17th September, 2015

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By Arshad Kamal Khan

UNFORTUNATELY WE FOCUS TOO MUCH ON SKILL

“Even the highest performing companies in the world focus on skill development in order to elevate and retain their performance level. I am also keen to elevate our performance level and think we must immediately design a skill development program for our entire employees” said one of my esteemed clients.

My colleague who handled this client was excited through this discussion as he was viewing this as a big opportunity; I guess he must have even calculated the kind of incentive he would earn through this deal.

I might have taken them by shock when I politely turned down this idea stating “Unfortunately we focus too much on skill”.

What do you mean? Asked the client. So was the bottled emotion of my colleague.

Let me explain, I said.

“Employee Performance has two critical dimensions: Capability & Engagement.

Capability refers to an employee’s ability to perform the work assigned to him using his knowledge and skills. Engagement refers to the situation where an employee is emotionally connected to the organisation and his actions are backed by motivation to further the organization’s goal.

In order to elevate performance of an employee, we must gauge the employee’s capabilities vis-à-vis his performance levels. In case the same is not at the optimum level the ratio of employee’s Capability and his Engagement need to be mapped.

In simple words we must have clear understanding of whether the organization’s current skills are delivering to their optimum best, if not then skill development may not be the right step. The right step would then be to engage with the said employees, motivate them to perform their best with their current skills, thus enabling the organization to deliver at its optimum level.”

Hence I said “Unfortunately we focus too much on skill development.. lets’ first concentrate and build engagement levels”.