How to make difficulty look easy
Great performance is not born from easy, but from making difficult look easy because your skill sets are on point; learn why difficulty is not a problem, it's your path to success and winning
The subject of difficulty in corporate training should be front and center in an organization’s strategy.
Why?
Because it reveals the state of mind of the organization.
It reveals their knowledge of skills development; or actually, their lack of it.
What do you mean?
Well, think about it.
Let’s look at the logic
The pinnacle of organizational learning right now is the network team model (see Josh Bersin, McKinsey, Stanley McCrystal). This means that the basic unit of business structure is a team; that is, a team that is linked to their teams and other teams throughout the organization. Teams can be fixed, but they can also exist only for the life of the project. Not only that, but team made up is made up from a multidisciplinary perspective. Members can be drawn from different departments, inside and outside the organization, all bringing different skill sets to the table.
The foundational skill set, as McKinsey likes to call it, is power skills. Leadership and teamwork are power skills. Setting goals, getting alignment, communicating, collaborating, planning, executing, taking risks, problem-solving, creative thinking; power skills. They stand in contrast to then technical skills or hard knowledge that make up your job description.
“Hard Skills are soft (they change all the time, are constantly being obsoleted, and are relatively easy to learn), and Soft Skills are hard (they are difficult to build, critical, and take extreme effort to obtain).” As we redefine soft skills, they become power skills” — Josh Bersin
So, what is the next logical step?
How do you get good at power skills?
It’s got to be, hasn’t it?
Here we have a boat load of top consultant and experts in their field saying that organizations need to revisit their understanding of what skills are going to build you a real competitive advantage.
It’s not hard skills.
The truth is that hard skills can and will be turned into an app.
Soft skills — your power skills — are your goldmine, your touchstone, your superpower.
You switch onto power skills, turn up the dial, means you are growing your people skills.
That means your job is to grow people. Your job is to create a culture of performance.
What do we mean by a culture? “How do a group of people solve problems?” That’s culture.
It’s the values and norms, the good and the bad, the set of rules that determine how you operate. As the saying goes:
Organizational strategies, change management practices, restructuring, mergers, international operations fail because nobody takes into account culture. How your organizational culture manifests itself is a reflection of your organization’s power skills capacity. If you are still working from a Newtonian model of the organization as a machine, or a computer model of systems, you are missing the biggest opportunity to create competitive advantage.
It’s staring you in the face.
It’s not the what and the how, it’s the who, the capacity your people have to make decisions.
Take a copy of your organization’s structure… stick it up on your wall?
If culture is defined as a how a group of people solve problems, then who does that? Look at your organigram. What does it tell you? Where does the power lie? Where are the decision-making processes? Is it top-heavy?
I’ll make you a bet:
So, the challenge all organizations face is equipping teams with a set of skills that have been misunderstood and sidelined over years, if not for decades in the favor of hard, expert specialist skills.
It’s like asking a teenager to give up their favorite console video game. It’s not going to work. Doomed to failure.
Unless…
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