Here are six soft skills IT leaders must look for when building teams
for digital transformation.
1. Critical thinking
When it comes to
new undertakings, critical thinking is a skill that helps people define and
solve new problems that come their way. It involves conceptualizing,
synthesizing, and analyzing data, as well as the ability to reason and draw
conclusions from those analyses. It’s essential for business survival.
Yet a study by MindEdge found
that only 36 percent of current students and recent graduates feel that they
are well trained in critical thinking, and only 20 percent feel their
colleagues are well trained.
To hire critical
thinkers, look for candidates who can demonstrate their thought process to you
when talking through their work, including examples of how they have handled
making important decisions or solving complex problems through research,
deliberation, collaboration, decision making, and execution.
Digital
transformation can require complex changes that require buy-in across an
organization. Your team must be able to take technical terms and explain them —
in writing and through speech — in a way that the rest of the business can
understand.
This is especially
true because your digital transformation will touch every department and
employee in your company. You need people who can create buy-in and
understanding of the process and goals throughout the company.
Creativity isn’t
just being able to draw amazing pictures or write thought-provoking short
stories. Creative people can look at a problem and think of new ways to solve
it in ways that often seem off-the-wall at first glance. They aren’t afraid to
take a risk during the thinking and brainstorming phase.
To gauge the
creative skills of a potential hire, consider sharing a current challenge that
the company is looking to solve and ask the candidate how they would
approach the problem. Don’t focus on the viability of the solution, but on
their thought process and originality. Does the person rely on traditional
processes and methods, or are they proposing a new angle that you hadn’t
considered?
These days, work
is inherently collaborative. You need team members who are willing to work with
others — listen to their ideas, brainstorm, communicate, take feedback, and be
willing to share the spotlight.
For example,
during GE’s transition to one master
CRM, the team collaborated with employees in
different roles and departments of the company by giving people an equal voice,
eliminating silos, and having technology experts involved in the entire
process.
Regardless of how
organized you are, your digital transformation will not always go according to
plan. Some tasks will take longer than expected. New challenges will arise. The
end result may look completely different from what you imagined when you
started.
So you need people
on your team who can easily change course and adapt quickly. By filling your
team with people who are flexible and can pivot easily, you can focus on
changing the organization rather than managing change within your own team.
To meet your goals
around digital transformation in a timely manner, you need people who can get a
lot done quickly. You know the type: everyone else wonders how they seem to
find more hours in the day than everyone else. And equally important, you need
people accountable for their work.
These skills can
be difficult to assess during an interview. Consider asking the interviewee to
tell you about a recent work project. Look for clues in their narration
to gauge what the candidate was responsible for and what they were able to
accomplish in a short period of time. To assess their accountability, ask what
they would have done if the project was running late.
Building a team
that can take on the thorniest of challenges is no easy undertaking. But
keeping in mind the importance of soft skills, as well as technical skills,
when hiring for your team can help you move your business forward even faster.
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