Selling SFIA and Skills to Your Leadership Team

Introduction

Becoming a skills-based organization or team is not a small undertaking in terms of time and resources. So before embarking on the skills journey, it’s right for an organization’s leadership team to ask, ‘ What business value do skills provide your organization with?’ It can be a valuable tool for positioning skills and frameworks such as SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age) in the organization. With the forthcoming release of SFIA (version 9) and the impetus that a new release of the framework brings, it is timely to consider the real and tangible benefits of leveraging skills, specifically the SFIA framework.

In line with this, at Lexonis, we have learned that the most significant cause of ‘success’ versus ‘failure’ is helping every sponsor, stakeholder or participant to understand how they will benefit from a skills management initiative. This engagement starts from the top, your leadership team.

“Digital Transformation, DevOps, Agile, Cybersecurity” may be hot topics that are taking their attention now, but do they truly understand how SFIA can help organizations manage their workforce’s skills and align talent with business goals and emerging industry needs?

Lexonis’ Guidance for ‘Selling’ SFIA

With the above in mind, the key is to identify the issues or the pain points for your organization and then link these to the talent outcomes that a skills-based approach will enable you to achieve. What are some of the key business-related challenges that your leaders are interested in addressing? Here are just a small number of examples:

• We are misfiring on our business strategy because our teams’ skills are misaligned with our goals
• We are losing business because we are not keeping our best talent
• Poor hiring decisions are costing our business through poor performance and morale
• We are losing business to our competition because we are falling behind in our skills

Taking a skill-based approach can provide the skills intelligence data to help address these questions; for instance, using a skill framework such as SFIA and the right tools will help to answer the following: 

• We know the skill gaps that prevent us from meeting our business goals and how to address them using a ‘build vs. buy’ strategy.
• We have a clear sight of the capability across all our teams; we can pinpoint how many people have each skill and see their level of mastery.
• We know which people have critical skills; we can prepare a succession plan for their replacement and/or progression.
• We can identify our highest-priority learning and development needs to support the career development of our organization’s top talent and provide them with career progression.
• We can assign the right people to our projects and service requirements to ensure operational efficiency and performance.

Get Specific

Here is a more specific example of how you might think about this…

Your leadership team is interested in business improvement and performance. Since SFIA consistently defines the skills, knowledge, and proficiency levels required to drive excellent performance, the connection is logical. The performance of any function is directly related to the skills of its constituent teams, managers, and employees. This relates to the degree of performance and its alignment with the organization’s business strategy.

For example, consider the performance of the Service Support team within the organization; the link between this team’s performance and overall service quality is critical. Efficient service support leads to faster issue resolution, improved system uptime and user satisfaction.

Modeling the skills of a high-performing Service Support professional can help to identify skills gaps for learning and development purposes, refine your recruitment criteria, and ensure your team can handle both routine and complex support tasks. If this results in even a 10% improvement in performance, imagine the impact on user satisfaction, reduced downtime, and the resulting boost in operational efficiency. Now, consider the effects of a 20% or 30% improvement — the positive impact on productivity and the organization’s bottom line could be substantial.

Moreover, your Senior Leadership Team may want reassurance that its workforce can continue to operate despite business disruptions or unexpected departures. 

Which skills are critical to the smooth running of the organization? Which ones are at risk, and how would the organization most effectively bridge them if the unexpected occurred? How is it possible to answer any of these questions successfully if the workforce’s skills have not been captured and measured against a consistent framework such as SFIA? Only an effective skills management program can achieve this.

Most importantly, the closer you make the rationale for skills management to the organization’s business strategy and its ‘bottom line,’ the more likely you will sell a skills approach and SFIA to your leadership team.

Lexonis and SFIA v9

At Lexonis, we have developed a ‘project launch pack’ that we use when implementing SFIA for our clients. We share many lessons learned, templates and sample materials that can be used to create a robust engagement and communications plan.

So, if you are interested in selling SFIA or skills to your leadership team or any of your other stakeholders or sponsors and would like to know more about version 9 of SFIA, have a chat with one of our SFIA-accredited consultants.