Deep Skills: The Lever You Are Not Pulling

Agility11 is excited to share this guest post by Sarah Gilbert, MBA, CTO

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If you are lucky, you’ve had the privilege of working with a great team. You got along, you got things done and you felt great. Why is that? You probably had Deep Skills.

Deep Skills are attributes of our motivation, values and personality that are often utilized, but rarely overtly understood or developed by organizations. Most organizations spend 80% of their energy looking for, developing and leveraging Hard Skills. They spend most of the rest of their people-focused time on Soft Skills. But a focus on Deep Skills can account for one third of the differences between low performing and high performing teams.

Kanban, Agile and Lean practices have embraced deep, core psychological phenomena using principles and rituals to leverage Deep Skills, whether people are aware of it or not. These practices create Team Intelligence, a social phenomenon that produces a set of experiences and outcomes that are greater than its parts. We have seen it and felt it. But did you know that it can be further developed by being intentional in creating self-awareness and conscientiousness?

For example, in my role as a CTO, I hired a manager who was exceptionally talented in empathy – one of his Deep Skills. But they were not great at providing negative or constructive feedback, because everything always came across as “too nice.” Through a series of coaching and reframing of the benefits for employees of receiving critical feedback, the manager was able to see that all feedback was an act of kindness. He became excellent at providing it, because his original Deep Skill helped him to build trust and his direct reports could see that he wanted what was best for them, regardless of the nature of the feedback.

It is who you are that drives how you act, which in turn, directly impacts what you can achieve. Multiple scientific studies show that having a cognitively diverse team produces the very best outcomes for any endeavor. And the more teamwork that is required on an endeavor, the more personality and Deep Skills will impact the outcome.

 If you would like to learn more about the impact of personality on teams, we would love to talk to you.

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You may reach our guest author, Sarah Gilbert, at the Innovative Insights web site.