Video: Using an IT Skills Matrix

Learn how to manage new tech changes at nonprofits using this simple and powerful team-building tool.

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In pt 1, Heather describes a typical IT Skills Matrix and how you create one, and responds to audience questions. In podcast part 2, she delves into identifying stakeholders and gives several examples of when and how to use a Skills Matrix to build and empower your team.

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Transcript below!

Have you ever used a skills matrix in IT change management at your nonprofit?

Do you know your super-users and early adopters? Your champions and ambassadors? Do you know who on your staff will happily and reliably use the tool exactly as trained vs your staffer who is always looking for new features and finding new shortcuts? Do you know who usually needs a little extra training and review sessions? Who is tech-hesitant, or even tech-phobic? How can you make your IT roll out a success for ALL your users? Can using an IT skills matrix make a difference?

Join Build change management expert Heather Ritchie in an interactive, free webinar to learn about this simple and effective tool. She will share a spreadsheet template, talk through real life scenarios and examples from her work, and explore the benefits and challenges of creating a staff skills matrix.

A skills matrix is also a useful tool to increase the value of training and enhance your conversations about professional development. Where are you investing in your staff skills? Where should you invest? Where do your staff want to learn and improve? What skills will help them and your nonprofit the most?

How can using an IT skills matrix improve new tech rollout?

Build Consulting download: IT Skills Matrix Template

As with all our webinars, this presentation is appropriate for an audience of varied IT experience. Community IT believes strongly that your IT vendor should be able to explain everything without jargon or lingo. 

Community IT is proudly vendor-agnostic, and our webinars cover a range of topics and discussions. Webinars are never a sales pitch, always a way to share our knowledge with our community.

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Presenters:

Heather Ritchie has spent the last 20 years supporting organizations and leaders to find effective ways of achieving results for the people they serve. She has led change management efforts in nonprofit, academic and corporate sectors, serving in a variety of roles from senior leadership to educator, coach and consultant. Heather brings a passion for connecting social purpose with the strategy, tools and technology to make the world a better place – on budget, on time, and for measurable impact. Throughout her career, Heather has focused on communication as the foundation for navigating change, bringing a strong ability to listen and diagnose challenges to find creative, tailored solutions.

Carolyn Woodard is currently head of Marketing and Outreach at Community IT Innovators. She has served many roles at Community IT, from client to project manager to marketing. With over twenty years of experience in the nonprofit world, including as a nonprofit technology project manager and Director of IT at both large and small organizations, Carolyn knows the frustrations and delights of working with technology professionals, accidental techies, executives, and staff to deliver your organization’s mission and keep your IT infrastructure operating. She has a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Johns Hopkins University and received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Williams College. She was happy to interview Heather Ritchie about using an IT skills matrix.

Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome to the Community IT webinar about using a skills matrix at your nonprofit. Have you used a skills matrix before, and are you in IT change management? Do you know super users, early adapters, your champions, your ambassadors?

Do you know who usually needs maybe a little extra training and review when you’re rolling out a new technology tool? Who is maybe even tech-phobic? 

And how can you make your IT rollout successful for all of your users, and get them the skills that they need to be able to use your new tool?

Introductions

My name is Carolyn Woodard. I’m the Outreach Director for Community IT, and I will be the moderator today. I’m very happy to hear from our guest, Heather Ritchie from Build Consulting, about this IT management tool and change management tool.

If you’ve never used a skills matrix before, you’ve come to the right place. 

And first, I’m going to go over our learning objectives. Today, after our program, we hope that you will be able to learn what a skills matrix is, understand the steps to create an IT skills matrix with your staff, explore the benefits and challenges to creating and using an IT skills matrix, and learn tactics and strategies to roll out IT changes to all staff using examples.

Heather is going to give us some good examples. So Heather, I’m very excited to welcome you to your first webinar with Community IT. Would you like to introduce yourself? 

Heather Ritchie: Thank you. I’m Heather Ritchie and I’m a consultant at Build.

I’ve enjoyed working with nonprofits for over 20 years and have served in a variety of roles from communications to technology to executive director. I’ve led change management efforts in a variety of sectors and served as an educator, professional development specialist, and leadership coach. 

My personal and professional experience keep revealing to me that communication is a foundation for success. And the same applies to leveraging technology. 

At Build, we know that improving use of technology and implementing new systems requires careful communications and the enablement of the people using the systems. We have also seen and know that nonprofits as well as others right now are experiencing faster and greater rates of change for technology and for people transitioning.

So, today, I’m super excited to talk about how to support individuals and teams and explore balancing their skills, their competencies, and their interests. I know not all organizations or departments have explored something like this and would encourage everybody to try it. I’m passionate about investing in our people and believe by doing so, we can really build better teams and have greater impact.

Super excited to be here. Thank you, Carolyn.

Carolyn Woodard: Thank you for coming. And would you tell us a little bit more about Build Consulting?

Heather Ritchie: Sure. Build is a technology consulting firm focused solely on nonprofits. Build believes in technology.

Change is more than changing the tools. It includes the strategy, the people, the leadership, change management support. We’re experienced at leading nonprofits through technology projects, from assessments to implementations, with deep data, information, technology, and everyday experience.

Carolyn Woodard: And before we begin the rest of our program, I’ll tell you a little bit more about Community IT if you’re not familiar with us. We are a 100% employee-owned managed services provider. We provide outsourced IT support. We work exclusively with nonprofit organizations also, and our mission is to help nonprofits accomplish their missions through the effective use of technology. We are big fans of what well-managed IT can do for your nonprofit.

We serve nonprofits across the United States, and we’ve been doing this for over 20 years. We are technology experts. We are consistently given MSP 501 recognition for being a top MSP, and that is an honor we received again in 2024.

I want to remind everyone for these presentations, Community IT is vendor agnostic. We only make recommendations to our clients and only based on their specific business needs. We never try to get a client into a product because we get an incentive or a benefit from that.

But we do consider ourselves a best of breed IT provider. It’s our job to know the landscape, what tools are available, reputable, and widely used. And we make recommendations on that basis for our clients based on their business needs, priorities, and budgets.

And today, we’re mostly going to be talking about Excel. So, spreadsheets may be something that you all already have. But in general, when we talk about tools in our presentation, they’re just one tool that you can use.

Purpose of an IT Skills Matrix at Nonprofits

So Heather, I think you’re going to take it over and tell us what an IT Skills Matrix is and what is the purpose.

Heather Ritchie: Sure. Let’s explore why organizations and IT departments should use a Skills Matrix. And this is framed around IT departments.

It can be for any department in a nonprofit. We just want to note that. But for IT departments, the purpose and usefulness of engaging in a Skills Matrix framework with your team, whether as a leader or a colleague, includes optimizing team performance.

And so, what we mean by this is seeing if you are leveraging your team member skills most effectively, planning for future training and development. How are we supporting the team as new technologies are added, as interests change, identifying skills or competency gaps? 

One of the top competencies of 2024 is being customer service oriented. If your team is a group of introverts that have not really had to interact a lot directly with staff, how can you help support them in growing that competency? 

Or consider team composition. When a team member leaves, this is an opportunity to discuss what skills the team needs. Have the needs of the team or the organization changed? Or are they the same? Are there team members that have the ability to fill in some skills, and you could hire for some other skills?

In another instance, we’ve worked with a number of nonprofits that had IT departments that were focused on help desk and hardware support models. And these organizations might have transitioned to using an MSP. And so now the IT staff that are in house need more expertise in enterprise and application software focused on support for the users and the organization.

That’s a different set of skills from the model they were staffed for. How can we have that conversation to support one another and build our teams? 

At its core, the purpose of a skills framework is to strengthen your teams and consider how you build collaborative spaces

It’s a conversation starter. It’s a way to look at data and discuss it. To borrow from Daniel Pink, a writer on the changing nature of the workplace, after adequate pay, employees really need three intrinsic elements to motivate them and be successful.

One of them is autonomy, the ability to make choices about their time and their tasks. 

Another is purpose, being part of something larger than ourselves, which when you’re in a non-profit, a lot of times that mission is really driving us. 

And then the third one is mastery.

And that’s really what connects to this skills matrix. Mastery is the desire to continually improve at something that matters. Pink says it’s the love. Humans love to get better at stuff.

If I’m in my job and I don’t have the opportunity to get better and grow, then I’m probably going to look at other things that I can do. And so, this idea of mastery and how we support our team members and our colleagues, and to support the organization, is really where the skills matrix conversation can come in. 

I’m hoping what you all leave here today with is that investing in knowing and understanding your people and teams at a more holistic level, really provides an opportunity to support team morale, skills, and performance.

What is an IT Skills Matrix? 

Heather Ritchie: So now let’s broadly look at what it is, and then we’re going to show you an example of a skills matrix. 

Broadly, a skills matrix is a framework for reflecting on job skills, competencies, and interests.

The skills, what we’re referencing there are things you’ve learned in the field, data visualization, user support and troubleshooting, database design. 

Competencies are broader. They may be a little bit more innate skills, but they’re still skills that you can develop. Are you a great problem solver? How do you feel about public speaking? Do you work well in teams? Are you a really good individual contributor? 

And then the next area are the interests. Areas where people might be curious or have a desire in investing time and developing. 

And part of this conversation is, hey, you know, employee one really wants to invest time in this area, and another employee is also interested. So maybe we pair people up. Or employee three is not interested in that topic and can kind of do a divide and conquer so that we can all have the content knowledge that is being developed. 

These three areas are what we want to look at to identify where individuals and teams are strong and where they have growth areas, as well as where the team may need additional support to fulfill the organization’s needs. The way this is laid out, it can be in a spreadsheet or a chart, and we’re going to show a little bit about data visualization with it.

And so, I can go ahead and take over if you’d like, Carolyn.

Carolyn Woodard: Sure. That sounds great. This slide is the example of the generic template, which is available on the Build Consulting website, which is www.buildconsulting.com, and I’ll share that link with everyone.

But I think, Heather, you’re going to go ahead and share the different tabs.

Heather Ritchie: Yes, I got super excited, and I made an example one for our webinar today. 

How to Use an IT Skills Matrix at Nonprofits

You may be thinking, “how am I going to use this skills matrix? How do I step into it?”

Step One: Brainstorm a list of skills and competencies for your organization or team

The first place you can start is compiling the list of skills and competencies. And the reason why this is the first step is not every team or department is going to need the same skills or competencies. 

You can survey your organization, and you can have anecdotal conversations with people. You can just talk to the team and brainstorm, or you could use our sample skills list to get started to kind of say, “hey, what do we think we really need to talk about as a team, as our core functionality for this organization? Is project management something that we really need to lean into? Is database management something? What does it look like?” 

If you look at this example chart, here’s the categories and here’s the skills. This is not a comprehensive list. This is what I would say is your starter list if you use our template. And you’re looking at the categories, which you’re going to see repeated here. And then you’re looking at the skills that might go along with it, that an individual might be responded to.

In addition to the sample skills, we’ve listed some sample competencies. So again, these are those more innate ones that like team collaboration and interpersonal skills, effective communication, time management, and organization. These are things that some people are innately good at, and other people can develop.

Step Two: Create an inventory

Next you would take those skills and competencies that you’ve brainstormed, that you’ve said, “hey, this is what our department needs to evaluate and assess across our team and our individuals.” And I’m going to encourage you to start by having an individual fill in their own inventory. 

And this is one way you could set up the inventory. The idea here is that I, as the employee, would fill it in. One way you could have this process done is you would also have the leadership fill in and then you can compare. Or you can just have the individual fill it in and then have a discussion about it with the individual.

And so, I might look at this and ask, “am I a big picture thinker?” and say, “you know what, that’s not something I’m super great at. Am I interested in developing that skill? Yes, I am totally interested.”

What you’ll see over here is we have a key, and it goes from not proficient to very proficient and not interested to very interested. These could be different. You could make these fun.

I’ve seen this being awareness levels versus novice versus professional versus expert. You know, interest key could be not interested. “No way, Jose” could be “somewhat interested.” Or maybe, you know, super excited. You can have fun with this as well. And so, you would note your proficiency and your interest. 

And you would do the same here for your help desk support. If I’m in the role in IT that does some of this work, I might say, “I’m okay at it. I could get better, but I’m really great at doing this other skill.” 

Encouraging Honesty

One of the pieces of information that we really need to communicate to anybody filling these in is the idea is not that I’m going to come out of it going, “hey, I’m the best at everything and I’m interested in everything.”

We really want to have kind of this honest conversation in space of, “where can I grow and what am I interested in?” Because we don’t want people being stuck doing things that they’re not interested in for long periods of time. That doesn’t help either the organization or the individual. 

And so, once this is filled in, then you get this really colorful employee inventory.

The idea at this stage would have been that you would have talked to the employee, you would have all had a conversation with each of these six employees and then you would bring them together. If you can, I would encourage everybody to have their name on it. It adds to the transparency and just the depth of conversation that you can have.

But if on the first pass, it really needs to be employee one to employee six and make it anonymous, so be it. You can still have a great conversation. 

Step Three: Analyze the IT Skills Matrix

Part of what this is, is looking at what you see in the data.

And so, what you might notice here at a glance is that employee one and two, they feel really good about how they do help desk support. And you have some employees that don’t feel as strong in that. And then you have a couple employees over here that feel really strong in database management.

And then you have some that are not so great at it on their own, how they feel about where they are in that right now. Or they just feel that they’re at the novice level and they could really grow into the next level. So that’s the conversation you can have here is just noting what your team has and where the strength and growth areas are.

And then you might move over to interests and say, okay, wow, what do I see from what interest levels there are? And at a glance, I really see right off the bat that there’s a lot of people interested in developing their skills in database management. And if we go back here to the skills tab, I know I have some experts in database management.

We might have internal capacity to do some training and development, or we might need to see if there’s other people, if there’s another skill needed. I’ll also note that in IT project management, we have, according to this, based on discussions, one person that’s really strong at this skill. And then when I go over to interest, I see, oh, look, there’s somebody else who really wants to develop this skill. So, if I need a backup person, maybe we start pairing these people together to develop this skill set.

This is talking about how you can support your team members, helping them grow, helping them live into that idea of mastery and being supported for their work. 

Step Four: Make a Plan

We also might want to take this and take these summary levels over here and look at them from an organizational perspective.

Maybe we did a survey, maybe this is anecdotal. I have some charting I did from interviews, but it looks like right now the organization is telling me that help desk support needs some help. It doesn’t say whether it’s helpful or not, but it’s somewhat needed or prioritized.

But what they’re really needing or feeling like they could use more of is some data analysis and business intelligence. We can see that data point from what the organization has said. And then we want to come over and look at our team skills proficiency.

If there is a disconnect, we could say, well, do we need to grow that area?

Have that conversation. It might spark some more interest in this area. 

And then I might look down here at team interests and see, well, we had the least amount of interest in growing in this other area.

So, what does that mean? 

If we do feel that that is a priority, do we have a conversation to see if somebody might grow into that area? Or do we say we really need additional staffing to support this work? 

This organizational support, this might be a survey that you’ve done with the full organization, or if you know that a specific department is feeling like they need more IT support and you’re trying to figure out what that support need is. A short survey might do that. A conversation, a focus group with that group might do that as well.

Carolyn Woodard: I could see you might talk to managers or directors also, and just kind of take that pulse if they know what their strategic planning is, where do they see gaps, and where do they know their team needs to gain some more skills.

Step Five: Data Visualization

Heather Ritchie: And so, this might be in the form of a chart. I did it here to show how you could look at it against other charts. 

It might be that you just have these top five items that have come up by talking to people in your organization and seeing if that aligns with where your proficiency and interests are with the team. I’ve seen this done where you have single teams or departments doing this. 

I’ve also seen this done where every department does it. In that case, you’re looking at global skills for the organization.

Two takeaways: There’s a variety of ways to utilize doing a skills matrix. And the team building aspect and having everybody look at the strengths of your team is really a great opportunity.

Carolyn Woodard: I know you’re going to talk a little bit more about this later, but I want to say in this context, we’re talking about IT change management, where you’re rolling out a new tool that a lot of people are going to be using, or you’re talking about your IT strategy. So, you’ve put in this example spreadsheet these categories based on that type of a scenario, but I could see this tool just being useful in lots of different scenarios where you just want to know, fo example, who’s good at Excel, or who’s great at Word, those types of things as well. And as we’re moving forward too, who’s really good at writing AI props, or who’s really good at using a new tool that everybody’s interested in. I could see that as well.

Heather Ritchie: Yes, it’s like partially looking at your knowledge center within the organization and who within your organization or department or team you can go to, as well as who else might align with your interests to kind of grow a skill. So, it’s a great way to just see the people more holistically in your organization.

Carolyn Woodard: So, I want to say again that this template, a plain template without all of these things filled in is available on the buildconsulting.com website and I’ll have that also in the transcript. 

I’ll also say the template notes how to use it and gives instructions. This is meant to be used within departments with colleagues and leadership. It’s not meant to be used from an HR perspective to look into the team.

Heather Ritchie: That’s the way we’re talking about it today. This is a way for everybody to grow and explore together. And it’s a really fun activity in a lot of ways when people try to do it.

Carolyn Woodard: That’s great. This is a question for the chat, please think of some opportunities, where this could be useful if this presentation is getting you thinking about some things we want to help people share with each other. This of some ideas of where you could see using this, or some challenges that you could foresee, maybe with your team or the way your organization works.

Mid-Point Q&A

Some questions coming in. 

“How would you implement this tool?” We’re going to talk about that on the next slide.

What do staff see when they use an IT Skills Matrix? 

“What does the forward-facing part of the matrix look like for staff filling it out?” I think you mentioned that a little bit, Heather, that you might do that as a survey.

Heather Ritchie: It could be done in a number of ways. 

You could pull out the actual Excel page tab and send it individually to people. 

You could create a survey and have the survey results pull out into Excel.

I think the extent to which you feel like you want to be able to manipulate the data is going to really drive how you format the tool.

Carolyn Woodard: And if you have tech challenged staff, of course, you would want to make it the easiest possible. 

You might even put it in an email to them and have them just email it back and then you would input it. So, it really depends on your vibe at your office.

The next question is about challenges. 

“We may have experts in X or Y, but time constraints might not allow them to teach others.”

So that’s a really good example of something that might be a challenge once you’ve put this graph together. Just acknowledging time constraints on people, and also acknowledging those kinds of feelings and fears. Someone might be worried about putting in that they’re really good at something, if they’re thinking, then I’m going to get this extra job of teaching everybody else how to do Excel or whatever it is. This is a really great one for you, Heather.

“How do you ensure the accuracy of the self-ratings?”

Heather Ritchie: The accuracy of the self-ratings? I think what this is coming out of is whether I might say, oh, I’m super great at this and maybe I’m more of a novice, or maybe the other way though is maybe I am super great at it, but I’m also very critical of myself and I say, no, I’m really not that great at it. 

I think the part for the accuracy of the self-ratings is really that dialogue with the leadership that you’re doing this with, or if this is done, because this could be done just collaboratively, a group of colleagues or project teams saying like, hey, let’s see what our knowledge base is.

So, at that point, I might look at Carolyn and say, “Carolyn, I saw what you did with Excel the other day. You’re amazing.” 

Those types of dialogues can help with the accuracy of the self-ratings.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, and we’re going to talk a little bit later about implementing it, but you could do this as a team exercise, a group exercise. So, on a Zoom call, or if you’re in an office, in the same office room, and just fill it out together instead of doing it individually. And that could help your team as well.

The next person in chat mentioned, this is a good way to help clarify what we want or need and who might be able to meet the needs. And I think particularly in a nonprofit or philanthropy example, we’re often working as teams, like you said earlier, seeking to contribute to something bigger than yourself. So, working toward the mission.  

Everything that you can do to strengthen your organization strengthens your ability to meet that mission.

We’re already coming from a good space, is what I would say.

Who Should Use an IT Skills Matrix?

Carolyn Woodard: How do you set the stage to help staff feel psychological safety around discussing staff members’ strengths and challenges? I feel like that’s a perfect segue into our next slide. 

Heather Ritchie: I’ll take that. So, yeah, I would say to respond to the question first.

Setting the stage and really having open discussions with people about what this is going to be used for and why you all are investing the time in it, is how to help create that safe space. 

If an organization is going to ask everybody to fill this in, and then just share out the results and not have discussions on it, I would say that’s not creating the safe space that this type of tool needs.

What this tool needs is honest conversation before you even start it, that, hey, we are going to be looking at our team and seeing how we can build it and how we can grow one another. 

If it comes from this growth and this strength of opportunity, then people are more likely to lean in and say, you know what, PowerPoint isn’t my jam. But I know I need to do it for a couple of things, and so I need to level up at least to the next level. Versus, I love AI, and I want to know everything I possibly can about AI, but it’s a new technology. I’m a novice at it, just like a number of other people. 

I think giving examples – whether it’s the leadership or the team that is doing it together – are a way of acknowledging the difficulty in being honest.  

Maybe they start the conversation with, “what’s one thing you’re really great at?”

And then the next question is “what out of these is the thing that you’re least experienced at?”

To make it a group experience, I do think it’s more helpful for individuals to reflect on themselves first. So even if you are sharing this out as a group, in a group setting, you might want to give people the spreadsheet in advance or the quiz or the survey or however you decide to do it.

I do think people like to learn about themselves and to reflect on themselves. And it’s something that the more we can give space to, I think the more used to it, people will also become accustomed. So, I think that’s the other piece about making this a safe space.

If this is done once every five years, it’s probably going to be a little awkward. If somebody does it once every quarter and reviews it with people, then it becomes more routine and less anxiety producing.

Timing and Language Matter

Carolyn Woodard: I was going to jump in and say also in the context of what we’re talking about that you might do this exercise early on in a change management situation when you’re assessing where are the weaknesses of your organization and what would you like to be doing differently two, three years from now that you’re going through this assessment. Do you need a new CRM? Do you need a new fundraising tool? Do you need a new team’s collaboration tool? How are you doing these different activities? And as a group activity, like really assessing where you want your organization to be.

And that’s a very different context from if you’ve already gone through a software selection. You know, somebody in leadership has already chosen, we’re going to have this new tool. And then as part of that, you’re doing a survey. Do you think you’ll be good at using this tool? That’s not going to make people feel good about being on this team that’s trying to get those skills that they need for a specific tool. So that’s something else to think about is when are you using this in the process.

Heather Ritchie: Very true.

Carolyn Woodard: And someone mentioned in the chat, 

If you lead by example and disclose your weaknesses as a leader, whether it’s around some of those competencies or if it’s around specific tools and tasks and skills, that also sets the tone.

Heather Ritchie: I one hundred percent agree and I love that. I also want to just note that I often will say, “oh, what am I not good at or what can’t I do?”

The language with which we approach this also really helps people.

If I hear, “what can I grow into or what can I be stronger at?” I’m more likely as a human to respond sign me up versus if it’s framing it as me not succeeding. So, I think the language matters in a lot of the work that we do when we do self-reflection.

Carolyn Woodard: The other thing I love about having it in this spreadsheet is that it gives you a perfect opportunity to when you talk about it again, another quarter, half a year later, people can change, right? They took that tutorial, they did some extra work, and they put the work into PowerPoint because they knew they were going to be using it. So, you give people also an opportunity to see themselves mastering something, which I just love as well.

But in the interest of time, I want to make sure we talk about the stakeholders and rolling it out so we can get to our next piece, which is the examples.

Who are the Stakeholders? 

Heather Ritchie: I would say there is a decision point when you talk about the stakeholders that a lot of departments or organizations kind of have to initially wrestle with. And that is, is this inclusive of full-time staff only? Is it inclusive of part-time volunteers, consultants?

You want to think through who is being invited into this conversation, who needs to be invited, who needs to understand that this has to be a smaller group, because we’re really looking at this project versus the whole department. And so, thinking through the people part of this is also thinking through who’s invited to be a part of the process.

And as we talked about in reviewing the Matrix, people can be a part of the creation of the timeline. I saw somebody asked in chat earlier, “how do you get started?” The starting point might just be setting up a brainstorming session and saying, “what do we do in this department? What do we do well? What are people always asking us about? Have we noticed more questions about the CRM this quarter than the last quarter? I wonder why that is, or whether we’ve seen a lot of interest in AI. Should we start putting that on our radar?” So, part of that could be a brainstorming session.

Part of that could be a leader coming with a draft of a matrix and saying, “what do you think? Is this how we start looking at our department? And what skills can we grow into?”

One thing that I did want to note is whatever you build for an individual template, you also want to have consistency for everybody in the group that you’re looking at. 

So, for instance, I might say, well, there’s five competencies, but I have a six one that I’m really, really good at. That’s awesome. We want to note that. But unless you want to look at everybody with that competency, that should be a bonus note about that person on the side. And the reason for that is you want to see what your team is doing for your core skills and competencies.

To roll this out, the other piece to the person’s question earlier is really helping people understand the purpose and how it can benefit them. Make sure you talk to the individuals about the scores and how they feel about sharing those with their peers in advance. And that’s why you may have to step into things being anonymous.

And then ask people about how they feel about sharing their growth and strength areas to determine as a team, how best do we talk about this with that goal of looking at the strength of the team? And then this idea of mastery and being supported to get better at stuff, it’s really if people feel you are genuinely interested in supporting them and genuinely interested in making time to develop your skills, people usually respond very positively to that. 

And I want to make a note of that. When we are saying, “invest in these people and do professional development or help one another do training,” that doesn’t mean necessarily that they create an hour webinar, or they’re paired up as your mentor, or that you’re going to pay for a very expensive certification. 

There are a number of ways to develop our skills, and micro learning is really kind of the heart of what can happen right now, I’d say, in the landscape that we’re in with technology changing as fast as we can. And when I talk about micro learning, I mean, read a summary of a book, listen to a podcast, watch a one-minute video, and then have a discussion at your next team or department meeting saying, “hey, guess what I learned about X?”

It does not have to be the investment in a nine-hour course that you may not have time for in the next three quarters.

Carolyn Woodard: We did a webinar just a couple months ago on being a learning organization, and one of the suggestions was to make time in your all-staff meetings or your team meetings to set 10, 15 minutes aside for learning sharing. For example, what have you gotten better at? And just share some examples with your team. People used to be able to do brown bags, actually in-person, but you can do those over Zoom as well. 

And I do wonder too, if that is a point where you have your plan, you have your skills matrix, and you might at that point want to talk with HR and your employees and their supervisors around making it a goal that then they do get a reward for in terms of their professional development as that goes. 

IT Skills Matrix Examples and Uses

So, can you give us some examples and uses?

Heather Ritchie: Sure. Here are four examples and uses that we’ve experienced over time for using skills matrices. 

One of them might be new technology and training.

If I by chance have a new CRM coming in or my website moves to Drupal and it doesn’t move automatically, our department has moved it there, right? Who has the time to learn it? Who’s going to be the one that really dives deep initially? Or is that spread across the department? Those are the kinds of conversations that can happen with the Skills Matrix. If an organization decides to move from Google to Teams or Teams to Google, what parts can you divide into discrete learning activities that people can do?

Or as I noted before, you may have heard of AI and some people are curious about it. I’ve noted with some of my colleagues that some people are saying, “I want to know as much as I possibly can tomorrow about this.” And I know others are saying, “please don’t make me learn anything about AI except what I absolutely have to learn.”

Those are the kinds of conversations that you can dig into and understand, and then help level up the team to the level it needs to as a baseline, and then let other people dive deep. 

And then also staffing changes happen. We’ve seen them happen more often, especially since COVID. A staff member leaves an organization. What skills did that team member really bring to our department? And is there somebody else on the team that actually has some of those skills that wants to lean into those? Or do we need to hire a completely new person to replace that person? Again, if you’ve invested in this and you continuously invest, you would have that answer along the way, or it might be the starting point for why you want to start up a skills matrix. 

And then building project teams is another great opportunity to just see who’s great. I have a colleague that I know that if I need her something for attention to detail, I send it to her immediately. And so, on your project team, who’s your attention to detail person? Who’s your big picture thinker? Who’s the project manager types personality? And it may be if you look at the team and you think, oh, we’re missing something we really need, that’s where you can have that conversation.

And then last but not least, collaboration and knowledge sharing. I’m a big proponent of it. I’m a lifelong learner, and I’ve been a professional development specialist for years. And this idea of what’s in the room is probably more knowledge than anyone knows. And so how do we surface what our colleagues know, and also create systems to Carolyn’s point that everybody doesn’t bombard Heather with every question about AI. But we also know who we can go to within our teams for advice or expertise.

Carolyn Woodard: That’s great. 

More Q&A

We have a question in the chat. Norma says,

“We already have a matrix of Clift Strengths. And this IT Skills Matrix seems like it might be more about tactical, specific skills.” 

Do you have experiences with organizations that already have a matrix of some sort, and how this can complement what they have?

Heather Ritchie: Yes, we actually also use Clifton Strengths at Build. I love it as one of those tools where you take a quiz and basically are shown where your innate skills put you out of a list of a number of skills. And I would say you could use Clifton Strengths. Those, again, are more in your competencies space than they are in how well you have explored or learned Excel or the CRM that you’re using or the website system that you’re using. 

I would say that a skills matrix of this sort would complement your Clifton Strengths. And you could utilize the Clifton Strengths more in the competencies space and then your skills would be more for your everyday what the organization needs from your IT department or for their own IT skills.

Carolyn Woodard: I like that. Yeah, and I could see how they do two different things. So, you may still need to have two matrices, or you may want to be able to put them together. 

We have some other questions, a couple of questions from registrations. 

Time Management

One thing is, 

How can you encourage people to volunteer skills and time when they are already so busy with other tasks?

And I feel like we could also take that a step back. As you have said, this exercise itself is going to take time. You need to have meeting time. People are going to have to have time to reflect and assess this. So you have to be able to prioritize that time. Do you have advice on that?

Heather Ritchie: We all want more time, I think. This is something, whether it’s in your personal life or your professional life. I would say I saw a note in the chat that someone said, hey, we could use this at our next team building retreat. That’s exactly where you could start. The idea of how do you help people volunteer their skills in their time? 

Part of that, I think, is an organizational culture.

There are some organizations that I’ve seen that acknowledge that a part of your time is to build your skills as well as support your colleagues to build their skills. I also know I’ve worked in nonprofits forever and that I always have more on my list than I could ever get to. I don’t want to sound too pie in the sky.

But I will say it comes to prioritizing it.

If you want to have effective teams, if you want to have collaborative workspaces, then we have to invest in the people and these conversations. They won’t just organically happen and your team, poof, is this highly effective functioning team that is doing everything everybody possibly wanted.

It really takes the people’s side of this. And that’s where we noted at the beginning, there’s so much technology coming at us and it’s changing quickly. And I watch organizations, for instance, one nonprofit has five project management tools.

Doing a skills matrix could also spark conversations about, “hey, I’m great at these tools. But did you notice that we’re using five of them? That means we have to support technologically five different tools and learning curves?”

You may learn from these conversations that there are things that you could streamline and then prioritize the people’s side versus always having to respond to every technology need.

Carolyn Woodard: And I think this is an investment. You’ve said several times, investing in your people and investing in your organization. And that’s going to take a leadership role that prioritizes investment at all, because you don’t have immediate results. You don’t have immediate outcomes. It’s an investment for that reason. 

I think I’ve heard this story from someone else at Build about going through a software selection for wide ranging platform or CRM, something that was going to be used by everyone at the nonprofit. And they were very unhappy with the tool that they had. And for kicks, I guess, Build included that existing tool in the software selection. And in fact, it did everything that that team needed.

But because of the poor training on it, they didn’t know that it even had some of the capabilities that they were looking for. And at that point, they were so soured on it, that they had to get it out of the running. They just needed (psychologically) to get something new.

As a nonprofit leader you can realize, when you invest in your team and their ability to use the tools that you have, you’re going to save money and, I guess, tears, maybe, on some of those technology tools.

Heather Ritchie: Agreed.

Encouraging Basic Skills, and Negative Uses of an IT Skills Matrix

Carolyn Woodard: We have another question, which I feel like we haven’t really talked about some of the downsides of this sort of exercise. But one person in registration asked, 

“How can you motivate people to try harder and do basic things themselves?” 

You’ve talked a lot about using this Skills Matrix and building this spreadsheet as a team exercise and as an empowering exercise. But have you run into situations where it didn’t work out so well?

Heather Ritchie: Sure. I’m trying to think about the motivation level. I think what it sparks in me is that this tool is going to be successful with the right approach and the right culture.

If an individual is currently demotivated in their work, I think the wonder would be by looking at the skills that the department needs or for the project, is the person able to really showcase their strengths? And if not, then what does that mean for the organization and the individual? Is it that they need a better fit for themselves for a position?

I guess to answer that, it’s partially also this is tool that I could look at, if I’m looking at all the skills the department needs, and I am not motivated by any of them to grow my skill set, that’s a reflection that I think would be very internal for that person. If I’m looking at all the skills that are on the list, and I’m thinking, oh, there’s a few that I really would like to grow into, but I’m not in that role, then that provides a conversation space for the team. So, I think that it could be both an internal motivator and a team support.

It is also about the health of the team going into this. The stronger your team is on communication and openness and culture, the faster this can build that strength for your individuals and your team.

Carolyn Woodard: That makes a lot of sense. I’m sorry that we’re getting close to the end of the hour, because I feel like we could keep talking about this for a while. We got some other really great questions coming in, so I’ll make sure to put those in the transcript, and we’ll get some answers to those.

Learning Objectives

But I want to quickly go over our learning objectives for today, which I feel like you just hit all of them, Heather. 

• Understanding what a skills matrix is, 
• understand the steps to create the skills matrix with your staff, 
• explore the benefits and challenges, and 
• learn tactics and strategies to roll them out to all staff. And we got some great 
• examples from you.

I want to make sure to let you know about our next month’s webinar, which is going to be a great one. We are re-releasing our Nonprofit Cybersecurity Playbook with Matt Eshelman, who is our Chief Technology Officer, and who wrote the first one, which is, it’s only three years old, three and a half years old now, but so much has changed about cybersecurity, particularly with the rise of AI and some of the new hacks and security features. So, we are reworking that Cybersecurity Playbook and we will be releasing it.

That is at 3 p.m. Eastern, noon Pacific on Wednesday, October 23rd. So please join us again next month for that. And I just want to thank everyone for the gift of your time this afternoon.

I really appreciate you spending your time with us and learning about this tool. I hope you can go forth and use it in wonderful ways to build your teams, help your nonprofits reach your missions. 

And Heather, I really want to thank you for your time preparing for this. And I feel so much smarter. So, thank you so much, Heather.

Heather Ritchie: It was great to do this today. And thank you to everybody for your comments and your questions. Thank you.