Using an IT Skills Matrix with Heather Ritchie pt 2

Have you ever used a skills matrix in IT change management at your nonprofit?

In pt 1, Heather describes a typical IT Skills Matrix and how you create one, and responds to audience questions. In podcast part 2, she delves into identifying stakeholders and gives several examples of when and how to use a Skills Matrix to build and empower your team.

Do you know your super-users and early adopters? Your champions and ambassadors? Do you know who on your staff will happily and reliably use the tool exactly as trained vs your staffer who is always looking for new features and finding new shortcuts? Do you know who usually needs a little extra training and review sessions? Who is tech-hesitant, or even tech-phobic? How can you make your IT roll out a success for ALL your users? Can using an IT skills matrix make a difference?

Join Build change management expert Heather Ritchie in an interactive, free webinar to learn about this simple and effective tool. She shares a spreadsheet template, talks through real life scenarios and examples from her work, and explores the benefits and challenges of creating a staff skills matrix.

A skills matrix is also a useful tool to increase the value of training and enhance your conversations about professional development. Where are you investing in your staff skills? Where should you invest? Where do your staff want to learn and improve? What skills will help them and your nonprofit the most?

How can using an IT skills matrix improve new tech rollout?

Build Consulting download: IT Skills Matrix Template

As with all our webinars, this presentation is appropriate for an audience of varied IT experience. Community IT believes strongly that your IT vendor should be able to explain everything without jargon or lingo. 

Community IT is proudly vendor-agnostic, and our webinars cover a range of topics and discussions. Webinars are never a sales pitch, always a way to share our knowledge with our community.

_______________________________
Start a conversation :)

• Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/
• email Carolyn at cwoodard@communityit.com
• on LinkedIn

Thanks for listening.

Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome to the Community IT webinar about using a skills matrix at your nonprofit. My name is Carolyn Woodard. I’m the Outreach Director for Community IT, and I will be the moderator today.

Heather Ritchie: I’m Heather Ritchie and I’m a consultant at Build. I’ve enjoyed working with nonprofits for over 20 years and have served in a variety of roles from communications to technology to executive director. I’ve led change management efforts in a variety of sectors and served as an educator, professional development specialist, and leadership coach.  

Carolyn Woodard: How do you set the stage to help staff feel psychological safety around discussing staff members’ strengths and challenges? I feel like that’s a perfect segue into our next slide. 

Heather Ritchie: I’ll take that. So, yeah, I would say to respond to the question first.

Setting the stage and really having open discussions with people about what this is going to be used for and why you all are investing the time in it, is how to help create that safe space. 

If an organization is going to ask everybody to fill this in, and then just share out the results and not have discussions on it, I would say that’s not creating the safe space that this type of tool needs.

What this tool needs is honest conversation before you even start it, that, hey, we are going to be looking at our team and seeing how we can build it and how we can grow one another. 

If it comes from this growth and this strength of opportunity, then people are more likely to lean in and say, you know what, PowerPoint isn’t my jam. But I know I need to do it for a couple of things, and so I need to level up at least to the next level. Versus, I love AI, and I want to know everything I possibly can about AI, but it’s a new technology. I’m a novice at it, just like a number of other people. 

I think giving examples – whether it’s the leadership or the team that is doing it together – are a way of acknowledging the difficulty in being honest.  

Maybe they start the conversation with, “what’s one thing you’re really great at?”

And then the next question is “what out of these is the thing that you’re least experienced at?”

To make it a group experience, I do think it’s more helpful for individuals to reflect on themselves first. So even if you are sharing this out as a group, in a group setting, you might want to give people the spreadsheet in advance or the quiz or the survey or however you decide to do it.

I do think people like to learn about themselves and to reflect on themselves. And it’s something that the more we can give space to, I think the more used to it, people will also become accustomed. So, I think that’s the other piece about making this a safe space.

If this is done once every five years, it’s probably going to be a little awkward. If somebody does it once every quarter and reviews it with people, then it becomes more routine and less anxiety producing.

Timing and Language Matter

Carolyn Woodard: I was going to jump in and say also in the context of what we’re talking about that you might do this exercise early on in a change management situation when you’re assessing where are the weaknesses of your organization and what would you like to be doing differently two, three years from now that you’re going through this assessment. Do you need a new CRM? Do you need a new fundraising tool? Do you need a new team’s collaboration tool? How are you doing these different activities? And as a group activity, like really assessing where you want your organization to be.

And that’s a very different context from if you’ve already gone through a software selection. You know, somebody in leadership has already chosen, we’re going to have this new tool. And then as part of that, you’re doing a survey. Do you think you’ll be good at using this tool? That’s not going to make people feel good about being on this team that’s trying to get those skills that they need for a specific tool. So that’s something else to think about is when are you using this in the process.

Heather Ritchie: Very true.

Carolyn Woodard: And someone mentioned in the chat, 

If you lead by example and disclose your weaknesses as a leader, whether it’s around some of those competencies or if it’s around specific tools and tasks and skills, that also sets the tone.

Heather Ritchie: I one hundred percent agree and I love that. I also want to just note that I often will say, “oh, what am I not good at or what can’t I do?”

The language with which we approach this also really helps people.

If I hear, “what can I grow into or what can I be stronger at?” I’m more likely as a human to respond sign me up versus if it’s framing it as me not succeeding. So, I think the language matters in a lot of the work that we do when we do self-reflection.

Carolyn Woodard: The other thing I love about having it in this spreadsheet is that it gives you a perfect opportunity to when you talk about it again, another quarter, half a year later, people can change, right? They took that tutorial, they did some extra work, and they put the work into PowerPoint because they knew they were going to be using it. So, you give people also an opportunity to see themselves mastering something, which I just love as well.

But in the interest of time, I want to make sure we talk about the stakeholders and rolling it out so we can get to our next piece, which is the examples.

Who are the Stakeholders? 

Heather Ritchie: I would say there is a decision point when you talk about the stakeholders that a lot of departments or organizations kind of have to initially wrestle with. And that is, is this inclusive of full-time staff only? Is it inclusive of part-time volunteers, consultants?

You want to think through who is being invited into this conversation, who needs to be invited, who needs to understand that this has to be a smaller group, because we’re really looking at this project versus the whole department. And so, thinking through the people part of this is also thinking through who’s invited to be a part of the process.

And as we talked about in reviewing the Matrix, people can be a part of the creation of the timeline. I saw somebody asked in chat earlier, “how do you get started?” The starting point might just be setting up a brainstorming session and saying, “what do we do in this department? What do we do well? What are people always asking us about? Have we noticed more questions about the CRM this quarter than the last quarter? I wonder why that is, or whether we’ve seen a lot of interest in AI. Should we start putting that on our radar?” So, part of that could be a brainstorming session.

Part of that could be a leader coming with a draft of a matrix and saying, “what do you think? Is this how we start looking at our department? And what skills can we grow into?”

One thing that I did want to note is whatever you build for an individual template, you also want to have consistency for everybody in the group that you’re looking at. 

So, for instance, I might say, well, there’s five competencies, but I have a six one that I’m really, really good at. That’s awesome. We want to note that. But unless you want to look at everybody with that competency, that should be a bonus note about that person on the side. And the reason for that is you want to see what your team is doing for your core skills and competencies.

To roll this out, the other piece to the person’s question earlier is really helping people understand the purpose and how it can benefit them. Make sure you talk to the individuals about the scores and how they feel about sharing those with their peers in advance. And that’s why you may have to step into things being anonymous.

And then ask people about how they feel about sharing their growth and strength areas to determine as a team, how best do we talk about this with that goal of looking at the strength of the team? And then this idea of mastery and being supported to get better at stuff, it’s really if people feel you are genuinely interested in supporting them and genuinely interested in making time to develop your skills, people usually respond very positively to that. 

And I want to make a note of that. When we are saying, “invest in these people and do professional development or help one another do training,” that doesn’t mean necessarily that they create an hour webinar, or they’re paired up as your mentor, or that you’re going to pay for a very expensive certification. 

There are a number of ways to develop our skills, and micro learning is really kind of the heart of what can happen right now, I’d say, in the landscape that we’re in with technology changing as fast as we can. And when I talk about micro learning, I mean, read a summary of a book, listen to a podcast, watch a one-minute video, and then have a discussion at your next team or department meeting saying, “hey, guess what I learned about X?”

It does not have to be the investment in a nine-hour course that you may not have time for in the next three quarters.

Carolyn Woodard: We did a webinar just a couple months ago on being a learning organization, and one of the suggestions was to make time in your all-staff meetings or your team meetings to set 10, 15 minutes aside for learning sharing. For example, what have you gotten better at? And just share some examples with your team. People used to be able to do brown bags, actually in-person, but you can do those over Zoom as well. 

And I do wonder too, if that is a point where you have your plan, you have your skills matrix, and you might at that point want to talk with HR and your employees and their supervisors around making it a goal that then they do get a reward for in terms of their professional development as that goes. 

IT Skills Matrix Examples and Uses

So, can you give us some examples and uses?

Heather Ritchie: Sure. Here are four examples and uses that we’ve experienced over time for using skills matrices. 

One of them might be new technology and training.

If I by chance have a new CRM coming in or my website moves to Drupal and it doesn’t move automatically, our department has moved it there, right? Who has the time to learn it? Who’s going to be the one that really dives deep initially? Or is that spread across the department? Those are the kinds of conversations that can happen with the Skills Matrix. If an organization decides to move from Google to Teams or Teams to Google, what parts can you divide into discrete learning activities that people can do?

Or as I noted before, you may have heard of AI and some people are curious about it. I’ve noted with some of my colleagues that some people are saying, “I want to know as much as I possibly can tomorrow about this.” And I know others are saying, “please don’t make me learn anything about AI except what I absolutely have to learn.”

Those are the kinds of conversations that you can dig into and understand, and then help level up the team to the level it needs to as a baseline, and then let other people dive deep. 

And then also staffing changes happen. We’ve seen them happen more often, especially since COVID. A staff member leaves an organization. What skills did that team member really bring to our department? And is there somebody else on the team that actually has some of those skills that wants to lean into those? Or do we need to hire a completely new person to replace that person? Again, if you’ve invested in this and you continuously invest, you would have that answer along the way, or it might be the starting point for why you want to start up a skills matrix. 

And then building project teams is another great opportunity to just see who’s great. I have a colleague that I know that if I need her something for attention to detail, I send it to her immediately. And so, on your project team, who’s your attention to detail person? Who’s your big picture thinker? Who’s the project manager types personality? And it may be if you look at the team and you think, oh, we’re missing something we really need, that’s where you can have that conversation.

And then last but not least, collaboration and knowledge sharing. I’m a big proponent of it. I’m a lifelong learner, and I’ve been a professional development specialist for years. And this idea of what’s in the room is probably more knowledge than anyone knows. And so how do we surface what our colleagues know, and also create systems to Carolyn’s point that everybody doesn’t bombard Heather with every question about AI. But we also know who we can go to within our teams for advice or expertise.

Carolyn Woodard: That’s great. 

More Q&A

We have a question in the chat. Norma says, 

“We already have a matrix of Clift Strengths. And this IT Skills Matrix seems like it might be more about tactical, specific skills.” 

Do you have experiences with organizations that already have a matrix of some sort, and how this can complement what they have?

Heather Ritchie: Yes, we actually also use Clifton Strengths at Build. I love it as one of those tools where you take a quiz and basically are shown where your innate skills put you out of a list of a number of skills. And I would say you could use Clifton Strengths. Those, again, are more in your competencies space than they are in how well you have explored or learned Excel or the CRM that you’re using or the website system that you’re using. 

I would say that a skills matrix of this sort would complement your Clifton Strengths. And you could utilize the Clifton Strengths more in the competencies space and then your skills would be more for your everyday what the organization needs from your IT department or for their own IT skills.

Carolyn Woodard: I like that. Yeah, and I could see how they do two different things. So, you may still need to have two matrices, or you may want to be able to put them together. 

We have some other questions, a couple of questions from registrations. 

Time Management

One thing is, 

How can you encourage people to volunteer skills and time when they are already so busy with other tasks?

And I feel like we could also take that a step back. As you have said, this exercise itself is going to take time. You need to have meeting time. People are going to have to have time to reflect and assess this. So you have to be able to prioritize that time. Do you have advice on that?

Heather Ritchie: We all want more time, I think. This is something, whether it’s in your personal life or your professional life. I would say I saw a note in the chat that someone said, hey, we could use this at our next team building retreat. That’s exactly where you could start. The idea of how do you help people volunteer their skills in their time? 

Part of that, I think, is an organizational culture.

There are some organizations that I’ve seen that acknowledge that a part of your time is to build your skills as well as support your colleagues to build their skills. I also know I’ve worked in nonprofits forever and that I always have more on my list than I could ever get to. I don’t want to sound too pie in the sky.

But I will say it comes to prioritizing it.

If you want to have effective teams, if you want to have collaborative workspaces, then we have to invest in the people and these conversations. They won’t just organically happen and your team, poof, is this highly effective functioning team that is doing everything everybody possibly wanted.

It really takes the people’s side of this. And that’s where we noted at the beginning, there’s so much technology coming at us and it’s changing quickly. And I watch organizations, for instance, one nonprofit has five project management tools.

Doing a skills matrix could also spark conversations about, “hey, I’m great at these tools. But did you notice that we’re using five of them? That means we have to support technologically five different tools and learning curves?”

You may learn from these conversations that there are things that you could streamline and then prioritize the people’s side versus always having to respond to every technology need.

Carolyn Woodard: And I think this is an investment. You’ve said several times, investing in your people and investing in your organization. And that’s going to take a leadership role that prioritizes investment at all, because you don’t have immediate results. You don’t have immediate outcomes. It’s an investment for that reason. 

I think I’ve heard this story from someone else at Build about going through a software selection for wide ranging platform or CRM, something that was going to be used by everyone at the nonprofit. And they were very unhappy with the tool that they had. And for kicks, I guess, Build included that existing tool in the software selection. And in fact, it did everything that that team needed.

But because of the poor training on it, they didn’t know that it even had some of the capabilities that they were looking for. And at that point, they were so soured on it, that they had to get it out of the running. They just needed (psychologically) to get something new.

As a nonprofit leader you can realize, when you invest in your team and their ability to use the tools that you have, you’re going to save money and, I guess, tears, maybe, on some of those technology tools.

Heather Ritchie: Agreed.

Encouraging Basic Skills, and Negative Uses of an IT Skills Matrix

Carolyn Woodard: We have another question, which I feel like we haven’t really talked about some of the downsides of this sort of exercise. But one person in registration asked, 

“How can you motivate people to try harder and do basic things themselves?” 

You’ve talked a lot about using this Skills Matrix and building this spreadsheet as a team exercise and as an empowering exercise. But have you run into situations where it didn’t work out so well?

Heather Ritchie: Sure. I’m trying to think about the motivation level. I think what it sparks in me is that this tool is going to be successful with the right approach and the right culture.

If an individual is currently demotivated in their work, I think the wonder would be by looking at the skills that the department needs or for the project, is the person able to really showcase their strengths? And if not, then what does that mean for the organization and the individual? Is it that they need a better fit for themselves for a position?

I guess to answer that, it’s partially also this is tool that I could look at, if I’m looking at all the skills the department needs, and I am not motivated by any of them to grow my skill set, that’s a reflection that I think would be very internal for that person. If I’m looking at all the skills that are on the list, and I’m thinking, oh, there’s a few that I really would like to grow into, but I’m not in that role, then that provides a conversation space for the team. So, I think that it could be both an internal motivator and a team support.

It is also about the health of the team going into this. The stronger your team is on communication and openness and culture, the faster this can build that strength for your individuals and your team.

Carolyn Woodard: That makes a lot of sense. I’m sorry that we’re getting close to the end of the hour, because I feel like we could keep talking about this for a while. We got some other really great questions coming in, so I’ll make sure to put those in the transcript, and we’ll get some answers to those.

Learning Objectives

But I want to quickly go over our learning objectives for today, which I feel like you just hit all of them, Heather. 

• Understanding what a skills matrix is, 
• understand the steps to create the skills matrix with your staff, 
• explore the benefits and challenges, and 
• learn tactics and strategies to roll them out to all staff. And we got some great 
• examples from you.

I want to make sure to let you know about our next month’s webinar, which is going to be a great one. We are re-releasing our Nonprofit Cybersecurity Playbook with Matt Eshelman, who is our Chief Technology Officer, and who wrote the first one, which is, it’s only three years old, three and a half years old now, but so much has changed about cybersecurity, particularly with the rise of AI and some of the new hacks and security features. So, we are reworking that Cybersecurity Playbook and we will be releasing it.

That is at 3 p.m. Eastern, noon Pacific on Wednesday, October 23rd. So please join us again next month for that. And I just want to thank everyone for the gift of your time this afternoon.

I really appreciate you spending your time with us and learning about this tool. I hope you can go forth and use it in wonderful ways to build your teams, help your nonprofits reach your missions. 

And Heather, I really want to thank you for your time preparing for this. And I feel so much smarter. So, thank you so much, Heather.

Heather Ritchie: It was great to do this today. And thank you to everybody for your comments and your questions. Thank you.