Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 308 | Leading & Managing Section | 1

Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since September 2017 | Week 308 | August 4 – 10, 2023

Make Your Case for Communication Upskilling

By Nancy Duarte | MIT Sloan Management Review | August 03, 2023

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

It’s hard to find a job posting that doesn’t mention the communication skill set as a key requirement. And yet, when faced with the skills that candidates actually have and those that they’re weak in, hiring managers find themselves making trade-offs, particularly to meet pressing technical needs: This guy can code like there’s no tomorrow, but his communication is a challenge. Let’s get him in here fast. We’ll coach him up. It can wait.  

The thing is, communication skills can’t wait.  Executives in “people functions” like human resources and learning and development (L&D) understand that communication and persuasion skills are critical in all areas of business — even software development and accounting. You do it by making a solid case for the return on that investment.  Five key insights from the author’s conversation with two L&D folks on how to emphasis this are:

1. Collect examples of the ROI you’ve seen from previous training.  One way to start is to think back to previous learning efforts in your organization and see what dots you can connect for stakeholders. 
2. Help identify the value of future training.  When you’re considering or developing future training, look for more direct ways to measure upskilling outcomes. 
3. Recognize qualitative impact — including better employee retention.  Even with something like a pitch program in place, it’s tough to tally up the costs of soft skills training in cold, monetary terms So you gauge value qualitatively. That can mean soliciting input from managers and team leaders on a training program’s impact on employees’ behavior, effectiveness on the job, and approach to teamwork.
4. Strategize about which kinds of jobs to focus on first.  Like any organizational change effort, upskilling a workforce requires strategic planning. To help such an initiative gain traction, it’s useful to identify where you’ll see the greatest immediate payoff and plan to concentrate there before you roll things out more broadly.
5. Address the time crunch head-on.  Even if an organization’s stakeholders agree that, in an ideal world, they should prioritize helping employees with soft skills, time constraints can make it tough. In the perennial battle between the important and the urgent, the urgent tends to win leaders’ attention and resources. You might need to adjust project deadlines a bit or give people fewer tasks while they’re doing development work so they don’t feel pressure to do their “real” work after hours. Development is real work. 

3 key takeaways from the article

1. It’s hard to find a job posting that doesn’t mention the communication skill set as a key requirement. And yet, when faced with the skills that candidates actually have and those that they’re weak in, hiring managers find themselves making trade-offs, particularly to meet pressing technical needs.  The thing is, communication skills can’t wait.
2. Executives in “people functions” like human resources and learning and development (L&D) understand that communication and persuasion skills are critical in all areas of business — even software development and accounting. You do it by making a solid case for the return on that investment.
3. Five key insights to establish the case for this important task:  collect examples of the ROI you’ve seen from previous training, help identify the value of future training, recognize qualitative impact — including better employee retention, strategize about which kinds of jobs to focus on first, and address the time crunch head-on.

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Topics:  Personal Investment, Training, Communication Skills