The Missteps of Skills-Based Strategy: Understanding and Unlocking Human Potential

I got inspired by the conversation around the missteps of skills in my recent LinkedIn article: The Misstep of a Skills-Based Strategy: What We’re Overlooking. It sparked   deeper thoughts about how skills are often treated as a snapshot of today and yesterday, at best. The best strategies out there (which – in distribution curve style – means we are talking about maybe the top 5% out there) are looking at skills in conjunction with motivation and potential. But I don’t think anyone is understanding potential the way they should.

Potential is not an individual-focused, isolated snapshot in time, or one that just anchors on whether someone has the desire or ability to be upskilled. Potential is about how the environment influences those factors, and that can only be understood by considering the individual in the context of team and organizational dynamics within which they need to deploy those skills.

Why Psychometrics Fall Short in Understanding Potential

So I’m taking a few broad brush strokes here, and all based upon my own drop-in-the-ocean set of experiences and perspectives of the world, but it’s in the spirit of keeping things punchy…

1. Psychometrics Are a Snapshot in Time: Just think about that for a second. Think about who you are right now. Who you were last week, six years ago. We are complex, nuanced, ever-evolving beings. A psychometric snapshot will ONLY tell you someone’s potential TODAY. It tells you absolutely nothing about what could unlock potential in the future, because the compass for potential, the activator of potential, is a response to the conditions around you.
2. Outdated Technology and Static Outputs: The “big kahunas” in the psychometric space, the ones that have dominated for decades, are built on outdated technology. Most assessments are taken at ONE POINT in time—captured forever in time as a PDF. Once it’s done, there is very little you can do with that information to track outcomes or apply into new scenarios.
3. They Don’t Consider Context: Psychometrics don’t look at the individual in the context of the team or environment. They miss the dynamic interplay between a person and their surroundings, which is a critical oversight. If they do look at this in context of team or organization, then guaranteed, it’s back to point 1 – it’s a ‘ONE point in time’ consideration.
4. Heavy Lifting Without Results: Building on points 2 and 3, the reason organizations aren’t seeing results or correlations they expected to see, is that static assessments aren’t proving out what they said the would do. They aren’t doing this because it’s too much of a heavy lift to take those static files and model them out against real time data.  And if that heavy lift was done, it’d probably actually prove out a lack of correlation to results, because of the shortcomings mentioned in my previous points.

For this reason, most psychometric evaluations are used at the pre-hire stage and then put in a drawer … never to be dusted off.

Truth be told, I have a deep love for psychometrics. I cut my corporate teeth in the psychometric world—studying occupational psychology, writing a thesis about the predictability of SHL’s OPQ 32i on sales performance, and working in a talent management consulting team. I pivoted after a few years into corporate TA. Why? Because I couldn’t bear to turn up to another pitch or write another RFP response that went something like this: “We can tell you 20% of the story here through psychometric evaluation, the rest is based on variables unique to the organization and out of our control!” I needed to understand the other 80%.

HireGains: A Different Approach

Humans are complicated. We are influenced – perhaps more than we realize – by what is around us. Constantly. We are like a river, constantly flowing. The thing I find myself wondering about is – if I said, will a plant do better with water or sunshine, or no? You know the answer. If I said, will a kid with different learning needs do better in a classroom that caters for that, or no?  You know the answer. Marginal Gains and Moneyball have already proven out the criticality of environment on sports performance. But we get to corporate – and we leave it up to chance, gut feel, a roll of the dice…

The only way that assessments tap into understanding potential is if they continue with the individual along the talent cycle, capturing data at regular intervals, understanding the patterns surfacing, and engineering those learnings adaptively into respective talent initiatives: for talent acquisition, mobility and development.

At HireGains, we:

• Recognize that static snapshots don’t reflect the evolving nature of individuals, teams, and environments.
• Continuously gather and analyze data to capture dynamic shifts in behavior, team dynamics, and organizational culture.
• Embed these insights into talent strategies, creating iterative solutions that adapt to changes over time.

Here’s our other great back story: HireGains doesn’t just draw inspiration from elite sports science; it actually brings the science directly into the algorithm driving our outputs and insights. Marginal gains—the practice of continuously capturing data, learning from it, and making small, incremental improvements—have proven transformative in elite sports, and they are equally relevant in corporate environments. By applying 1% adjustments over time, we can drive exponential improvements in performance, engagement, and outcomes.

When we talk about environment, we are referencing how people connect (who they work with) and how they contribute (how and why they do the work) – which has been proven out for decades in the academic realms as purpose and meaning drivers in both work and life.  When people feel a sense of meaning and purpose in what they do, and who they do it with, it organically fuels engagement (vs. diagnosing the problem downstream) and unlocks potential.

If you have a few extra minutes, please check out Dr. Mike’s TedX Talk—he’s an advisory board member to HireGains and has spent decades researching what fuels meaning and purpose in work AND life, which – somewhat unsurprisingly – are the same things: we want to connect and we want to contribute.

The Problem with Skills-Based Strategies

Skills-based strategies—as valuable as they are— focus on the present and the past. They capture the skills already used or recognized and current motivation around those skills. But without weaving in the dynamics of the team and organization, the environmental influences that act as a compass for potential and performance, it’s like seeing only one side of the equation, or one part of the wider opportunity.

What is The Opportunity?

This isn’t about abandoning skills-based strategies or pivoting to something entirely new. The opportunity lies in understanding the individual in the context of team and organizational dynamics within which they need to deploy those skills as an additive layer to skills-based strategies. Skills-based strategies are a giant leap forward for many reasons, we just need to take a few more steps now.  And by combining these approaches, we will – in my opinion at least – create a bulletproof, forward-facing, future-ready strategy that WILL deliver outcomes.