Back in the 1960s US fighter pilot John Boyd was known as ’40 second Boyd’ from his standing bet that starting from a position of disadvantage he could get himself into a winning position in 40 seconds or less. It...
One of the services TeamFit delivers using its skill management platform is Skill Insights. There are a number of specific business cases, but the most common is the following question. “Do we have the skills we need to achieve...
Back in February 2015, when we were at work on our first ideas about skill management and how a shared understanding of skills was core to the future of work, we set out our critical assumptions about the future...
Skills are being described as the new currency of business. Our skills are how represent ourselves, find jobs, get chosen for projects and find people to work with. LinkedIn lets you identify up to 50 skills but modern skill...
TeamFit is a skill management platform for professional services companies. We spend a lot of time speaking with the leadership of different companies to understand their strategies and the business pressures they are under. A surprising number of these...
Many large or rapidly growing companies have a person responsible for talent acquisition. Aging workforces, changing skill requirements, competition for talent are all driving interest in talent acquisition. But is talent acquisition the most important way to build capabilities?...
Human resources management generates a lot of records and is supported by process after process. Sometimes we lose sight of the people in all of the data and processes. Collecting reliable records is a critical part of human resources...
“Differentiate for your clients, not from your competitors” Understanding strategic differentiation is critical to the leaders of professional services companies. In a hyper-competitive world, companies without differentiation quickly find themselves pushed down into commoditized roles where it is hard...
Software may be eating the world, as Marc Andreessen says, but it is doing so by embedding itself into things and then connecting them into larger systems. The handle for this massive trend is the Internet of Things or...
“The future is here, it is just not evenly distributed.” William Gibson Governments are preparing a massive renewal of infrastructure. In Canada, the government plans to stimulate the economy with a $125 billion infrastructure fund. In the United...
Skill profiles are the new calling card. They are how we introduce ourselves to people and show what we can do. Building a great skill profile is part of the day-to-day work of all knowledge workers. So how do...
Your skill profile is as unique as you are, but unlike your fingerprints, your profile adapts with experience and you can intervene to shape these changes. Skills are the new currency of work. This is especially in the professional...
Over the past decade, HR in professional services has become increasingly complex. There is a need for new tools that give deeper insight into people’s real skills and how they are being applied on projects. The payback for HR...
Please take the Design Thinking Skills and Applications Survey – Share Your Insights How do you build a new skill set? That question is coming up a lot lately, in part because it is the beginning of the year...
Talent Management looks at you from the outside while Skills Management is looking at you from the inside out. TeamFit is what connects the two. Chuck Hamilton 2017 is shaping up to be the year of ‘skills.’ Everywhere...
Professional services companies depend on leadership for success. This is true for all companies of course, but it is especially true for companies that rely on the skills of their people to succeed. If you are the CEO of...
What does this mean for your professional services firm and more important for yourself as an individual? Dan Pink introduced the case that mastery, autonomy and purpose are the key drivers for business performance. What does this mean for...
Almost all of the people on TeamFit work on teams, which is not surprising given the platform’s name. We spend a lot of time figuring out what patterns of skills help people to work together. So much of the...
At TeamFit, we regularly survey different industries on skill trends and look at our own platform to see what skills are getting the most use. One of the skills that has been trending over the past five years is...
TeamFit takes an open, bottom up, approach to skills. Anyone can claim a skill and they can call anything they like a skill. This keeps the system open and adaptive and lets new skills and skill terms bubble up...
Most of us use hundreds of different skills in our work. But not all of these skills are equally important. Our research has found that the most important skills for an individual or an organization are differentiating skills. Core...
A simple question, “Can you perform the same role using different skills?” From another perspective, “Can the same skill set be applied to different roles?” Why do these questions matter? How you answer them will say a great deal...
What is the primary role of company leadership in markets characterised by variability, complexity, ambiguity and risk? It is pretty simple really, building capabilities that deliver value to some part of the market. Then taking the revenues from the...
For the past few weeks, I have been in conversations on critical emerging skill sets for different industries. The conversation has ranged from LinkedIn groups (especially Design Thinking), to long e-mail threads, to dips into Twitter and even Facebook....
There has been compelling research evidence reported over the past decade that organizations with high engagement of their people deliver better financial outcomes (e.g. Gallup Sept 2016). This makes intuitive sense. But if we unpack this a little more,...
Many of us spend part of our careers as project managers. Learning how to manage a project and get the best out of our people is a foundational learning experience for many of us. It’s a time when we build core...
Back on August 14 Gary Golden wrote a fascinating post on Techcrunch “Why LinkedIn should kill the résumé and replace it with the experience graph.” He makes the basic point that the résumé as it currently exists does not...
At TeamFit, we are carrying out a survey on skills in professional services. Basically we are asking what skills contribute to success today and tomorrow. Please contribute to this survey This has gotten us into many conversations about skills...
Skills are at the center of TeamFit. They are one of the four key things that the platform connects, the others being People, Projects and Roles. Our focus on skills leads some people to ask “How is this different...
“Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.” – Rita Mae Brown, 1988 The words we use are always informed by their histories. They reflect and distill the thoughts and values of a particular time. Words change...
In June our team successfully completed a major piece of work. It was high stakes and high pressure, with a lot of late nights and some pretty intense conflicts. But we made it through and we decided to celebrate...
As a product professional, I’ve had the opportunity over the years to be a member of or leader of cross functional teams. These teams tackled a wide array of issues, typically in project or time-bound committee formats. The matrix...
One of the biggest factors in a company’s success is also one of the hardest to acquire. According to a recent leadership survey, 46 percent of companies stated that leadership skills were the most difficult to find in an...
Value-based pricing is a strategic tactic where setting price is based on the benefits your service or product provides to your customers. It is the ability to charge based on the value you offer. On the other hand, cost-based...
A high-performance team is often characterized as one that is aligned and committed to a common purpose. The people on the team have roles with complementary skills. Most importantly, they show high levels of collaboration and innovation to produce...
Faster project cycles More diverse teams Pressure to perform Professional services are evolving rapidly, and with it the tools and systems we use to deliver are changing as well. There has been no change in the fundamentals. It is...
What skills differentiate you from people in your profession? What skills do you have that surprise you? In my twenties I worked mostly on my own. I was what we call today a ‘sole contributor.’ I did a variety...
It is hard to really know how skilled another person is. The only real way to do this is to work with them on a series of projects and follow the results of the work over time. Even then...
In a recent Entrepreneur article, contributor Matt Straz wrote, “Almost half of the companies that participated in the Workplace Trends’ Global Workforce Leadership Survey in February and March 2015 chose leadership as the hardest skill to find in employees. What’s more, among...
Knowledge workers are often biased towards skills that rest in the mind and are expressed through language. That is language broadly defined, to include math and coding, conversations and negotiations … things that happen mostly in our heads. Looking...
We have been carrying out a simple one-question survey that asks the following question: “What categories do you use to organize your skills? Please pick the top five categories that you use to organize your skills. You may want...
We have almost 2,000 unique skills on TeamFit. That may seem like a lot, but one company we are talking with has more than 9,000! And some individuals on TeamFit have as many as 200 different skills, all rated...
“The best leading indicator of the success of a B2B SaaS company is user engagement.” Boston VC in Conversation User engagement can predict future success. So how should we be measuring engagement? This is a frequent topic of conversation...
We all talk about big data these days. Never before have we had access to so much data from so many sources. In TeamFit’s world, we are bringing in data from many, many different systems and then blending this...
What conversations do you have about skills in your company? There are three that matter. And if you are not having these conversations you are putting your company at risk. What skills lead to our winning work? What skills...
Sketching is a pretty valuable skill. It is one of the best ways to capture ideas, explore connections and communicate our thoughts and feelings. It is a core design skill. Maybe it should be seen as a core business...
Automation of knowledge work, platforms to connect freelance knowledge workers, cost cutting at major companies and the development of internal consulting services will all put professional services firms under pressure in 2016. Please take our short survey What skills are...
Most of us work on more than one thing at a time. I am not just talking about the multiple projects we take on at work. At TeamFit I generally have three or four projects running at any one...
Skills are not evenly distributed. They are not even normally distributed! There is now good research support for the idea that skills distribution follows a power law and not a bell curve. For a good summary see Josh Bersin’s...
Managers have to worry about many things. Making revenue and profit numbers, customer satisfaction and their Net Promoter Score, employee engagement, trends that could disrupt their industry … it seems endless. Should skills be on the list? Just how...
Welcome to 2016. We hope you had a great holiday season and are back at work full of hope for the New Year. At TeamFit, we are obsessed with ‘skills.’ We help people understand their own skills and the...
At TeamFit we spend a lot of time talking to people about their skills, parsing through skill and competency models, and looking at skill maps. One thing that often comes up is concern about overly general skill terms. One...
The new year is just around the corner now. Most of us are well into our annual strategic planning cycle and goals are getting firmed up for 2016. But what about skills? Do you have a comprehensive skill development...
As an organizational effectiveness expert and management coach, I get to learn from many different teams. During the last downturn in the oil patch, I engaged in strategic planning with the leadership team of a business unit in a...
Entering the holiday season, we are looking back on what we have learned over the past year at TeamFit. One of the most important is the role of trust in consulting, success, team performance and building a valued consulting...
For professional services firms long-term value comes from just two things: client relationships and firm capabilities. Both of these are built on trust. It is pretty obvious how client relationships rely on trust. They are built up over time...