by Ben Brearley
Understanding the mixture of skills and experience in your team is critical for any leader. Creating a Skills Matrix is valuable because it helps you:
The best part is that a Skills Matrix is simple to create and maintain. It simply requires a little effort to understand the capabilities of your team. Keeping the Skills Matrix simple is key. Too much effort in maintaining the information in these types of tools can cause leaders to neglect them. Great complexity will introduce a tendency to let the information go out of date and become useless.
The first step to create your Skills Matrix is identifying the key skills and experience that you want to record for your team members. Using a simple spreadsheet, create a table with each skill or experience item as a column heading.
When generating your list of skills and experience items, be sure to include:
An example of a skill may be proficiency in a certain tool, method or technology. For example, you may add “Graphic Design” as a skill. However, if it is relevant, you may break this down further to list different types of graphic design or tools e.g. Graphic Design using Photoshop.
Experiences refer to different contexts in which skills have been applied.
For example, you may list Executive Stakeholder Management as an experience, which represents having worked closely with senior executives at an organization.
Note: This could also be considered a skill, but to be quite honest, as long as it exists on your list, it doesn’t matter!
You may add different industry experience here too e.g. Automotive, Retail, Oil & Gas. To help organize the Skills Matrix, you may want to cluster similar skills or experiences together. Shading them a different color may help you to see the different groupings more easily.
To include or not to include a skill?
You should only include skills or experiences in the Skills Matrix if they are relevant to the work that your team performs. If your team member has a lot of experience working in hospitals, but this has nothing to do with the work at hand (or in the future), then don’t include it.
If your team member is a highly skilled badminton player, this probably doesn’t matter either, so leave it out.
The rows of your table should consist of the members of your team. Again, you may group the team members by category if there is a logical way to structure them. If your team has Communications team members and Marketing team members, you may choose to group them separately.
By the end of this step, you should have an empty matrix. The skills and experiences are the column headings and the row headings are your team members.
Finally, you need to develop a skill and experience inventory for your team. At the intersection of each row and column, place a tick (✓) to indicate that the team member possesses the skill or experience. If not, leave the cell empty.
You *could* introduce a rating system for each skill, such as high, medium and low. However, this introduces a level of complexity that I feel is unnecessary. This starts to become more complex. How do you determine what comprises a low rating, compared to a medium?
When determining whether a team member has a skill or not, simply ask yourself whether the team member is able to use that skill autonomously. If so, then I’d suggest putting a tick in the box. An alternative approach is to introduce a time threshold e.g. at least three months working with a tool, method or system.
An additional aspect that can be useful to record is who is the most capable or senior within your team, for each skill and experience item. This may help you to differentiate between team members when it comes to team design. For these team members, you might use an asterisk (*) instead of the tick mark.
Deciding whether someone has experience is a judgement call. You might choose an amount of time that you are comfortable with. For example, you may need your team member to have had at least six months working within a particular field to be counted as having experience. This is completely up to you.
The most important thing is that now you have a table representing the key skills and experiences of your team. For many of the future skills or experiences, the boxes will likely be empty to start with.