Helping Your Team Build the Right Skills

Are you incentivizing your team to build the wrong skills?

As leaders, we’re not just working on our own skill development – we’re influencing and incentivizing the skill development and behaviors of our entire organization.

Some of this skill development is straightforward based on the role and responsibilities of the position.

But sometimes, we encourage our teams to spend time and energy developing the “wrong” skills – ones that meet an immediate need but ultimately detract from our overarching mission, effectiveness, revenue generation, and sustainability.

What does it look like to focus on the “wrong” skills? Here are two common examples:

1. Insisting every frontline fundraiser faithfully inputs 20+ data fields in the CRM after every donor interaction to ensure backend reporting runs smoothly.
   
   The skill you’re incentivizing is being great with CRM data entry.
   
   It’s true that someone at your organization should have these skills and, in our tech-driven world, modern fundraisers need to have foundational skills with fundraising tech.
   
   But if frontline fundraisers have to spend a lot of time and energy learning the specific quirks of the system or the data hygiene processes that govern it, is that really more important than them spending time to build their skills related to effective donor outreach and 1:1 donor meetings? (Spoiler alert: it isn’t.)
   

2. Providing weekly or monthly board reports that emphasize achievements/progress since the last report and requiring every area of the organization to contribute at least 3 updates.
   
   The skill you’re incentivizing is writing reports that present only the rosiest picture and equate progress (i.e., doing lots of things) to performance (i.e., results).
   
   This detracts from the development of important communication skills – like clarity, brevity, and accuracy – and management skills – like critical thinking, prioritization, and managing expectations – that are essential to advancing your organization. (Pro tip: It also leads to ongoing conflict between the board and staff.)

If you read through these examples and thought – “uh oh – this sounds like our organization” – I’m here to tell you that you’re not alone.

The first step to getting back on track is to identify the areas where this may be happening at your organization so you can understand what’s happening and why, and assess the best approach for incentivizing the skills you actually do want folks to build.

Have you seen other examples of leaders incentivizing the “wrong” skills? Share your experience and join the conversation on LinkedIn.