Employee Skills Gap Blocking Your Strategy? Leadership Guide to Fix It

Employee Skills Gap Blocking Your Strategy?  Here’s a Research-Backed Leadership Guide to Fix It
Your strategy must go through you people and your culture to be successfully implemented.  Even a well-crafted strategy will fail if your employees lack the required capabilities and mindsets to make it happen — i.e., an employee skills gap. Strategic success depends on more than ambitious goals — it requires a motivated workforce equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge to deliver it.

What Should You Do If Your Employees Are Not Skilled Enough to Execute Your Strategy?
We know from strategy retreat facilitation that when employees are not skilled and inspired enough to execute your strategy, the organization faces a critical inflection point.  Either:

1. Invest in building the right capabilities.
2. Lower your strategic ambitions.
3. Risk watching strategy execution stall.

What the Research Says about Employee Skills Gap Blocking Your Strategy

• According to a recent Deloitte Human Capital Trends survey, 72% of executives view workforce capability as a key enabler of strategy, yet only 11% believe their organizations are prepared to close skill gaps effectively.
• The disconnect between strategy and employee readiness often explains why IBM found that only 10% of well-designed strategic plans are successfully executed.

The Steps to Close the Employee Skills Gap to Successfully Execute Strategy

1. Diagnose the Employee Skills Gap Before Acting
   Once your strategy is clear enough and believable enough, the first step for talent leaders is to assess the skills gap between the desired strategy and current capabilities. A thorough skills and capability assessment, supported by performance data and employee feedback, helps pinpoint where deficiencies lie.

   Typical approaches include:

   — Training needs assessment
   — Organizational culture assessment
   — 360-degree feedback
   — People manager assessment center
   — Leadership simulation assessments
   — Sales rep assessment simulation

2. Prioritize Critical Capabilities
   Because not every skill is mission critical, it is important to identify the critical few competencies and behaviors that will have the greatest impact on strategy success. Research by BCG found that organizations focusing their development investments on fewer, strategically essential skills see higher returns than those spreading resources too thin.

   This seems like common sense to us; prioritization ensures that time and resources are allocated where they matter most.

3. Invest in Targeted Development
   Once employee skill gaps are clear, training strategies must be deliberate and highly relevant to the target audience, their bosses, and the overall strategy. Options include:

   Formal Training Programs
   Build core competencies linked to delivering strategic priorities through customized training programs. Tie everything that you do to measurable business outcomes.

   Coaching and Mentoring
   Provide personalized guidance though 1×1 and group coaching and use individual development plans to create goal clarity and accelerate growth.

   Action Learning Projects
   Blend real-world problem-solving with targeted skill development through action learning leadership development programs that move strategic initiatives forward while developing capabilities.  The key is to design highly experiential and relevant learning experiences that connect directly to the strategic context, not generic skill-building.

4. Consider Talent Redesign
   Often, employee development alone is not enough to close employee skill gaps. Leaders must make tough decisions about redeploying, hiring, or restructuring roles to ensure the right capabilities are in place. A World Economic Forum report estimates that by 2027, 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted, making reskilling and talent redesign essential levers for strategy execution.
5. Align Systems to Reinforce Skills
   Skill development must be supported by business practices and belief systems that reinforce new behaviors. Performance management, incentives, and recognition must align with the capabilities the strategy demands. Otherwise, employees will default to old habits, regardless of new skills acquired.
6. The Role of Leadership
   When employees are under skilled, leaders must be able to lead, coach, and manage their teams to higher performance. Ensure that your leaders know how to set clear expectations, provide resources for development, and create enough psychological team safety for employees to grow into new roles. Leaders who invest in building capability send a powerful signal that people are central to strategy execution.

The Bottom Line
If your employees are not skilled enough to execute your strategy, something must change. Strategic plans succeed only when matched with the right workforce capabilities and attitudes. Strategies and skills must eventually move in lockstep — or strategy execution will stall.

To learn more about how to close employee skills gap blocking your strategy, download How to Connect the Strategy Disconnects by Transferring Skills and Knowledge.