Building essential skills at an SMB

The Background

McKinsey calls problem solving, leadership, interpersonal communication, people management, and detail orientation “essential” skills because they apply across many occupations and widen a worker’s career options. An employee who is good at them can move between support, account management, and operations without starting over. That makes them the cheapest skills to build for an SMB, since you can build them inside the jobs people already do.

The research does not describe how to build them, so the illustrative story below and the research share one idea: these skills grow from practice on real work with feedback, and a course on “communication” rarely changes how someone handles an unhappy customer.

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The Story

Maya runs people operations at a 60-person B2B software company, and she had a pattern she could not explain. The support team of eight was good at the work. Nearly everyone who stayed past two years left within six months after that. In exit conversations they gave the same answer: they liked the job and could not see what came next. Meanwhile engineers were pulled into the same customer issues week after week, because support escalated them instead of fixing them.

At the quarterly review, Tom, the CEO, asked a plain question. If the company grew 30 percent next year, where would the people come from? Hiring for every new role was not realistic at their size. Maya decided the answer had to include the people already on the payroll, and that the place to start was the skills that apply in almost every role: problem solving, leadership, interpersonal communication, people management, and detail orientation.

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The First Steps

1. Rotate ownership of real problems. Luis, the support lead, picked the five customer issues that came up most often. Each month a different agent owned one from diagnosis to fix, working with an engineer where needed, and wrote a one-page summary of what they found and what changed. This builds problem solving and written communication on work that matters.

2. Run a ten-minute debrief after every project or incident. The support team asked three questions after each escalation: what did we expect, what happened, what will we do differently. The lead rotated. Debriefs build detail orientation because people learn to notice where the gap between plan and result began.

3. Give people small units to lead before the title. Priya, one of the longest-serving support specialists, started running the weekly support standup. Another specialist onboarded the next new hire. Leadership and people management are easiest to practice when the stakes are low and a manager is nearby.

4. Pair people across functions. Each specialist spent a morning with an engineer, and a salesperson sat in on a support call. Interpersonal communication improves when people hear how another function describes the same problem.

5. Coach one skill per quarter, using observable behaviors. Luis stopped rating people on communication in the abstract. He wrote down what good looked like on his team, such as summarizing the decision and next steps in writing within a day of a meeting, and gave feedback against that.

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The Outcome

After two months, Luis noticed that fewer repeat issues were reaching engineering, and two engineers mentioned it without being asked. Priya told Maya it was the first time she had felt the job was going somewhere. Nothing about her title had changed.

If you want to try this at your company, pick two of the five practices and start with the people in roles most likely to change. Assign each participant a manager who commits to giving feedback. Decide in advance what comes off their plate, because ownership takes time. Then track two things: how many employees have owned a problem from diagnosis to fix, and how many can name the next role they could move into. The second one tells you whether the practice is connecting to real career paths.

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In Part 2, Maya turns to the skills that decide who gets promoted.

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