ThemePeople & wellbeing
CardCard 47 of 65
Questions5 to explore

Skills & Experience

What we have & what we need

Knowing what your team can do and where the gaps are is harder when the evidence of skill is spread across locations and rarely documented.

Skills and experience include both what individuals bring (expertise, domain knowledge, past experience, technical ability) and what the team collectively can do (what we are confident doing, what we need support for, what we are still building). In a hybrid team, this map is harder to build. Informal expertise is less visible: you do not see someone solve a problem in a meeting room, you do not overhear a conversation that reveals what they know.

Without a clear picture of what your team has and what it needs, you make slower decisions about who to involve in a problem, you miss opportunities to develop people in the right direction, and you repeat mistakes that someone on the team already knows how to avoid. A lightweight skill mapping exercise, done openly and updated occasionally, makes the invisible visible.

Make it explicitCreate a simple shared record of the skills and experience in your team: what each person is strong in, what they are developing, and where there are gaps the team needs to address.

How strong hybrid teams handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are patterns from teams that work well across locations, offered as illustrations to react to, not rules to copy.

Self-reported skill maps

A lightweight version: each person writes a short profile of what they are good at and what they are trying to develop. Kept in a shared document and reviewed occasionally. Imprecise but far more useful than no record at all.

Make expertise visible through work

Some teams build visibility into their regular processes: when someone solves a tricky problem, they share a short note about how. When someone develops a new skill, they mention it in a team channel. These habits build a shared map over time without a formal audit.

Gap-first hiring

Strong hybrid teams name their capability gaps explicitly before they begin a hiring or contracting process. The gap description shapes the role, rather than the role being a generic post. This is more useful in hybrid contexts, where informal skill transfer is reduced and each hire matters more.

Cross-team skill sharing

Pairing team members with different skill sets for specific projects creates development and makes expertise visible to people who would not have encountered it otherwise. Hybrid teams that do this intentionally build internal resilience and reduce single points of failure.

Questions for your team

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Could you say in two minutes what each person on your team is particularly skilled at, beyond their job title?
What skills does your team need more of in the next year, and is there a plan to build or acquire them?
How does a team member make their expertise visible to people outside their immediate circle in your current setup?
Are there skills or domains on your team where only one person has the knowledge, and what happens if they leave?
How do you currently decide who to involve in a new project or problem, and is that decision based on a real picture of skills or mostly on proximity and habit?

Watch for

In hybrid teams, informal reputation (knowing who to call) develops unevenly: people near the hub know who knows what, people at a distance often do not, and both lose out.
Skill maps become outdated quickly and can create a false sense of certainty if they are treated as permanent; what someone knew a year ago is not always what they are capable of or interested in now.
Talking about skills gaps can feel threatening; the conversation is more useful when it is framed around the team's needs rather than any individual's shortcomings.