The Future of Work Needs Teams With These 5 Skills

A new team-centric structure is arising among businesses and governments around the world, according to a recent Economist article.

To be agile in today’s fast-paced, digital marketplace, leaders are shifting away from traditional hierarchical models and are restructuring to build dynamic networks of highly empowered teams. In a study of more than 7,000 executives in 130 countries, Deloitte found that more than 80% of respondents surveyed say their companies are either currently restructuring to a team centric structure.

The future of work needs teams with highly developed future ready skills – teams with these skills will be able to innovate at the speed of change as well as create real time solutions needed for customer and employee happiness.

The 5 Skills needed Are:

1. Me to we attitude – individuals on a team need to be able to navigate the ambiguity of being an autonomous high performing individual while respecting and interacting with multiple stakeholders within the team dynamic. This skill requires people to have a healthy ego and to know when to ‘push’ forward on an idea or when to ‘give’ in to the teams overall goals or to someone else’s ideas.
2. Real time creativity skills – with the shift towards team structures in organizations it requires every person on the team to be focused on creative solutions. As a collective the team ‘culture’ needs to be one of ‘we do not see roadblocks – we see opportunities’. The ability of each person on the team needs to be able to link seemingly uncommon things to find the creative answer. For example ‘what does a customer who might ride in a self driving car have in common with our beverage service?’ as a possible question. Creative answers might include – wants convenience, wants easy, wants to be cared for etc.
3. Ability to leverage tech solutions – with the influx of AI, robotics and automation a lot of the mundane elements of projects will be handled by technology. We are already seeing this with carebots, cobots and talk directed assistants such as Alexa, Siri and more. Every person on the team needs to be ‘tech minded’ but not in a way that is ‘tech only’ focus – the tech mind needs to be focused on “how can we leverage the tech we have to improve the customer or employee experience?”
4. Integrated ‘team talk’ communication skills – there are many ways to communicate and future ready teams need to build a ‘team talk’ that allows each person to interact with ease and to move with great speed by being on the same page more often than not. Team talk means that there is a communication code of conduct agreed to by all team members. Team talk code of conduct can include: we can talk openly, we trust each other, we can say ‘no’, we can challenge ideas and inputs, and we can agree to disagree.
5. The ABLE acronyms is a key component of future ready teams: Able stands for: Always, Be, Learning Everyday – the most effective teams consist of highly self motivated individuals who have a keen desire to grow and learn. When everyone on the team is ABLE he or she sees ever interaction, every challenge, every celebration as an opportunity to learn and grow. Teams focused on learning spend less time in the “ME” part of being a team and more time on the “WE” part of being a team.