Skills-based approaches are the tip of the iceberg
Business leaders recognize that the rate of change has accelerated, and many organizations have adopted a skills-based approach to help them keep pace with new and ever-evolving challenges. However, most companies have an inadequate view of their employees’ inner motives – what drives their energy and satisfaction and makes work more fulfilling. Without this insight, skills development might run headfirst into resistance or misalignment. In the worst-case scenario, employee burnout and high turnover can emerge.
“The bottom line is that job burnout is all about mismatches – mismatch between the individual and their job, or between the individual and their workplace environment. So any good prevention strategy has got to aim to reduce these mismatches and increase job engagement.” – Christine Maslach
In a rapidly changing environment, people intuitively feel stress from potential uncertainty and will revert to survival mode. When you're in survival mode, your brain is focused on getting through challenges. It’s constantly on alert to protect you from threats (real or imagined) and can stop you from resting or enjoying life. Most skills-matching tools identify skills an employee has demonstrated in the past, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. There is no indication if applying those skills brought an individual personal fulfillment.
As opportunities emerge to learn new skills, employees pursue a path in which they hope to survive and thrive. But developing new skills does not prevent burnout from occurring, and if the employee is not particularly self-aware, they could pursue what appears best on the surface without contemplating whether the new skills are aligned with their inner motives. If that alignment is not present, short-term excitement may be replaced with renewed frustration and burnout.
Helping employees identify their most-satisfying skills and offering development opportunities to match is a better pathway forward. tru® Strength Realization (tru) is an innovative talent management and career development platform that provides organizations and individuals with a shared framework to highlight each person’s unique strengths and preferences. By helping individuals analyze personal and professional Peak Experiences, the tru platform uncovers a person’s most-satisfying skills and encourages them to build a plan to pursue them.
In addition to highlighting the most-satisfying skills, tru also highlights the roles, values, and needs involved when acting in a fully authentic way and pursuing meaningful objectives. It also helps analyze and identify the contextual factors that support or hinder a person expressing their best self. Employees focus on learning the skills that will help them be most fulfilled. Companies get the right people doing the right things at the right time. Teams benefit from mutual understanding with each person making powerful requests and offers that leverage strengths for the benefit of one another and the whole.
Considering the full breadth and depth of employees’ inner motives can help companies ensure that skills-based approaches yield sustained results.
