Skills Agility: A Path for Smaller Organizations

According to Josh Bersin, a thought leader and author on the global talent market, careers that have been focused on functional or technical expertise are morphing into “skills-based careers.” A career path grounded in skills is enabling people to move around in non-traditional ways more easily than ever before. This trend is not only meeting talent expectations today but is essential for companies’ survival. Bersin explains:

“CEOs and CFOs are operating in what we call the ‘Industrial Age’ – hire to grow, then lay people off when things slow down. As we enter 2024, all that is different. We have to ‘hoard our talent,’ invest in productivity, and redevelop and redeploy people for growth.”

Disruptive technologies and talent shortages are accelerating workforce transformation, forcing organizations to adapt and reskill. While 74% of organizations acknowledge the importance of reskilling workers in the upcoming year, from Deloitte’s research, only 10% feel prepared to tackle the demand.

Organizations like Delta Air Lines are leading the way in this work by aligning workforce skills with the needs of the organization. In our latest whitepaper, we followed Delta Air Lines’ pioneering flight to a skills-first culture. The airline has committed significant resources to prioritize a skills-based approach, championed from the very top by Delta’s CEO, Ed Bastian.

But what if you don’t have the resources of a large organization to cultivate skills agility? At Acera Partners, we believe you can build this one leader at a time.

As we continue our focus on the reskilling revolution, we interviewed Toni Baruti, who is leading with a skill-focused lens – without additional resources or investment beyond her own time.

Toni Baruti is the Chief Information and Chief Technology Officer at AllHealth Network, a $90M non-profit mental health and addiction organization with about 650 employees. Toni also serves as the eHealth Commissioner in Colorado’s Office of eHealth Innovation (OeHI). OeHi is responsible for defining and evolving Colorado’s health technology strategy in care coordination, data access, healthcare integration, payment reform, and care delivery.

By focusing on skills, not tenure and experience, Toni is building non-traditional career paths to retain talented people while enhancing the work of AllHealth. As the Chair of the Board of Directors for AllHealth, I’ve had an opportunity to see Toni in action.

Chatting before a recent AllHealth board meeting, Toni mentioned that she moved two acute care therapists from the clinical team to her data analytics team. I couldn’t see the path from therapy to data analytics and wanted to learn more. Here are the highlights from our conversation.

Anne: Toni, how did you move therapists to your data analytics group, a leap very few would see to make?

Toni: These therapists worked directly with clients with severe mental illness. They were getting burnt out, which is common in Community Mental Health Centers; we see the highest acuity of clients and receive the lowest reimbursement. We lose therapists at a high rate.

Each of these therapists let me know that while they loved the organization, they had accepted non-clinical roles with new organizations. I was like, don’t leave AllHealth! Why don't you come over to technology? In technology, you're not seeing clients. It will give you a break.

Anne: What did you see in these therapists that made you think they could be successful in your technology group?

Toni: Neither had technology experience. One of them said, “I’m terrible at technology.” I think they thought I was crazy. They’d never imagined this path for themselves.

The main thing I look for when I bring someone over is: Do they have the ability and interest to learn something new? Both were self-starters. I could see that they were open to learning and willing to take the risk.

Anne: How did you know that the therapists had the skills needed for your technology group?

Toni: It starts with recognizing the common and key skills needed on the team. And not only common, but enhanced skills to create a more blended technology function from an overall skills perspective. I look at talent on the team as a toolbox. I'm always thinking about skillsets that I need to develop or include.

The gap I saw on our team was clinical experience, which these two had. I just thought, this makes sense. They have a growth mindset and insight into clinical. They can learn the other skills needed to be successful on the team.

Anne: One of the barriers I hear from leaders for shifting to a skills-based approach is the challenge of figuring out what skills are needed. How did you define the skills on your team?

Toni: I built a Team Skills Assessment for each of the technology teams to capture the skills that we need with what we have. It includes technical, business, and soft skills, like leadership skills. I built the basic framework of skills that I saw on each team and then had team members provide input.

On the Team Skills Assessment, we capture where each team member is with each skill. Looking at the number of team members proficient in each skill, we can see where we’re strong, where we're lacking, and what we need to build through training or cross-training. I can see what skills are at risk to ensure critical skillsets are continually built and fostered.

We look at the skills assessment periodically to keep it updated around what skills are needed today and in the future. Then as team members gain new skills, or we add or lose someone on the team, we update it to see what we’ve gained or what gaps we need to fill.

The goal of the team skills assessment is not for every team member to have every skill, which is the expectation for many teams. Rather, it is about ensuring that every critical skill is covered across the team and the technology group.

Anne: How are the skills rated?

Toni: There are two people doing the rating. Each team member does a self-assessment and then the manager rates where they think the team member is performing. The team member and manager meet to determine the final rating together.

Anne: Who has access to the Skills Assessment?

Toni: Every team member and manager has full transparency to the skills assessment. They know where they are and where each team member is with every skill. This gives them insight and a path to new skills. You can see that there’s two skills you don’t have, so you can go learn those. It is inspiring team members to learn more and to knowledge share. They feel empowered and have a sense of autonomy over their development, which is really special.

Anne: Can you share more about the benefits of bringing therapists to your technology team?

Toni: I was excited about the perspectives and skills that these therapists would bring to the technology team. Everything that we do in technology within AllHealth is to support the clinicians. The clinicians are the users of the tools we create and maintain. It’s gold to have the perspectives of what clinicians do every day and get feedback on what would make it easier. By blending the clinical perspective with the technical side, we can build better solutions.

Because the language and communication styles of clinicians and IT are very different, the therapists on our team are now liaisons between IT and the clinicians. When they get the requirements from the business, they fully understand the clinical side and can translate it in technical terms so that we can build what they need. We can now better understand the work and language of the clinical side of the business.

The value is beyond the therapists’ clinical skills on the team. It’s helping to upskill the whole team by transferring clinical skills into technology and vice versa. As an example, for a business analyst, you need to communicate effectively when asking about a problem. Communication is a strength for clinicians. Our technical folks are watching how the therapists communicate and it's changing how they communicate with the business. This transfer of skills happens without them even knowing.

Anne: How is this changing how you are working as a team and as an organization?

With everyone leaning on each other's strengths and learning from each other’s skills, we are accomplishing critical upskilling because technology is always changing.

Every month we have a technology and innovation meeting that one of the team members runs and presents something they’ve learned or do personally. As an example, we have an employee who’s taking artificial intelligence classes and has taught the whole team what he’s learning. It gets the team excited about new areas and finding ways to incorporate them at work.

As we continually upskill, we are increasing innovation. They're like, “Oh, I learned this, and we should try this, too.” This feeds their creative genius and gets their creative juices flowing.

This is also fostering increased team and organizational collaboration. When I first started here, everything was siloed. Now we have meetings that are collaborative between the clinical and IT functions. In every project that we do, everyone is around the table designing and making the decisions. I feel like technology can't do anything without clinical and vice versa. It’s changing how we collaborate across the organization.

It also helps with internal mobility. Through this exposure, a programmer will hear what the system administrators do and may want to go over there. Instead of leaving the organization, people are staying for new opportunities to grow and contribute to the organization’s success.

Anne: How does this assessment help with Individual Development Plans (IDP)?

Toni: We take the broader skills needs right into each team member’s IDP. There are just three goals on the IDP, and we look at the team member's skills gaps and strengths to achieve these goals. This determines what skills will be most valuable for them to develop in the coming year. If they are at an intermediate level in a certain skill, we assign different classes or mentoring for them to upskill. The employee and manager co-create the plan.

We also anticipate obstacles and barriers to achieving their goals, which could be their own behaviors. We look at what you are going to stop doing, start doing, and keep doing. I love the everyday part, too. If they focus on a new behavior for three minutes a day, that adds up significantly over time.

Instead of focusing on past performance like traditional performance reviews, we focus on leveraging and developing your skills and strengths to achieve a goal. We’re saying, “You’ll grow into this skill." Focusing on skills growth makes the IDP so much more accessible and positive.

Overall, we are not looking at individual weaknesses. If someone is weak in an area that’s not their strength, I'm not going to try to build up that weakness. I'm going to utilize their strengths and bring in a partner who has strength in the other area. When the team is working together across their strengths, it's like iron sharpens iron.

Anne: Your approach follows the research that when you develop people’s strengths, they get exponentially better versus when you develop a weakness, improvements are smaller. (See Forbes’ research: “Why Leaders Should Focus on Strengths, Not Weaknesses”)

Toni: Right, yeah. It's weird how that works, but you see it all the time. And it's counterintuitive. I think in so much of business, there is this focus on building weaknesses, which can be exhausting for the person. Instead of looking at individual weaknesses to develop, we look at the construction of the whole team to round out weaknesses. Fostering people’s strengths raises the boat for the whole team.

Toni has offered to share the Team Assessment and Individual Development Plan with anyone who might want to adapt these tools for use within your organization. Please contact info@acerapartners.com to request a copy.

Anne: In addition to a skills focus, are there other things that helped the therapists’ transition to technology?

Toni: I'm really hands-off and like to give folks autonomy to do their thing. With these positions, I simply told them to go and be great. They knew I had confidence in them. I just watched them and helped them have confidence in themselves.

Before they started, they were very intimidated by technology. A lot of people think that in technology, we're in the basement coding all the time. Then when they get into it, they were like, “Oh, so this is what you guys do!” From a growth mindset, both just took off and are finding their way. It's amazing.

We also have a “no failure” environment. It's okay to fail here. If you're not failing, you're not learning. I told them, “I’ll provide the resources for you to learn and be successful. We’ll support you when you need something.” This helps new team members be okay with making mistakes. They don't think, “Oh, I messed up. I failed.” They look at it and say, “Let me go and try to figure it out.” If we didn't have an environment where it’s okay to fail, it would be difficult to move people onto the team.

Anne: How did the move go over with the rest of the team?

Toni: There was grumbling with one of my team members when the first therapist came over. They were like, “What the heck? This person doesn’t have the technical experience I have to be on the team.” But after they saw the value it brought our team, they got it.

It is also helping other team members be more willing to try something that's different and outside of the box as well. If these therapists can make such a big move, they have less fear of the unknown for themselves.

Anne: What’s so interesting is that you yourself have modeled a non-traditional career path, moving between disciplines that do not often intersect.

Toni: Yes, I have a blended background in finance, technology, state policy, and a little bit of clinical. I started my career in finance doing incredibly complex cost reports for one of the county’s largest safety net hospitals. When you're looking for reimbursement from the state, you get to see everything under the hood.

I needed to understand how each department impacted the next around costs. This required good access to data, so I learned how to code and build databases. This is how I got into technology.

Then seeing the impact of policy on healthcare, I got on state commissions. As a commissioner for OeHi, I focus on technological innovations at the intersection of healthcare and technology. I bring these insights back to my role as CIO and CTO at AllHealth to better align with the state on the Social Health Information Exchange. By blending social information with behavioral health and physical health, we can see the root causes of clients’ problems to treat them more holistically.

I think I gained a broader perspective of organizations through my blended background. I can understand the connections and skillsets needed to be successful in different areas of the organization. Then I can look at talent through a skills lens to fill the gaps.

Being on the nonprofit side for the majority of my career helps a lot as well. There aren’t funds to hire new people with the skills you need in non-profit. You have to optimize your resources and broaden your skillsets to wear multiple hats in every role.

Anne: What’s the opportunity to expand this approach across the organization?

Toni: At the organizational level during COVID, there was a lot of need for immediate upskilling. As an organization, we went almost 100% telehealth. We had seasoned psychiatrists on Zoom for the first time, which is not something they would have been willing to do outside of a pandemic. Before that, we’d been talking about telehealth as an industry forever. Like, how are we going to do it? Well, when the pandemic happened, it was sink or swim. We had had to do it; we found a way to do it, and we did it.

To drive a focus of continual upskilling, our Head of HR, Beth Nixon, will be rolling out the growth focused IDPs across the whole organization. This will help foster and capture forward-thinking opportunities and innovations for the organization.

We also need to think about what buckets of skills we need as an overall organization, not just as individuals. It's the meta view of our Team Skills Assessment. This will give us insight into skills gaps or openings in the organization. While most companies buy skills from the outside, we’ll be able to see the skills needs and match our own people’s skills and development plans to those needs rather than struggling to bring in skills from the outside.

Anne: How is this skills focus changing how people see their careers within AllHealth?

Toni: We’re modeling that you don't have to be siloed in your function. There are avenues open for different career paths. We are breaking away from a traditional career ladder where if you start in accounting, you're always in accounting for the rest of your career.

I've been getting a lot of people saying, “Can I come over to your team, too?” I think that is good. People are starting to see, “Oh, I can move around in the organization as well.” In our industry where there’s compassion burnout, this can give people the break they need to stay with the organization. Then maybe when they’re ready, they’ll move back into therapy.

Our goal is to communicate that you can stay and reinvent yourself at AllHealth.

Summary

Regardless of organizational size or focus, the advent of generative AI and the scarcity of talent is changing the nature of work and the skills needed in organizations. The pace of this change is outstripping the preparedness of businesses.

To answer this challenge, organizations must develop talent from within. This requires a shift from traditional career ladder progression that keeps people in the same function to skills-based advancement. With a focus on skills, people can move in non-traditional ways that are more mobile, adaptable, and responsive to the evolving needs of organizations. As Harvard Business Review explains, “Rather than climbing a ladder, the career of the future is a portfolio to curate.”

The shift toward skills-based careers is just as impactful and imminent for small organizations as for large. By paving a skills-focused path onto her technology team, Toni Baruti demonstrates how one leader can cultivate this approach in a smaller organization.

As Beverly Kaye coined in her best-selling management book, Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Getting Good People to Stay, Toni is an “opportunity-minded manager.” Kaye says:

“If you are an opportunity-minded manager, you will help your employees seek opportunities but will also help them to see those opportunities… Best yet, you will teach your employees how to do those things for themselves. In partnership with your employees, ask, ‘Where and how carefully are we looking.’”

As an opportunity-minded leader, Toni is helping employees see and seek different career paths in the organization. Employees can “stay and reinvent” themselves at AllHealth.

Are you an opportunity-minded manager helping to drive internal mobility within your organization?

See What’s Possible — with Acera Partners

Learn more about a skill-based approach in our latest blogs: 6 Best Practices from Delta Air Lines’ Skills-First Journey and AI and the Reskilling Revolution: A Path to Talent Agility.

Acera Partners is a thought leader and partner in building agile career architecture with skills and compensation alignment. To discuss your reskilling transformation and explore a partnership on your path, please connect with Acera Partners today.

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