This is the third of four posts outlining a practical framework for addressing critical skill shortages. See my “Talent, Technology & Timing” post to make sure you’re focused on the right problem for your business. Check out “From Cross Training to Collaboratives” to evaluate the range of solutions you’re pursuing.

As a leader, you probably know the workforce risks you’re facing today if you’re going to grow your business. And you already have some initiatives in place to attack skill shortage problems. But are these solutions really making a difference? Could they be having a bigger impact?

Here are three things you need to implement an effective talent strategy: leadership skills, change management tactics, and a customized workforce development process. No matter what solutions you’re pursuing, these three elements are essential for success. Address these needs up front. Don’t pretend they will magically take care of themselves.

Do you have the leadership skills you need?

Complex, uncertain, adaptive problems require sophisticated leadership skills that have not been as essential in the past. These skills are particularly critical for:

• Creating and leading multi-employer workforce collaboratives.

• Leading the transition to a more technology-intensive workplace, dominated by AI and automation, where uncertainty about future roles and skills is high.

Many economic regions and industries are ripe for workforce solutions that include multi-employer collaboratives, but the leadership skills needed to create and sustain these alliances are often missing.

For example, I refused to work with one economic development group who assigned a new 26-year-old program manager to establish a collaborative. I told the director she was wasting her time. This young manager lacked the personal relationships he needed to bring skeptical employers to the table. He also lacked the sophisticated facilitation skills to engage busy executives in important trust-building discussions to create a group that would work together.

Finally, the program manager’s previous experience suggested he probably wouldn’t stay in this job very long. Continuity of relationships is critical for leading workforce collaboratives. Unfortunately, this combination of skills and existing relationships is hard to find and takes time to develop. 

The other set of leadership skills needed when trying to transform your workforce is the ability to manage through uncertainty and major organizational change. These skills are particularly important when automation and AI technology changes make the shape of your future workforce unclear. This challenge requires another set of capabilities that have not historically been demanded of leaders.

Managing change to close the skills gap

A change management mindset is also essential no matter whether you’re tackling skill shortages at a function, company-wide, or industry level. Many executives overlook this part of the process. They don’t think through the dynamics of change or how much change they are asking of participants – employees, managers, educators, or other stakeholders.

For example, to effectively implement changes in a company, industry, or region’s talent pipeline, leaders have to gain emotional buy in from key players, identify short term wins that will sustain momentum for a long term initiative, and measure results to demonstrate impacts.

Understanding the dynamics of organizational change is essential to get results and sustain what can be complex, lengthy, and politically-charged workforce initiatives.

Customizing your workforce development process

Every situation is different. Are you addressing skill needs for your company, county, region, industry or state?

It’s hard – and even misleading – to give specific advice on how to create an effective workforce development process to tackle critical skill shortages – now and in the future. That’s because your process depends on the unique problems you’re addressing, whether it’s with short term skills gaps or the uncertain future created by AI and automation. In addition, there are a myriad of contextual factors, such as leadership capabilities, complexity of the skills involved, geographic location (urban/rural setting), and existing relationships between key players, that make your situation unique.

Nevertheless, every process will have certain steps:

1. Diagnose & prioritize most critical skills needed. At a company level, these must take into account the overall business strategy.
2. Evaluate current workforce initiatives in place. You may have some great programs already underway in your business. Build off of them. At a county or regional level, there can be dozens of training programs that make a coordinated strategy and solution more difficult.
3. Identify most practical solutions to invest in, given pressing and changing skill needs.
4. Evaluate resources and leadership capabilities available to support your initiatives.
5. Develop an implementation plan, that includes important change management activities.
6. Create plan to evaluate impacts on workforce needs. Measurement of results is key to sustain support for the effort.

The next time your colleagues propose investments to build and sustain your future workforce, evaluate these three elements – leadership skills, change management capabilities, and implementation process – when deciding what initiatives to pursue and how long it will take to see results. Subscribe to my Smart Workforce Strategies Blog for more practical ideas on the latest skills gap solutions and implementation lessons I’m uncovering in my research.