Building enabling skills at an SMB

Decision-making, innovation, and critical thinking are what McKinsey calls “enabling” skills. They are concentrated in higher-paying work and support moves into coordination, business operations, and project leadership. In the pathway examples from the research, the office assistant who could become a project manager is a good picture of the gap: the person knows the work, and what is missing is a track record of making calls and being right often enough to be trusted with more.

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Our Story Continued

Priya had been on the support team for three years and was its strongest member. She wanted to move into a customer success coordinator role, and Maya had already written a one-page path for that role listing the skills it needed. When Maya sat down with Luis to compare Priya against the list, he could vouch for her product knowledge and her rapport with customers. He could not say whether she could make a judgment call without checking with him, because she had never had to. Every refund, exception, and prioritization went through him.

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The Next Steps

1. Hand over decisions with a boundary. Luis and Tom agreed on refund approvals up to a set amount, and Priya started making those calls on her own. They kept a short decision log with the call, the reasoning, and a review date.

2. Ask for a recommendation before giving an answer. When Priya brought Luis a problem, he started asking what she would do and why before he said anything. Managers in small companies often answer too fast, and the habit teaches people to wait instead of to decide.

3. Share the business numbers. Maya picked three numbers: customer churn, time to first response, and cost per ticket. She showed them at the monthly all-hands with one sentence on what had moved. Priya later said that was when her refund decisions started to make more sense to her, because she could see what a lost customer cost.

4. Practice critical thinking with a pre-mortem. Before the team changed its onboarding flow, Luis asked everyone to assume it had failed and list the reasons. Then he asked what evidence would change the plan. It took fifteen minutes and surfaced two risks nobody had raised.

5. Fund small experiments. Priya proposed a thirty-day test of a new welcome email for trial customers. She wrote a one-page proposal, got a few hours a month to run it, and presented the result at the review date.

6. Review outcomes without blame. At the first review of the decision log, one of Priya’s refund calls had turned out to be wrong. Luis did not treat it as a penalty. They went through what she knew at the time, what she missed, and what she would do again. She made the next decision faster.

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If you want to try this, choose one decision area for each person you are developing and write it into their development plan. The decision should be one your team escalates out of habit, and the boundary should be clear enough that the employee never has to guess. Track the number of decisions owned by people who are not managers, the number of experiments run, and internal moves into coordination or project roles over the next two quarters.

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In Part 3, leadership asks the whole company to start using AI tools, and Maya has to decide how to help people learn them without overloading the team.

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