Chapter 22
Filling the Digital Skill Gaps
In a perfect world, you would hire people who were perfectly prepared to do the job you needed them to do. The nature of work is constantly changing, and a combination of trends has merged to create consistent gaps in the skillsets of employees. Roles are becoming more specialized, and education (from kindergarten to college) isn't keeping up.
The CEO of Zipcar puts it succinctly: “My father had one job in his lifetime. I will have six jobs in my lifetime, and my children will have six jobs at the same time.”
These splintered experiences of work have combined to create employees who are decent at a wide variety of things but not necessarily experts at even a few.
This means you have to play an active role in filling the gaps. Training people to succeed ultimately falls to you—including the how of focused work in a constantly connected workplace.
The Skills to Train
Aside from focus-wise skills, what do your people need in a world of relentless connectivity? Though you may add skills specific to your own business, the two that every modern workplace requires relate to communication and technology.
Effective Communication
If you're immersed in digital all the time, your other skills will suffer. (This book is overflowing with examples.) The more time we spend staring at screens, the worse we become at face-to-face interaction.
Empathy declines because we can't see facial cues. Is Chris angry…or constipated? I wish he'd text another emoji so I could figure it out!
Digital natives find themselves at an even greater disadvantage because their brain rewiring makes them slower to pick up on nonverbal cues in normal conversation. “That could be a liability if you want to work in a field such as consulting, financial advising, and diplomacy that requires face-to-face interactions,” John K. Mullen writes in the Harvard Business Review.1
Digital-first people try to handle issues through e-mail, texting, or the like—often turning conflict into conflagration (see Chapter 16, “Face to Face in a Facebook World”).
Presentation skills also fall under this category. Through the ages, rhetoric has been considered one of the most important skills to master; it was one of the first three units of Aristotle's classical education. In a world filled with distraction, it's even more crucial to success. In the past, we were forced to listen to the incoherent ramblings of a CEO, but today, we all have Candy Crush to distract us.
In a world gone digital, rhetoric is no longer widely taught. Yet it's never been more crucial. In an analysis of 2.3 million LinkedIn profiles, almost 58 percent of workers who presented superior communications skills were hired in the course of a year.2
Companies hire people who demonstrate soft skills such as communication, teamwork, punctuality, and organization. But for some reason, they usually don't train their existing employees in these skills. That must change.
Digital Competency
The heroes of Men in Black battle comically huge and grotesque insects to save the world. One of their most important weapons is a pen-like device that erases people's memories, preempting dicey questions about aliens stomping around New York.
Important as the device is, Agent J (Will Smith) spends much of the movie fumbling with how to use it. (Mercifully, no one grills him about how it actually works.)
The irony of the movie stretches to this chapter. In a world saturated by technology, you might think the one area that wouldn't require training is tech use. Yet it's a significant problem.
Our immersion in all things digital doesn't necessarily make us good at it. It's become so user-friendly that we almost don't have to be proficient. Just click here, press there, and the software does everything for us.
In a bit of reverse discrimination, leaders often hire younger employees on the assumption that they're fluent in all things digital. That's simply not the case. A Canadian study even suggests that today's digital natives are more accurately described as “digital learners.”3 It argues that despite high confidence and skills, the competence of these learners may be much lower than that of their “digital teachers.”
The bottom line: We can't neglect training our people to effectively use—and take control of—the digital tools necessary for their work.
How to Train These Skills
Training can easily become passive rather than proactive. That's because we tend to guide others in a way that's easiest for us rather than most effective for them. So, we add pages to an already bloated manual or just hope they can learn by reviewing all of your past work.
How we train people is the truest marker of how much we actually value their training. We must budget enough time and money to make it shine.
Effective training begins by acknowledging the limitations of our participants. Today's employees are more distracted than ever. Many are addicted to devices that provide endless ways to entertain them. In fact, most of them can't even watch a TV show without also browsing Facebook on their phones. No wonder typical training bores them out of their minds within the first 3 minutes.
It doesn't, of course, have to be that way. Here are some tips to lift your training beyond typical.
Change the Setting
It's easy and comfortable to keep people in front of their computers. Don't. Yank folks away so you have their full attention.
As I write this, I'm preparing for a trip to Whistler for a retreat of key leaders of a bank. There's a reason organizations go on retreats. When we get away from the same environment, we are more likely to leave behind distractions—and actually retain the important information we learn.
My workshops are old-school. I strive to be dynamic at the front of the room, fortifying the training session with plenty of stories and media. Meanwhile, my captive audience sits in chairs with nothing but a handout and a pen.
The only tech in the room is whatever I choose for the presentation. I do this for a living, but not even I can compete with the YouTube video someone's friend just shared with him.
Be a Curator Rather Than a Creator
Your people are used to Netflix, YouTube, and TED Talks. If you don't communicate with humor, clarity, and relevance, they'll tune you out. Today, your people can not only feast on any form of entertainment from the best the world has to offer, but they can also literally do it from their phones while you're talking.
Even though I speak professionally and have spent hundreds of hours preparing, I still sprinkle in entertaining videos; fun, interactive drills; and questions that require more than yes or no, just to change things up.
So maybe you're not the most polished speaker, and it may be difficult for you to compete with the world's best entertainers coming through on an iPhone screen. The good news is you don't have to compete. Instead, leverage. As the saying goes, “If you can't beat 'em; join 'em.” The Web is teeming with great resources that are cheap or free. Determine the skills you want to develop, then find the corresponding resource.
It's simple and effective to watch a 10-minute video of a great communicator and lead a discussion. People will enjoy the changeup, leading to better results.
If the message needs to come from you, you can still incorporate short, entertaining videos and funny memes that illustrate your points. The goal is to emphasize the entertainment value of the presentation. Your people are used to switching platforms and content frequently in their day-to-day. Help them by switching the mediums and formats you use to deliver information.
In that vein, don't hesitate to invite professional speakers and trainers. A colleague of mine used to give sex ed presentations for classes from middle school to college. The topic, of course, automatically captured their attention. But it was also the treat of a new face and voice imparting the wisdom.
Best of all, outside professionals confer credibility on you. Hearing an expert echo your values elevates you from nag to sage, affirming your leadership.
Keep Training Sessions Short
Less is more. Except when more is more.
Like you, your people have a lot on their plates. No one wants to spend an hour listening to something that could've taken 15 minutes. By squandering your team's time, you also squander their trust in you.
This ethos extends to all-day trainings, most of which can be done in 2 hours. Plus, long sessions are expensive. Part of building a culture of effective training includes being a good steward of company resources.
That said, the skills you want to cultivate may warrant pulling your people out of their environment so they can get a full day of focus. Or split the difference: a half-day training with ongoing reinforcement of the message.
Additionally, keep the content formats you use in your training short and varied. This is not always as easy as it sounds. As Mark Twain said, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” It's much easier to play a 2-hour video than to create a dynamic presentation that is well-paced and full of short but high-impact material. But it's worth it.
As for your parts of the training between that high-impact material, keep it short, especially if public speaking isn't your strong suit.
A friend of mine knows this about himself, yet he typically rattles on for 45 to 50 minutes. Funny thing is he actually holds the audience's attention for about 15 minutes before the chorus line of nodding off begins. (Maybe if he just stopped after 15 minutes…)
Lots of reading material also tests the attention spans of your people. Heavy reading is for personal time, not work. (As a side note, please stop with the group slide read-along where you put your entire presentation in writing on the PowerPoint and then proceed to read it out loud.)
People simply don't read as often anymore (just because Moby Dick should be read doesn't mean it will be). More people watch the news, and even those who read it aren't really reading. A recent study found that about 60 percent of us admit to scanning headlines instead of diving into the stories themselves.4
Overall, it's smart to replace words with video whenever possible. As mentioned, your employees are used to, and therefore comfortable with, absorbing information on a screen with moving images.
With the landscape of work and technology constantly shifting, it's never been more important to properly train your people—on not just what to do but how to be focus-wise while doing it.