stars are placed in a box on the grid that implies high performance but low potential, is increasingly becoming obsolete.
Leading organizations in this field benefit in five ways.
1. Retention of top technical talent. Experts appreciate the investment, and they feel demonstrably “understood.” They stay on and add more value (and save organizations a huge amount of money and effort in replacement costs).
2. New positive behaviors. Teams trained in skills such as collaboration, influence, coaching and knowledge transfer have markedly more positive interactions both within their team and across team boundaries to nontechnical colleagues. They get more done. And it’s more valuable work.
3. Organizational innovation. Experts who become students of their organization and its market, not just their technical bailiwick, can respond to market trends and contribute new value in a more strategic manner. They earn a seat at the head table, and the organization never looks back.
4. Happier, more fulfilled staff. Experts like interesting problems to solve. And challenging a narrow technical expert to become a broader organizational superstar hands them an entirely new set of problems to relish in solving. There’s no better way to keep expert interest — and to improve expert engagement and positive mental health.
5. Attraction. Fully rolled out “expertship” development initiatives, creating an environment where experts are fully invested, attracts technical talent.
The new frontier for CLOs is this: How do we unleash the untapped potential of our technical experts to gain competitive advantage or community benefit?
Challenging long-held organizational assumptions
The way in which most organizational learning budgets are allocated implies that development of people leaders is more important — and therefore a better investment — than investing in technical groups. Technical departments are given their own budgets to focus their experts on getting more technically competent. Today, however, it’s time to challenge these assumptions. We ask: Who is valuable, and who creates real return?
Increasing the informed answer is your experts — those people who are hard to find, hard to retain and, after a while working in your organization, near impossible to easily replace.
In most organizations, experts don’t get the development they need to maximize their effectiveness. Their needs are not taken as seriously as their potential to create value demands.
Organizations make the mistake of assuming that if technical experts achieve technical competency, they have nothing further to learn. (Sorry to say, but this is a strongly held view of many learning and development specialists.) The impact is that talented technical experts feel unappreciated and undervalued, and they aren’t motivated to truly fulfill their potential.
So, how are leading organizations accelerating the development and potential of their experts? What are they doing to maximize expert performance and value creation, as well as the organization’s return on investment in expert teams?
A strategy for accelerated value creation
For experts to create breakthrough value, they need a wider competency set than just the technical skills and experiences. In some organizations this is described as building their soft skills, but most market-leading organizations have a wider frame — what we call enterprise skills. This is not just soft skills development. The ability to influence and collaborate is most definitely part of the equation, but the full range of skills required is broad: the ability to drive change, the development of commercial acumen and understanding of strategy, and a host of other nontechnical skills that contribute to successful innovation.
Delivery design is also very important. Where leaders want to master “leadership,” the skills needed to lead teams, experts need to master “expertship”— that is, the skills needed to drive projects, innovation and ideas, not people or teams. And they want all of the skills framed to be directly applicable and useful to experts.
The ability to collaborate effectively with other craft groups, for instance, is a critical but rare skill. It is rarely taught, but without it, innovation stalls. The ROI in expensive expert teams can be far higher when a broader range of skills are deployed.
Organizations that make great progress in this area typically work hard to banish some of the barriers that have gotten in the way of an investment in experts. These barriers include:
- Old thinking. L&D assumes that technical staff add the most value living and working in their “technical bubble.”
- Bias. L&D may assume technical experts are “not good with people,” but is this a nature problem or a lack of nurture? Our data, collected from working with more than 20 organizations and more than 1,500 experts, suggests it is most certainly a lack of nurture.
- A lack of interest from the experts themselves. Having rarely, if ever, been asked to focus on developing nontechnical skills, it’s easy for specialists to assume that technical expertise is all they need. They don’t equate their frustration at not being able to add more value with a lack of skills because we all tell them every day how expert they are.
- Lack of models and structure. While most organizations have capability frameworks for leadership at every level of seniority, few have developed a capability framework to grow expertship at any level. We’ve learned the hard way that these frameworks are essential and very discrete from leadership frameworks.
- An assumption that expertship and leadership are more or less the same thing. This approach demotivates experts who want to become senior individual contributors rather than managers.
