Skills Management: New Applications, New Questions

Managing skills is at the core of Human Resources Management. Based on previous literature and realized with researchers from Magellan, the Research Center in Management of iaeLyon, Skills Management examines how skills can be analyzed at the individual and collective levels, and investigates the focus on different types of skills – including technical, soft, learning, leadership and emotional skills.

The book examines how skills management is applied in various contexts and for various populations, cultures and profiles, with examples ranging from middle managers having to develop organizational skills in a changing environment, to engineers having to develop soft skills beyond their technical skills; from police officers developing emotional skills, to the new skills that are needed when a hospital introduces a new approach to shared leadership.

In the concluding chapter, this book also investigates how it is sometimes difficult to focus on skills development when organization needs are focused on flexibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Dec 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781119579229

Book preview

Foreword

When Collective Skills Produce an Added Value for the Reader!

This book is exciting!

It is great to see the collective skills built entirely towards the goal of offering a real added value to the reader!

Collective skills are built on three complementary elements. Building on the work of my colleagues and friends, Christian Defélix and Pierre-Yves Sanséau (2017)1, as well as the path initiated by Didier Retour, I will highlight that collective skills require:

– foundations (rules on how we work, how we collaborate, who does what? etc.);

– bricks (skills specific to each individual);

– and cement (cooperation, mutual assistance, subjective commitment, often the pleasure to work together).

Cultivated in the best of ways, collective skills create works that each individual, taken in isolation, would have been unable to produce. With collective skills, the whole is often, by far, greater than the sum of the parts…

This book is a perfect illustration of that.

While reading Skills Management, one immediately perceives the quality of foundations that have been built. All chapters offer a clarity of writing that allows for a clear and detailed explanation of ideas, arguments and concepts. There is no doubt that this clarity has been achieved through the tireless work of readings and re-readings. All chapters also share the same goal in explaining the conceptual bases of their approach. Concepts are presented and explained. They are discussed. Thus, they allow us to pose arguments and to advance knowledge. The chapters also offer rich and interesting empirical data. The invested grounds have all been with a clear concern to give voice to the employees encountered, in order to understand the way in which they perceive, live and develop their skills. And what to say of the rigor which has necessarily been required to produce this publication at the desired time!

What is striking is the quality of the individual skills of each of the authors who have been placed at the service of these collective skills. This book investigates the topic of skills in areas which are all renewed and at the cutting edge of current reflections:

– mentoring;

– soft skills (engineers);

– emotional skills (police officers);

– social business responsibility;

– shared leadership at the hospital, etc.

A more conceptual chapter proposes them to pass on, in SMEs, from Human Resource Management to Management of Business Resources, entrepreneurial skills that employees can develop in SMEs and that allow them to articulate with the skills of the SME manager and thus promote company development.

Finally, one chapter offers a more critical perspective by underlying that the flexibility of the workforce and skills are often opposed and that companies must choose one or the other.

This book thus appears as the worthy heir of the existing literature on competence management. Its wealth allows us to articulate conceptual debates of quality, in-depth empirical investigations and fruitful critical perspectives. Depending on their tastes and interests, readers can therefore choose to start reading the chapters that please them the most… This choice may even be a little difficult for them…

Finally, for the third element of the collective competence, it is evident that a strong cement holds this collective work together. We can guess the multiple meetings and the insightful exchanges which enabled its construction. After reading this book, we can say that we would have liked to be a member of this team and to have shared this adventure!

Finally, we thank the authors and the coordinators – who have undoubtedly played a major role in the construction of these collective skills and the success of this collective work – for giving us this book, this renewed perspective on skills management and this demonstration of the strength of collective skills.

Thank you all and happy reading!

Ewan OIRY

ESG-UQAM

October 2018

1 Defélix C., Sanseau P.-Y., Comment des dirigeants-entrepreneurs fabriquent-ils de la gestion des compétences? Enseignements pratiques et théoriques, Management & Avenir, no. 8, 2017.

Introduction

For a Renewed Approach to Skills Management

Why write a book on skills management, when the concept has been a part of managerial practices for the last 20 years?

Even if the time for epitaph-like assessments has not yet come, it is, however, necessary to propose an update on the subject. The 2000s saw the stabilization of the concept and could have led someone to believe, under the influence of the neo-institutionalist current, that the generalization of the skills approach would conclude with a standardization of the definition and practices.

However, 20 years later, this is not the case. Not only has skills management not fallen into oblivion, but its renewal presents both a theoretical and a practical challenge. First of all, theoretical, to the extent that new associated concepts have emerged, with key or critical skills, or even inter-organizational skills. Second, practical, as these skills are now declining according to singular types of populations and must be translated into each context of collective action. What is left of the competence? How should we rethink this approach when traditional business models and boundaries become fragmented, as the adaptability of individuals becomes a new social norm?

This is the ambition of this book.

It is important to remember at this point some fundamentals.

Skills management brings together two distinct worlds: the jobs that characterize the company organization, and the people who will occupy them. In the first place, skills management offers a common language to describe what is expected to fill the positions and what people can bring (Roger 2004).

Some authors, on the basis of the American works of Spencer and Spencer (1993), have defined skills as the fundamental characteristics of individuals, which lead them to obtain or to improve their performance at work based on precise criteria. At first sight, we traditionally make a distinction between knowledge and skills. Other, more numerous, characteristics are profound, difficult to identify and develop, such as personality traits, self-concept and motives. Thus, for Defélix (2003), skills are a combination of resources, in a given situation, making it possible to…. This generic definition applies to an individual as well as to a group of employees (collective skill) or to an enterprise (key or strategic skill) (Retour 2005). The concept of a combination of resources is open: data or information, instruments, decision support systems, organizational routines, knowledge or know-how, attitudes, social skills, even cultural elements, and so on. Thus, skills are always localized: it depends on a given situation, a more or less favorable context, with temporal room for maneuver that is also more or less flexible (Le Boulaire & Retour 2008).

Skills management, as it exists, is the result of a progression of steps of alternating business practices and research (Gilbert, 2011). In the 1960s and 1970s, various precursors such as ACUCES in France or McClelland in the USA outlined what was not yet known as management skills. In the UK, the first qualification standards appeared with National Vocational Qualifications and directly linked skills to national enforceable standards (Van Beirendonck 2004). It was with the precursors of the 1980s, such as Sollac or IBM, that formalized systems were put in place in the business sector (Roger 2004). Researchers such as Zarifian (1988) then analyzed the emergence of the competence model in relation to the evolution of work organization models and workforce management.

It was during the 1990s that this model rapidly took off and thus found its place within human resources management, mainly in connection with the need for management planning and the development of new skills to cope with market and technology developments in an increasingly competitive and volatile environment. In the USA, skills have been attached to Barney’s (1991) resource-based view (RBV) and strategic management to gain a competitive advantage. In this effort to link skills and individual performance, we will talk about competence, which is defined as a characteristic of an individual that produces effective or superior performance in a given function (Boyatzis 1982), and which will eventually lead to the notion of distinctive competence. Prahalad and Hamel (1990) extend this area to that of organizational skills.

The 2000s were characterized by a standardization phase, with a generalization of discourse in both professional and academic environments. Most of the human resources management information systems (HRIS) propose a skills module. It is at this time that AFNOR created a standard for defining competence1, while in France, an operational directory of trades and jobs, called the Répertoire opérationnel des métiers et des emplois (ROME) was established, which identifies trades from common basic skills to a set of activities, analyzes the proximities between trades and proposes possible paths. Skills then became an object of certification in the 2000 version of the ISO 9000 standards.

This expansion of the competence approach has been sustainable, because it has enabled companies to respond in a flexible manner to the transformation of their more complex organizational structures, often adopting matrix configurations or project management. It has thus often taken precedence over the concept of position, which is more rigid and more technical.

We now see the organizations reconfiguring themselves towards more flexibility, adaptive requirements, with certainly less rigid, but also more local, fragmentary, biodegradable models. Consequently, skills management is no longer the key element of cross-disciplinary structures. Today, it is closer to small teams, professional logic and emerging professions.

That is why skills management cannot be developed in an organization without taking into account its culture and context. While some authors consider that the establishment of standards requires a relatively stable environment, which does not question too quickly the developed tools, others on the contrary consider that they are more suitable for uncertain environments. However, because it lasted for 20 years, skills management is no longer a fashion trend; neither is it a magic wand which could miraculously solve all problems. Its implementation will not be without difficulties, both at the level of the tools that it must define and support, and at the level of its appropriation by the company operators.

This book consists of six chapters grouped into two parts and concludes with an overall reflection on flexibility.

The first part includes three chapters. Chapter 1 recalls the basics of the notion of competence and the value of a mentoring process for transferring skills. The following two chapters show the importance, alongside technical skills, of human and emotional skills.

In the first chapter, Manel Dardouri shows that skills development is at the heart of the mentoring relationship. What are the different approaches to the notion of competence? To what extent can mentoring support the transfer of skills, the sharing of experiences and the learning of new knowledge? How does this assistance and learning relationship contribute to the development of individual skills and the emergence of collective skills within the company? These are the questions that are addressed in this introductory chapter of the book.

Manel Dardouri is a PhD student in Management Sciences at the Ecole Doctorale de Sciences Economiques et de Gestion de l’Université de Lyon. Her research focuses on the contributions of support methods, particularly mentoring, on career management and the development of individual and reflexive skills.

Alain Roger then questions in Chapter 2 the people skills of engineers. Engineering training is usually focused on the acquisition of general or specialized technical skills, but it also takes increasingly into account people skills. The objective of this chapter is to identify the dimensions of these people skills, which in the literature are considered as soft skills, compared to hard skills, which are related to the technical specialization of the profession.

Alain Roger, Professor Emeritus at Jean Moulin University Lyon 3, was Head of the Magellan Research Center of this university for five years and of the Human Resources research group of this center for several years. After obtaining a PhD from Northwestern University in the USA, and business experience at Merlin Gerin, he was heavily placed in France in the operation of IAE in Aix-en-Provence, then in Lyon by taking, in particular, responsibility of Master programs in HRM and by actively participating in professional associations such as AGRH and Référence RH.

Hélène Monier addresses in Chapter 3 the emotional component of the work that is fundamentally integrated in the current theme of psychosocial risk prevention and individuals’ ability to manage risks, specifically how they must master and shape their own emotions in particular in order to master and shape those felt by the people with whom they interact with in their work. The emotional skills that they must develop are studied in the case of police officers of the French anti-crime squad (Brigade anticriminalité – BAC).

Hélène Monier holds a PhD in Management Science, is a Temporary Lecturer of Teaching and Research at the Jean Moulin University Lyon 3, IAE Lyon, and is associated with the Magellan Research Center. She is also a National Police Research Associate at the Research Center of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Police (NPHS). Her research, in human resources management and organizational behaviors, focuses mainly on the thematics of health and safety at work, work emotions and stress. She is also the Vice-President of the Lyon Rhône Association, Les Pôles Du Management.

The second part, which consists of three chapters, focuses on skills development to respond to new strategic directions.

Chapter 4, which is written by Sylvaine Mercuri Chapuis, addresses middle managers’ skills in a strategic context of corporate social responsibility by applying it to the Mediapost case. CSR strategies are studied in particular through the question of middle management and the skills that need to be mobilized to drive them. Middle managers are an essential pillar for driving this change, for creating meaning with stakeholders, for developing learning and organizational skills, and for enhancing corporate human capital.

Sylvaine Mercuri Chapuis is a Teacher-Researcher in Management Sciences at Esdes, the Business School of Ucly. Her work focuses on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), strategic foresight and human resources management. She holds a PhD from the Jean Moulin University Lyon 3 (achieved at IAE Lyon) and she also holds a specialized Master’s degree in International Risk Management from HEC Paris.

Lynda Saoudi and Stéphane Foliard then address in Chapter 5 the question of entrepreneurial skill development of employees in SMEs. According to them, everyone in a company has capabilities and skills not yet demonstrated, but they have capabilities that could fuel the entrepreneurial dynamic of the SME by proposing improvements to existing or new ideas. Integrating the entrepreneurial dynamic in their operation, in their strategy as well as in their daily life requires us to define the skills to be acquired and their learning method, to support employees’ expression and to review the general framework of work.

Lynda Saoudi is a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Strategy at IUT in Roanne. Associated with Coactis laboratory, she is working on the issue of internationalization, the transmission of SMEs and the underlying risks. She is also interested in entrepreneurial education and the development of agility and entrepreneurial skills and practices in the SMEs framework.

Stéphane Foliard is a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship. At IUT in Roanne, he has developed a teaching program based on the actual creation of enterprises by groups of students, from the creativity phase to day-to-day management. In this framework, his research concerns the position and the nature of action in entrepreneurial education and the evaluation of learning-by-doing programs in order to develop and mobilize a set of skills wisely.

In Chapter 6, Marc Valax and Didier Vinot address the emergence of shared leadership skills at hospitals. In the framework of a global territorial health strategy, a renewed form of leadership has emerged over the last decade. Leadership skills at the hospital are part of a particular historical and cultural context, but it is possible to propose a reading grid based on skill renewal, with a cross-disciplinary approach supporting shared and emerging skills, at the interface of professions in profound renewal.

Marc Valax, a University Professor at IAE Lyon in Human Resources Management, ensures the pedagogical responsibility of the Master 2 General Management Program. He offers courses in HRM, IHRM and Training in French and in English, both in initial training and in continuing education at Master’s level, at IAE Lyon and within its relocated programs (Budapest, Casablanca, Abidjan, Canton, Hanoi). His research is part of the International Management approach and within the HRM Group of the IAE Lyon Magellan Research Center. His research is mainly of a longitudinal qualitative nature with innovative SMEs and multinationals and focuses on the issues of human resources international management as well as the current management challenges in hospitals.

Didier Vinot is a Professor at Jean Moulin University Lyon 3, at IAE Lyon. After serving as Vice-President of his university, being in charge of human resources and quality of life at the university, since 2016 he has been responsible for the Human Resources Research Group at the Magellan laboratory. He is the author of one hundred publications and scientific communications and develops his research in the field of health management, professional ethics, health professions and hybrid professions. He is the co-director of the Research Chair Values of patient-centered care at Jean Moulin University Lyon 3.

A conclusion raises the question of reconciling skill needs and flexibility requirements. Christophe Everaere queries in contrast competence and flexibility notions. He invites us to decide between two requirements, flexibility and competence, which largely contradict each other. At the same time, we cannot hope to have competent staff capable of taking charge of demanding professional situations independently and responsibly, and to get rid of them at the first opportunity or to get them instantly into a temporary work company. Flexibility and competence are rooted in an identical need to respond quickly to uncertainty and/or to unpredictability. Human skills are necessary to cope with these types of professional situations.

A specialist in the flexibility applied to work, to employment relationships and to organizational functioning, Christophe Everaere is a University Professor at IAE Lyon, Jean Moulin University Lyon 3. In a global vision of atypical forms of employment, he has placed at the heart of his reflections the tensions between the search for flexibility and the risks of precariousness for people as well as the risk of loss of skills for organizations.

References

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