Will Yesterday’s Professional Competencies be Enough for What’s Next?

How do yesterday’s professional competencies meet today’s and tomorrow’s client needs? Something shifted during the pandemic. Did you feel it?

Because yesterday’s professional competencies are table stakes for meeting today’s and tomorrow’s client needs. Actually, they have been for quite a while.

From your perspective, how you learned to do things, yesterday, remains the crux of how you and your teams deliver solutions to clients. That hasn’t changed.

However, when you eliminate the context of where you typically execute professional competencies – the office, the water cooler, meetings – suddenly what’s left is yesterday’s professional competencies. Now functioning within a completely new, unanticipated and potentially permanent business ecosystem.

Within this new context, those competencies now strike you as a little bit, well, stale. Limited. Out of touch with what colleagues and clients really need and crave.

Why? Your clients shifted their own set of today’s minimum viable expectations. They anticipate that every employer hires professionals who are adequately trained to execute professional tools to:

1. Increase efficiency
2. Eliminate waste
3. Reduce downtime
4. Create high-quality output

Otherwise, why will clients initially do business with you and your company? More importantly, why will clients continue to do business with you and your company?

However, client expectations about tomorrow’s professional competencies go beyond how you and your teams deliver on these basic requirements.

What are your clients’ unstated needs, the needs you never thought about yesterday? And the ones you never think about exploring today? You see, tomorrow’s client expectations make them hesitate about you.

• First, they wonder how will you anticipate and meet their unstated needs.
• Next, will you and your team have their backs when things do not go as scripted, like, say, a global pandemic turns everything on its head?
• Also, will you ignore them when there is nothing to sell and no specific engineering problem to solve?
• Then, are you willing to support them should their own shops become compromised?

The professional competencies which distinguish you and your team today and tomorrow are about how you create trust.

Not exactly part of how you were educated or trained, is it?

• What happens when trust is the goal, and not just crushing your quota or delivering on your KPIs?
• For starters, you have different conversations with each other and with clients.
• You create different solutions, together.
• And then the stories emerge. Stories which are quantum leaps ahead of typical business- and use-cases.

Do you have trust-based stories to tell clients: today, tomorrow and moving forward?

During this incredible year 2020 (and it isn’t over yet, folks), some of you discovered that working from home, virtually, liberated you and your teams. You discovered your previously unrecognized, and probably uncompensated, purpose. You created client trust by what you so very naturally always bring to your clients’ tables, day in and day out.

Isn’t it time to raise the stakes in your professional trajectory? Yesterday’s professional competencies are not enough to get you, your team and your clients to where you all need to go, together. However, clients are waiting for you to tell them today’s and tomorrow’s stories. About moving one millimeter beyond what is comfortable. So everyone gets to where they need to go. Together. Take the next steps.

• Intentionally leverage trust as one of your core professional competencies. To discover more, connect via this link and let’s start the story, together.
• Planning your next team, corporate or association meeting? Engage me to present one of my One Millimeter Mindset ™ speaking programs, workshops or mastermind groups. Delivered virtually or in-person. Contact me here.

Babette Ten Haken translates across unprofitable and unproductive communication and collaboration disconnects between the business-operations continuum.  She is a card-carrying STEM professional and left-brain thinker specializing in cross-functional leadership, new product development, and professional innovation. Her One Millimeter Mindset™ virtual and in-person speaking programs and workshops get everyone to where they need to go together: one millimeter at a time. Optimize purpose-driven, strategic Project Economy business and human capital value in your organizations. Build Trust. Retain employees and clients co-invested in each other’s success. Her playbook of cross-functional tools, Do YOU Mean Business?  is available on Amazon.com. Image source: Adobe Stock.