The Three Main Parts of Skills Matrices

A skills matrix actually breaks down into three separate parts. Put them all together, and they give you a pretty full picture of where your entire team stands. The first part covers what we call technical competencies, and it’s just another way of saying hard skills. These are the skills that your employees pick up over time as they go through training programs and get experience with the work. The second part deals with leadership capabilities, and it includes everything from big-picture planning and making decisions to helping teams work through big changes and transitions. The third part focuses on behavioral attributes or how a person organizes their day-to-day work and how they work with everyone around them.

Technical skills matter for any role, and I’m not saying that they don’t. A person could be very talented at data analysis or project management, and they are great at everything they do. But having that level of expertise doesn’t automatically mean that they’re ready for a leadership position later.

Leadership abilities are what show if a person can take on a bigger role when they move up in the organization. They need to make sound decisions even when they don’t have the information. They should know how to mentor and develop the other members on their team. These abilities separate a strong performer in their existing role from a person who’s actually ready to take on a lot more responsibility.

Behavioral fit matters just as much as the other two dimensions when you’re planning for succession. Some research on this – about 89% of hiring failures stem from poor cultural fit instead of from technical skill gaps. The implication for succession planning is worth paying attention to. Technical skills can be taught in months or maybe a couple of years at most. But changing how a person works within your company culture and fits in with your entire team is much harder and frankly can take exponentially longer if it’s even possible.

All three dimensions need to line up for your matrix to actually work. For example, you might have an employee with strong technical skills and the right behaviors. Except that they don’t have any leadership experience yet. But when you see that gap, it’s much easier to know what their development plan should work on. Or maybe you’ll find a person with leadership promise who just needs more time on the technical side first. A strong matrix helps you see what’s missing for each person, and from there, you can start to prepare them for whatever roles they’ll move into later.

Build a Scale That Works

After you work out what to track, the next piece is the measurement part. Your system should be intuitive enough that anyone on the team can pick it up and use it in no time without needing to reference a training manual or have another person walk them through it step by step.

A basic 1-5 scale works just fine for most of the businesses out there. Team members can remember what each number means without any trouble, and it gives you enough of a spread to tell the difference between employees who are ready for more responsibility right now and the ones who still need some time to develop their skills. Your rating system doesn’t need to be complicated to get the job done.

The challenge is to define what each number actually means for each skill on your scale. A “3” in data analysis is going to be different from a “3” in team leadership, and you’ll have to write out what a person does at each level. With data analysis, a 3 might mean that the person can run standard reports and see patterns without any help. Leadership at that same level could mean a person who’s able to guide a small team through everyday projects without much supervision.

Behavioral anchors can help to fix this issue. IBM uses them to tie real, concrete examples to each level on its rating scale. If you don’t have them, a rating like “proficient” might mean one thing to one manager and something different to another. Behavioral anchors solve that problem by spelling out what behaviors an employee shows at each performance level. After IBM added these anchors to its system, rating bias dropped by 40% because managers finally had concrete examples to compare their team against.

You want to remove the uncertainty from your rating scale. Once everyone on your entire team knows what a level 4 employee looks like in day-to-day work, you’re going to have a lot more accurate information about which of the team members are ready to take on greater responsibility.

How to Check Your Skills Data

Most of us walk around with a somewhat inflated view of how strong we actually are at what we do. Cornell University did some interesting research on this particular topic, and their findings were pretty revealing – when we rate our own skills, we usually add about 25% more compared to what’s really there, and blind spots are the culprit. Everyone has them when they’re judging their own performance, and without another person’s feedback to help fill in what we’re missing, we’ll just keep right on overestimating ourselves.

The Dunning-Kruger effect adds another wrinkle to this. A person with just a few months of practice will walk around with 10 times more confidence than an expert who’s been at it for years. Newcomers haven’t run into enough problems yet to see how much they’re missing. Experienced practitioners have been through enough tough situations that they’ve learned to respect what they can’t always control or predict.

The best way to work around this problem is to cross-check your data sources against one another. When an employee rates themselves as advanced in a particular skill, but their manager and peers are rating them way lower than that, the difference between those ratings is worth paying attention to. How the projects turn out can show the same sort of disconnect in self-assessment. Did the employee actually deliver results that match the skill level that they claimed to have?

Soft skills make the assessment process much harder because you can’t measure them the same way that you would with technical abilities. The best way to handle this is to break those vague concepts down into concrete behaviors that you can watch for and confirm. When trying to review leadership, don’t rate a person on the general idea of being a leader. Look at specific actions – do they delegate tasks well? Can they step in and resolve conflicts when tensions rise on their team? Defining soft skills like this makes it much easier for multiple evaluators to review the same person and compare observations.

The goal here is to build an accurate picture of what each person can do. As you pull together observations from these different angles, patterns are going to form, and those patterns make it much easier to see who’s actually ready to take on a bigger role.

Build Career Paths for Your Team

Once you have your skills matrix put together, the next step is to match up what your entire team members can already do with the positions they might move into later. The 9-box grid works well for this analysis because it helps you visualize where each team member is right now – in terms of how well they’re performing and how much room they have to grow into something more, and it makes it much easier to see which of the team members are ready to step up and take on more responsibility.

Development paths are where the work gets more practical. What you’re doing is building a custom roadmap that closes the difference between where a person currently is in their career and where they need to be for their next role. Some directors perform well right now but haven’t quite developed the strategic thinking skills needed for a VP-level position. Your responsibility is to find the right experiences that will build those skills over time. This might include leading a cross-departmental project or sitting in on quarterly planning sessions to watch how the executive team operates and makes decisions.

McKinsey found that leaders with experience in multiple different functions are roughly 25% more likely to succeed than the leaders who stay in just one area. A finance manager who spends a year or two in operations before moving up the ladder could turn out to be a far more capable executive because of that wider experience.

Specificity matters quite a bit when you’re planning out each developmental step for your entire team. Writing down “needs better leadership skills” won’t get anyone anywhere. What helps is to figure out the exact assignments or rotations that build those skills in a practical setting. For some team members, this might mean you have them mentor a few junior staff members for a quarter. For others, maybe you hand them ownership of a new initiative and let them run it from start to finish. The best strategy is to make sure each experience ties directly back to one of the capability gaps you identified in your skills matrix.

Keep Your Skills Framework Up to Date

A skills matrix only stays helpful if you update it on a regular basis. Annual reviews don’t work well for most businesses. Modern roles and responsibilities change too fast to capture them just annually. You could finish your annual update in January, and by the time March rolls around, half of what you documented has already become outdated.

Most businesses find that quarterly reviews work best. There’s enough breathing room between check-ins to actually see progress, and you can still stay on top of how roles and responsibilities are changing over time.

The best way is to combine your scheduled reviews with updates whenever something big happens at your company. Any time you roll out a new software system or expand into a different market, you’ll have to go back and update your matrix right then. Big changes like these can change which skills your entire team needs the most. Even a 3-month delay in updating your matrix could put your entire succession plan at risk.

Microsoft actually did something similar a few years back when it got rid of its annual performance review system. Instead of one big review each year, they moved to regular and continuing conversations about skills and development throughout the year. The results were pretty strong – their succession readiness improved by 30% because managers were able to find skill gaps and fix them much faster than they had with the old annual review cycle.

Another big consideration is how some skills lose their relevance as time goes on. Automation and AI are changing what’s helpful in almost every industry. Something that looked very important two years ago could already be obsolete now. When your matrix shows these kinds of changes, it helps you put your training budget toward the skills that will be helpful later.

Most HR systems can automate at least some parts of this update process for you. Your system will send you alerts when employee certifications are about to expire, or when job descriptions get revised and need to be updated. Automation takes care of the easy and repetitive parts of all this. But it can only take you so far with the harder decisions. Someone on your entire team still has to review each skill gap and figure out if it’s urgent or if other business needs have shifted enough to bump it down lower on the list for the time being.

Move Your Team to the Next Level

A skills matrix is one of the best tools you can use for succession planning, and it takes the guesswork out of figuring out who’s ready for what role. When a team member puts in their 2 weeks, you won’t be left scrambling to find a replacement. The matrix tells you what each team member brings to the table, and just as importantly, it shows where your talent gaps are before they turn into problems. This visibility is useful all by itself. What makes it even better is the ability to get your entire team ready for bigger roles well ahead of time, instead of waiting until you desperately need someone to step up. You can build out development plans that close the exact skill gaps you’ve found and match your high-performers with the senior leaders whose roles they might eventually fill.

The best way to get started is to choose one department to begin with – somewhere that would really struggle if the wrong person decided to leave. Build out your matrix for just that one team first, and learn what actually works for your company, and then roll it out to other departments when you have the process down. Your skills matrix doesn’t need to be perfect right out of the gate. Starting with something documented (even if it’s rough around the edges) is way better than flying blind. At a minimum, you’ll finally have visibility into what skills you actually have on your entire team and where the gaps are.

Development and succession planning work much better if you actually have the right resources to back you up. HRDQ-U is a community built specifically for HR professionals who want to keep learning and stay sharp on the latest practices. Inside of it, you’ll find webinars, podcasts and blog articles that cover what’s working in HR and leadership training right now. The entire on-demand library is available to you whenever you need to access it, and it makes it easy for you to learn at your own pace.

One webinar is called ” Optimize Your Talent Development Investments with the ROI Estimator,” and it breaks down how to make better decisions about where your training budget should go.

For training materials that are ready to use without lots of extra work, the Reproducible Training Library Full Collection is worth a look. It includes more than 90 customizable courses that cover leadership, communication, team building and conflict resolution. Every course can be branded with your company name and delivered in whatever format makes the most sense for your entire team!