Innovation Skills: Skill Audits for Innovation Strategists

Taylor, the Chief Operating Officers of ImpactInnovate, a thriving social enterprise, stood at the helm of a rapidly growing organization. Despite the company's success, she felt a gnawing sense of unease. The landscape of nonprofit technology was evolving at breakneck speed, and Taylor worried that her skills weren't keeping pace. Taylor couldn't shake the feeling that without proactive steps, she might soon find herself ill-equipped to drive the organizational growth ImpactInnovate desperately needed and set themselves up for success in future endeavors in the industry.

Taylor had considered several common approaches to professional development, but each seemed to fall short: 1. Attending sporadic workshops and conferences: While informative, these often lacked depth and failed to provide ongoing support. 2. Performance reviews and CEO feedback: This approach, while valuable, offered a limited, backwards-focused perspective, missing the full spectrum of skills Taylor needed to develop for personal growth. 3. Taking on or creating new projects: While this expanded Taylor's role, it didn't necessarily lead to acquiring new, innovative skills crucial for driving organizational growth. Additionally, this risked stretching Taylor’s capacity in an unsustainable matter, leading to unfinished or low-quality projects.

Taylor realized that many social impact executives struggle to identify the specific skills they need to develop to drive organizational growth effectively. Determined to overcome this challenge, Taylor conducted a tailored skill audit, one leveraging her existing strengths, and providing a clear pathway for growth. Let's dive into the three powerful strategies she implemented for this audit. By implementing these strategies, social impact executives can create impactful innovations that positions their venture — and their careers — well for years to come.

Taylor brainstormed key skills by looking at the following sources: • Role model: skills their supervisor and other role models needed to succeed • Interest and unequal advantage: for instance, skills she found herself researching and learning on her own informally, or they fit in nicely with her unique positioning • Unmet need: skills that would solve common challenges she, her team, and her industry in general faced This exercise resulted in five crucial skills: • data-driven decision making and emerging tech integration • innovative community-based fundraising strategies • financial modeling for organizational sustainability • cross-sector partnership development • agile project management

Recognizing her time was limited, she needed to prioritize which items would create the biggest impact. She did this by assessing a few criteria that mattered to her: • Size of skill gap: based on a self assessment and one from her supervisor • Interest: learning and improving this skill excited her and gave her energy • Value: this was a skill largely missing in the organization (and her industry at large) and she felt it could be incredibly helpful to major strategic and operational challenges her organization faced After doing this quick scoring exercise, Taylor realized she needed significant improvement in emerging tech integration and financial modeling for organizational sustainability. To sharpen her focus, she decided to focus on financial modeling for organizational sustainability.

As a seasoned executive, she knew that without a plan, these aspirations were dreams and would not actually materialize. To make learning actionable, she applied best practices in creating a roadmap (see resource below for more): • Milestones. She broke skill down into 5 smaller components. These included: understanding financial statements, forecasting techniques, scenario analysis, impact measurement integration, and sustainable revenue modeling. • Definition of success. To scope this work further, she clarified what “good” looked like for each skills, with a desired artifact for each component that would demonstrate competence. For example, for the forecasting techniques component, she aimed to create a comprehensive five-year financial forecast for a new ImpactInnovate initiative. • Goal feasibility. She knew that a major risk to any new priority was not de-risking capacity required to complete it. So she set tentative deadlines and estimated the hours required to complete development against how much extra time she had this quarter. Realizing that she didn’t have enough capacity, she revised her definition of success and timeline. To be more specific, Taylor estimated that developing her skills would require 40 hours over the next quarter. But reviewing her existing projects, she saw she would be lucky to have 25 hours available. To create sufficient buffer, she did two things: (a) adjusted her goal to focus on two key components instead of three as initially panned; (b) delegated a minor project to a report looking to grow in that area

• Resources. She reflected on how she typically learned best, realizing that 1x1 feedback and mentorship was critical to prior success with skill development. She brainstormed board members, coaches, or training programs that could mentor her, searching through her linkedin network and asking her CEO and board for advice. One mentor recommended she join a slack community on the topic, where she could set up an informal small group with other executives looking to improve their skills. • Accountability. She also found a few accountability partners, which included her manager and a board member with financial expertise. At regular times, she shared what she promised to complete, what she would do next, and asked to brainstorm solutions to challenges she faced. Even though this gave her some stress, she also found an exciting volunteer project with a deadline where she could apply her newfound skills (see Conclusion for more on this).

Finding time to follow through with the development plan amidst day-to-day operational demands will be challenging. Taylor overcame this by using a variety of strategies: • blocking 1 hour every week to focus on this, setting it as a no-meeting or task time • doing the thing that scared her first thing in the morning until she felt comfortable with it • multi-tasking by listening to podcasts on relevant topics while at the gym

As Taylor embarked on her skill development journey, she realized that the comprehensive skill audit was just the first step in a broader professional development strategy: • Networking and service: In the next article of this series, we'll explore how Taylor leveraged strategic network engagement to broaden her impact and knowledge base and gave back to create a pragmatic approach to learning and growth.