CHAPTER 27
Essential Skills for TD Professionals
The label “talent development professional” implies that we’ve achieved a level of competence or proficiency in the skills we use to do our work. More basic skills such as collaboration and agility support specialized skills like designing learning. And skills such as influence and global perspective enable us to better partner across our organizations, communicating how talent development practices can help achieve organizational goals.
IN THIS CHAPTER:
Define the skills that are essential for talent development professionals
Examine where these skills are applied in the workplace
Consider strategies for developing essential skills
To create a world that works better, we use a combination of our own unique powers and a set of essential skills all talent development professionals employ to develop the people in our workplaces. Building these essential skills is vital for our successful contributions to our organizations. This chapter focuses on seven skills that are essential for talent development professionals and provides suggestions for how to build them. These skills are:
• Agility
• Global perspective
• Influence
• Collaboration
• Integrity
• Responsibility and accountability
• Resilience
Of course, there are other skills that all professionals need to succeed. The seven skills outlined in this chapter were selected after reflecting on my own career experience and talking with a broad cross section of TD professionals in a variety of work settings. They serve as the foundation for the other, more specialized skills outlined in other chapters of this book because they contribute substantially to our ability to empower others.
Where Essential Skills Show Up at Work
The essential skills outlined in this chapter are used throughout our everyday work routines. Let’s review a few examples of where these skills show up in a typical talent development professional’s day.
• David’s learning and organization development team used agility and collaboration when it had to transition all scheduled in-person training programs to virtual delivery in a period of three weeks after the company froze all domestic and international travel.
• In a meeting with her senior leaders, Bonita used her influencing skills to make her case and successfully get buy-in for a new employee well-being initiative.
• Terry drew on her integrity and strong sense of responsibility as she led her team through a challenging reorganization process.
Whether we are employed by a large global company, a regional organization, or run our own business, the essential skills described here are key to our success. For example, Sharon Wingron has a small, family-owned talent development consulting and supplier business. She started out in 2002 as a solopreneur—a one-woman shop. But as her business evolved and the world of work changed, so did her needs. She now leads a small team of full- and part-time employees and contractors. Collaboration, communication, agility, and accountability come into play in every aspect of their work. She relies on and holds her team members accountable for completing all tasks on time and with the quality their clients require. She expects them to work well together on their tasks and projects so that her company can deliver as promised to their clients while continuing to evolve the business.
Essential Skill: Agility
Agility: The ability to swiftly adapt to new circumstances, whether internal to the organization (such as a realignment or restructuring of department functions) or external to the organization (such as advancements in technology that affect the business)
Organizations need to be agile to quickly respond to today’s ever-changing business environment. Talent development professionals need to steer confidently and competently toward goals with a clear direction, steadfast focus, and determination. However, unexpected circumstances can require us to quickly adapt, to change strategies for reaching a goal, or to change direction entirely and steer toward a new goal. With agility, we can make these changes quickly, smoothly, and successfully.
How and where people work is changing at a faster pace, and TD professionals need to provide flexible learning opportunities to meet the evolving needs of the workforce. If we’re unable (or unwilling) to adapt, we run the risk of losing our seat at the table, our ability to influence, and our capability to contribute to the organization’s success.
For example, Bernadette Costello is an instructor who was used to delivering live, face-to-face classes. With little warning, the university where she worked transitioned to live, virtual classes in the middle of a semester. While initially not a fan of virtual delivery, Bernadette adopted an agile mindset and experimented with interactive technologies that could mimic (and sometimes even improve upon) the face-to-face classroom experience. This introduced her to a variety of applications that allowed her to continue contributing to the university and the students’ ability to learn.
Many of us exercise or build our agility daily. It can be applied in situations as simple as adjusting the start time for a training program to accommodate participants in a different part of the world or as complex as transforming a team member’s job responsibilities to take on a new role in response to changes in the marketplace.
Humans are wired to fear change. Most of us don’t like change, so being agile takes practice. Often our initial response to any change is negative, which doesn’t serve us well. Here are three ways to practice expanding your willingness and ability to pivot and cultivate your agility:
• Pause. When presented with a pivot, pause before responding and take three deep breaths. Interrupting a conditioned response with a pause offers an opportunity to choose a different response.
• Embrace the new. Take advantage of situations away from your work environment and intentionally practice embracing the opportunities brought by an unexpected or sudden shift. Try looking at it as an opportunity for a new, novel chance at discovering something new.
• Step outside your comfort zone. Look for opportunities at work to try something completely different and outside your comfort zone to elevate your comfort level with the unfamiliar.
Essential Skill: Global Perspective or Mindset
Global mindset: A set of attributes that helps people work better with individuals and organizations unlike themselves. It is the ability to understand the similarities and differences among cultures and not be paralyzed by the differences. It is about being comfortable with being uncomfortable in different environments. (Thunderbird School of Global Management 2021)
The workforce is becoming increasingly global—from multinational companies to organizations that do business around the world. The ability to embrace and understand differences among cultures serves us well as TD professionals regardless of our role. It enables us to have a deeper impact in our organizations by working effectively with people across borders, cultures, and generations and preparing others to do the same. Embracing a global mindset goes beyond appreciating similarities and differences in cultures and generations. It includes truly integrating them into our strategies, initiatives, and programs. Table 27-1 provides examples of where a global perspective can appear in a talent development professional’s work.
Table 27-1. Using a Global Mindset Across TD Roles
Role | Global Mindset Influence |
Talent development leaders | • Setting talent strategies • Defining policies that respect cultural and generational differences |
Instructors | • Being aware of and respectful of different cultures while setting class expectations |
Content developers | • Ensuring media, such as images and videos, include an array of diverse people |
A global mindset can influence many aspects of your day-to-day work experiences (Ratanjee 2019). One part of adopting a global perspective is an increased awareness of how varied cultural and behavioral norms are. For example, on a geographically dispersed team with members in different countries, which culture’s norms are adopted by the team? Another cultural aspect to be aware of is norms related to classroom behavior. For example, in a virtual class with participants from around the globe, is it acceptable to ask questions? Is it respectful to expect participants to have their web cameras on during class? These questions can be addressed effectively and fairly when you have an understanding of a global perspective.
For example, one company I worked for was based in the United States, with employees from India, Venezuela, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. Our office hosted a monthly potluck lunch where employees brought food dishes from their home countries or states, allowing us all to learn more about one another’s cultures and customs.
Develop a global mindset by focusing on:
• Increasing your self-awareness
• Cultivating curiosity about people and cultures
• Expanding your flexibility and open-mindedness to include all options
Essential Skill: Influence
Influence: The ability to transform and shape others’ opinions and actions (Adapted from CCL)
We use influencing skills throughout our workday to get our point across in conversations, emails, presentations, reports, and the learning environment.
For talent development professionals to provide maximum value, we need to be able to influence the organization and its leaders. In fact, the ability to influence is an important trait for identifying leadership potential (Nielsen, Niu, and Meng 2016). Providing a convincing explanation for investing in programs that develop skills and drive employee success, employee engagement, and retention of top talent is a key opportunity for TD professionals. To influence business leaders, we need to have a clear understanding of the business needs and the ability to communicate using language that they understand and respect. We also need to be able to quantify the expected impact for the programs and provide relevant metrics related to the work.
For example, when Dawn Sander was a talent leader at a large global medical device company, she invested time learning the business of the division she supported. She took ride-alongs with sales reps so she could see the skills they used and those they needed. She also participated in business meetings to better understand their work and conducted focus groups to get a clear understanding of the sales reps’ needs. As a result of her investment, she gained valuable insight about the business and was able to influence the leaders she partnered with by showing that she clearly understood their needs.
Here are a few examples of where influencing might appear during your day:
• Generating buy-in for your proposal for a new training program
• Deciding as a team which projects should get top priority
• Encouraging learners to adapt new behaviors as you facilitate a training program
Influence is built on genuine trust, connection, and integrity. Build your influence skills by:
• Consistently communicating with others clearly, honestly, and transparently
• Providing thorough, well-thought-out information that is backed by data and facts
• Following through on your commitments
• Creating genuine connections with others by listening, showing interest, and asking thoughtful questions
Essential Skill: Collaboration
Collaboration: Behavior in which two or more individuals work together toward a common goal with equal opportunity to participate, communicate, and be involved (ATD 2020)
We don’t empower others to develop talent in the workplace by ourselves; we do it by working with others. Today more than ever before, at all levels in the organization, our work as TD professionals requires collaboration. When collaboration is missing it slows or stalls projects, creates frustration among team members, squashes motivation, and leads to disengagement.
Collaboration skills include:
• Clearly and diplomatically communicating information in written and verbal forms
• Being open-minded with the ability to hear others’ perspectives without judgment
• Empathizing to understand and be aware of and sensitive to others’ feelings and experiences
• Demonstrating trustworthiness or the ability to be relied upon consistently
Whether we’re collaborating within our own department or with multiple divisions that span the organization, we can use these guidelines to collaborate effectively:
• Create a shared vision or purpose and identify clear goals as a team-building exercise—this will offer a sense of team identity, unity, and shared purpose.
• Establish a team or project charter regarding communication, accountability, and responsibilities, as well as how decisions will be made and conflicts will be resolved.
• Develop trust and rapport among team members by providing opportunities to get to know one another as people.
• Keep the team goals front and center.
• Meet or communicate regularly, discussing timelines, progress, challenges, and decisions, as well as providing the opportunity for connection.
• Celebrate wins, big and small.
Use these three strategies to build your collaboration skills:
• Practice open-mindedness in how you respond to outcomes, comments, or ideas you don’t like—look at them with curiosity.
• Use active listening in conversations and meetings.
• Ask for help from team members to get comfortable receiving it and ask your team members how you can help them.
Essential Skill: Integrity
Integrity: Consistently acting in firm adherence to moral and ethical principles. Knowing and doing the right thing, even when no one is watching. Acting with integrity involves using morals as your beacon for decisions and direction.
Has anyone ever taken credit for something you did? That’s what it feels like when someone does not act with integrity. How much do you trust that person now? How eager are you to collaborate with them or to offer your assistance? There are far-reaching consequences for not acting with integrity.
You want to trust your colleagues and leaders unequivocally, and to have no fear in their moral compasses. Similarly, your team, your leaders, and your learners need to know they can count on you to act with integrity.
Examples of integrity include:
• Committing to writing your own training material and not searching the internet to find content written by someone else.
• Acknowledging to your manager that your team member was largely responsible for a project’s success.
• Not sharing a copyrighted handout from a conference presentation without approval from the author, even if the author would never know.
Build your integrity by striving to consistently act within your morals and values.
Essential Skill: Responsibility/Accountability
Responsibility: Honoring your commitments, following through on your duties, and being reliable and trustworthy Accountability: Accepting responsibility for your actions
(Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Responsibility and accountability are closely related skills that professionals in every industry must have. Being regarded as irresponsible will have a significant limiting impact on your career because when your team can’t trust that you will do what you committed to, they’ll stop relying on you. Your leaders will lose trust in your ability to complete projects on time or at the quality level that meets their expectations. Conversely, when your team and leaders know you are responsible, their trust in you grows and your ability to influence them (and the organization) does as well.
Examples of responsibility include:
• Responding to phone calls and emails in a timely manner
• Completing projects on time, thoroughly, and without mistakes
• Attending team meetings and being fully present, attentive, and engaged
Being accountable means you meet all deadlines to provide exactly what’s expected. And if you miss a deadline, you accept responsibility for your actions, don’t make excuses, and apologize for the delay. It may mean that you submit a project update ahead of time and arrange for a colleague to share your report if you have to miss a meeting. Accountability also involves holding others accountable. While leaders are responsible for holding their team members accountable, strong teams empower team members to hold one another accountable as well. That means addressing behavior that is out of line or doesn’t meet expectations.
Let’s review a few examples of accountability:
• Maura couldn’t go to a meeting, so she sent her project update in an email ahead of time and agreed to follow up with George, the project lead, for any new tasks she was assigned.
• Marcelo rescheduled his doctor’s appointment for later in the day so he would be available to facilitate the new employee orientation program as his team expected.
• Rashad contacted a support team to find the answer to a question a participant asked during a training program and followed up with the answer before the agreed upon date.
Build your responsibility and accountability skills by making commitments to yourself and others that you can honor and then honoring them to the best of your ability. Be proactive and inform others as soon as you’re aware of a change in schedule. Accountable TD professionals under promise and then overachieve.
Use these three strategies to build your accountability skills:
• Ensure that you schedule realistic due dates for all projects and tasks; if you can’t meet a requested deadline, say so immediately.
• Clarify by ensuring that you know what result is expected on which date, at what time, in which time zone.
• Set high expectations for yourself by taking ownership of tasks that need to be done, accept personal responsibility for doing it on time every time, and then ask, “What else can I do?”
TD PROFESSIONALS MUST LEAD WITH COURAGE
Bill Treasurer, Chief Encouragement Officer, Giant Leap Consulting; Author, Courage Goes to Work and Leaders Open Doors
As TD professionals we must be leaders, even if we have high and often contradictory expectations of a leader’s role. We wrestle with leadership conflicts knowing that leaders must be reasonable but passionate, strategic but tactical, decisive but inclusive, and confident but humble. As a TD professional you must be all those things too! You might be thinking, “Where on earth do I start?”
The starting point is courage. Aristotle called courage the first virtue, because it makes all the other virtues possible. Courage is what steels the backbone that leaders like you need to forge the future, set bold development priorities, face challenges, inspire others, provide candid feedback, confront ethical breaches, and support the bottom line. Sound familiar? It’s what you do every day. Courage must be woven into everything you do. Thus, at the start of your leadership journey, you should first commit to nurturing, developing, and strengthening your courage.
My firm, Giant Leap, is a courage-building consulting firm. Our mission is to build workplace courage. The richest part of our workshops is the insightful discussions about the central role courage plays as it relates to leading and developing others. Four insights from my book Courage Goes to Work may provide you with a starting point:
• Look for courage opportunities every day. Small acts of courage make a big difference. Examples include pursuing big goals that stretch your skills, proposing ways your leaders can champion learning, giving candid feedback to your participants or peers, coaching managers about how to develop their people, or recommending that a favorite training program be cut because it doesn’t support the organization’s goals.
• Set a bold future. As a trusted advisor to your C-suite, you can partner with them to develop a workforce that supports the organization’s strategic imperative. You can be at the forefront and take a courageous approach to offering an innovative and bold, yet effective and practical approach to upskilling the workforce. Help your leaders determine how they can establish a hybrid workforce that engages employees, manages equity issues, fosters teamwork, and achieves organizational goals. That kind of TD leadership takes courage!
• Practice three expressions of courage. We believe that courage falls into one of three behavior expressions: tell, try, and trust courage. You show tell courage, for example, when you provide feedback, even if it’s negative, to your leadership about why engagement scores are low. You demonstrate try courage when you volunteer to deliver a topic that you’ve never facilitated before. And you display trust courage when you let IT take the lead to develop the best cyber approach for your TD department.
• Start with you. As a TD professional, you’re required to model the values you expect others to uphold. If you want others to be courageous, you must be the first one to go up and jump off whatever high dive you’re asking others to jump off. Here are some self-development questions to consider: Where am I playing it too safe? What big goals am I pursuing that warrant my courage mojo? What tasks have I outgrown that I need to delegate to others? What actions can I take to be a better role model of courage behavior?
One of your primary TD goals should be to clarify your organization’s readiness to create a learning culture. That means you need to ensure your leaders champion learning, your employees value learning, and everyone has a learning mindset. It’s a big task but you can lead the way—especially if you let courage guide you. Courage can be the lifeblood of talent development, causing your department to step up to challenges, offer innovative ideas, be more productive, and ensure a measurable ROI. Make courage your department’s essence, so all TD professionals get involved, embrace change, seek out leadership opportunities, and help the organization achieve its vision. Courage is the first virtue of development and leadership!
Essential Skill: Resilience
Resilience: The ability to keep going, to recover, and to adapt well and quickly in the face of adversity, change, or stress
Resilience is the ability to keep going when the journey is longer than expected, or you’ve hit potholes and speed bumps along the way. Talent development professionals always have the next training program to develop or facilitate. Our work is never done because there is always another exciting new initiative around the corner. Constantly changing or competing priorities are the norm. Our ability to bounce back from these challenges helps us maintain our influence, trusted status, and reliability. It contributes to being seen as diligent, reliable, successful partners who rise to each challenge. Resilience is the refueling of our courage and wherewithal to get back up and keep going. If we’re not resilient, we will struggle to persevere when our personal fuel gets low.
In February 2020, I finally finished shifting the focus of my business from one professional passion (slide design and presentation consulting) to my other passion of building belonging in organizations. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit a month later, businesses shifted their focus from diversity, inclusion, and belonging to establishing remote work environments. Once their employees were set up to work from home, organizations turned their attention to helping employees present more effectively in a virtual setting. So, while I wanted to do more organization development and culture projects, my clients needed help with presentations. To feed my desire to move forward with my belonging work, I was resilient in that I continued to read, research, and attend training programs to develop my own knowledge and expertise while meeting my clients’ immediate needs.
Here are three simple ways to build resilience:
• Take a break. Standing up from your desk or taking a 10-minute walk outside (with or without a colleague) can recharge your focus, attention, and motivation.
• Sleep. Getting the right amount of nightly sleep for you and taking a short nap when you are tired can refresh your alertness.
• Enlist anxiety- and stress-reducing strategies. Citing affirmations, meditating, practicing breathing exercises, using calming essential oils, and listening to music are all helpful.
Final Thoughts
We employ a broad range of skills as talent development professionals. The ones outlined in this chapter empower us to excel in our roles. Investing our time and energy in developing these skills is essential for our own success, as well as our ability to contribute to our organization’s success. ATD’s Talent Development Capability Model self-assessment is a valuable tool for evaluating these essential skills, as well as the others in this handbook. You can find that assessment on the ATD website. In addition, use the checklist on the handbook website at ATDHandbook3.org to identify which skills you need to develop. Then develop a plan to learn and practice the essential skills that will make you a better TD professional.
About the Author
Wendy Gates Corbett, CPTD, believes in the power of building belonging within people and places. She champions this through her speaking, training, and consulting work as the president of Signature Presentations. Wendy guides organizations in taking the difficult, yet necessary steps to create embracive spaces where people have no doubt that they belong. She’s an experienced international speaker, award-winning consultant, and executive-level facilitator who has trained more than 100,000 people over the past 20-plus years. Wendy is a recognized leader in the training industry and a past member of the Association for Talent Development’s board of directors. She speaks globally on building belonging, confidence, clarity, and powerful presence. You can learn more about her work at signature-presentations.com.
References
ATD (Association for Talent Development). 2020. “Collaboration.” Talent Development Body of Knowledge. Alexandria, VA: Association for Talent Development.
Nielsen, C., D. Niu, and S. Meng. 2016. “Measuring Your Employees’ Invisible Forms of Influence.” Harvard Business Review, November 7. hbr.org/2016/11/measuring-your-employees-invisible-forms-of-influence.
Ratanjee, V. 2019. “The Future of Leadership Development: A Global Mindset.” Gallup, February 8. gallup.com/workplace/246551/future-leadership-development-global-mindset.aspx.
“Responsibility.” Merriam-Webster Online. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/responsibility.
Thunderbird School of Global Management. 2021. “Developing a Global Mindset.” Thunderbird School of Global Management; Arizona State University, April 9. thunderbird.asu.edu/knowledge-network/developing-global-mindset.
Recommended Resources
Biech, E. 2021. Skills for Career Success: Maximizing Your Potential at Work. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Changcoco, R., M. Cole, and J. Harlow. 2018. Focus on Them: Become the Manager Your People Need You to Be. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.
Tobin, T. 2019. Peak Leadership Fitness: Elevating Your Leadership Game. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.