Toolkit for leaders: Skills and capabilities
The Problem: ‘It’s how we’ve always done it’
The heart of the problem in developing new organisational skills and capabilities, is that people default to doing what they already know, especially when what they know has served them well in the past.
Think of the fundraiser who can predict the ROI of a DM campaign but not what a new digital fundraising approach might offer, or the support worker who knows the deep value of the conversation they have with a helpline caller but feels anxious about the idea of co-creating with that same service user, or the leader who sees that organisational silos are a problem but managing ‘their team’ of discipline experts is a comfort zone.
As a Change-ready leader, you recognise the need for transformation yet struggle to shift organisational capabilities to deliver that change. Your own experience of the skills you’re seeking may be limited, having never been explicitly taught them. And you’re operating within a risk-averse governance model where these competencies are also scarce. You may be facing the persistent assumption that approaches effective in a more stable past remain suitable for today's volatile environment. And perhaps underneath is a quiet personal fear about whether you possess sufficient knowledge or confidence to model the changes you wish to see—all while facing the implicit expectation that senior leaders should somehow possess all the answers.
The traditional response to organisational capability development has been to delegate it to HR and L&D teams. This leads too often to a narrow focus on training people in established disciplines, doing traditional ‘management development’, or seeing ‘digital transformation’ skills as being about teaching people to use new tools. As an HR or OD lead you may be asked to help the organisation “develop digital skills” but without more concrete aims or direction, the response usually becomes focused on specific technologies eg moving from old systems to new ones with the belief that new technology will fix ways of working and skills. Upskilling is not learning how to use Teams or a new invoicing system - it's about recruiting and supporting people to learn and adjust with an understanding of human-centred design, product ownership, agile approaches, optimisation skills or data-driven decision making. The messaging around transformation is sometimes discussed in terms of organisational efficiency, which most people read as "redundancies" and will therefore resist.
Capability development for transformation requires both a different kind of skillset and mindset. AND to see those skills modelled by the leaders of the organisation. It cannot be delegated to teams to build from bottom-up, or kept in a separate ‘transformation’ silo.
“Fixed ideas about expertise will give way to adaptive capabilities. So-called soft skills will become the new hard skills over time because of the increasing rapidity of change.
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“Curiosity is more important than the technical skills - though you need those too
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DO THIS: Get people around you who have experience of the change you want to see and are curious by nature.
These people will bring colleagues along the journey faster, working confidently across your whole organisation to improve it systematically, with the right tools and approaches.
“Get the right people around you. 2 or 3 really good people who understand it and are resilient… who can stand up and tell the story of what it’ll bring and why it matters.
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Getting started: building your own capabilities.
Our research with leaders who are successfully navigating uncertainty revealed that you can develop organisational adaptability by learning four key concepts from digital-era organisations and by surrounding yourself with people who have experience of the change you want to see.
Leaders often feel pressure to have all the answers, but in a volatile and changing landscape that continually brings fresh challenges, you simply can’t know. The skills required for modern leaders and their organisations are all about asking the right questions instead.
DO THIS: Learn the four key concepts from digital-era organisations to build your change-ready leadership.
Being data-confident to understand your audience and organisation, and model insight-driven decision making
Supporting human-centred, iterative delivery to focus effort, build adaptability and manage risk
Developing digital fluency and AI literacy to understand how existing and emerging technologies shape power, relationships, and possibilities
Adopting coaching leadership at all levels instead of leading through hierarchy to build a culture of problem solving
What next: Practical approaches to shift skills and capabilities
In our discussions with leaders who have successfully guided their organisations through change, we've gathered practical advice that can help you take those crucial first steps:
Ask the right questions
You can remove the enormous pressure you feel as a leader to be an expert AND make your organisation more adaptable in an uncertain environment by asking questions based on the four core concepts of modern leadership:
1. Being data-confident and modelling insight-driven decision making (instead of relying on the wisdom in the room)
Example questions to ask: What data do we have that can tell us more about this? What data would we need to be able to do x? and how can we get it? Even though our data isn’t perfect, what does it suggest?
2. Supporting human-centred and iterative delivery to focus effort, build adaptability and manage risk. This means starting small and iterating, reflective learning and regular testing with audiences. Get comfortable with the language of design thinking, sprints, retrospectives, pivots and MVPs
Example questions to ask: What’s the smallest version of this we could create in order to test out our thinking with our audiences? How can we break this work into manageable chunks or phases? What can we learn from how things are going (both going well and not)?
3. Developing digital fluency and AI literacy
To understand how existing and emerging technologies shape power, relationships, and possibilities. This isn't about knowing how to use tools, but grasping how societal technology adoption changes audience expectations, how modern tools and approaches can create new forms of value, and understanding the risks inherent in a rapidly changing AI landscape.
Example questions to ask: What business problems can technologies like AI help us solve, and how would these be better than our current approach? Is our data structured and accessible in a way that supports all areas of our work? How do we balance adoption with governance and responsible use?
4. Adopting coaching leadership approach at all levels instead of leading through hierarchy to build a culture of problem solving
Example questions to ask: Who are the experts that I can support and champion? How am I supporting my team to solve their own problems and influence upwards? How can I better include my teams in decision-making?
Map your organisation’s capability needs strategically
Conduct a capability mapping exercise to identify what skills you need to develop, and which you need internally versus accessing through partners. Focus especially on skills that directly support your mission and strategy.
Use maturity assessments to understand the areas most in need of development. Tools like the Digital Maturity Assessment can provide a baseline and help you prioritise. Don’t fall into the ‘digital skills audit’ trap, where staff are asked what they need, but can only respond based on day to day problems like “wanting to use Teams better”.
Snapshot of one major UK health charity’s capability maturity assessment
Example criteria from Digital Leadership Ltd transformation capability framework (see full framework):
“It’s less about ‘digital learning’ and more about being willing to self-teach”
“You need to invest in the skills and capabilities to see change through
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“…you need people who are dedicated, prepared to throw themselves into things, open minded, curious, inventive
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Work towards the magic ratio
Have enough change and ‘modern’ skill specialists in your organisation to allow them to work alongside and teach others, not just do for them.
Evidence from a range of nonprofits shows that transformational change in skills, culture and ways of working is more likely to happen when you hit the ‘magic ratio’. This is the ratio of deep ‘technical’ specialists* from modern disciplines to wider staffbase:
When a minimum of 10-12% of colleagues come from these disciplines, the rate at which an organisation changes accelerates rapidly.
There are multiple reasons for this being the right level but one of the biggest appears to be that at this point there are enough specialists within the organisation to work alongside and teach colleagues these skills. At lower numbers, specialists have very little capacity for anything other than direct delivery, so skills are not shared.
How this expertise is structured also matters: it’s also crucial that this % is distributed at all levels of the organisation from early careers to management. And that these skills aren’t all in one department (esp if that department is labeled ‘change’ ‘transformation’ or similar).
Note: while many of the disciplines have roots in tech, core IT roles do not count towards the magic ratio.
Support the journey with coaching
Change happens person by person, team by team. Provide mentoring and coaching to help people, wherever they are in the hierarchy, navigate the shift. This will help people adopt new ways of working.
As a Change-ready leader or an HR lead, consider getting coaching yourself to support your change journey and mentoring to develop your own understanding of transformation.
You may also need to set up coaching for your technology and digital leads to help them understand how to best share their expertise, and work across the organisation.
Cultivate a leadership team that drives transformation
Look around the table at your leadership team. Are there people who have the experience and capabilities you need to help you think and work differently? Several organisations we studied changed their leadership skills or structures to help them embrace the future - for example, one organisation replaced their traditional CFO role with a Director of Technology and Transformation (with a highly skilled Head of Finance underneath). Others changed the required capabilities in their senior teams to include:
Experience working in cross-functional teams
Being part of product teams
Using design thinking and human-centred design
Making transformational use of technology and data
Make your leadership team model the changes you want to see and approach capability development together. This means the senior team should be among the first to experience and model new ways of working.
“[To be truly driven by audience need] every charity should have somebody with expertise around user centred design at the top table”
“To get to things like proper human-centred design and customer centricity, there’s a journey that people who’ve grown up in traditional organisations really have to go on. Yes, they have expertise, but they have to place the needs of the customer first.
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Get the right skills in the right places
Resource affordability is often cited as a limiting factor in transformational change, but there are multiple ways of working towards your capability plan. Usually a blend of the following is needed:
Upskilling your workforce
This isn’t necessarily about traditional training (although see resources for some suggestions on that). Get the right mentors around your people, and give them on-the-job opportunities to try doing things differently. Value and encourage curiosity and self-driven learning around new skills.
For HR/OD leaders: People learn best by experiencing new ways of working first hand. Look for colleagues who have already worked in agile or cross-functional teams, been part of product teams, or used design thinking and human-centred design. Support them in using these skills and build up their confidence in stakeholder management and managing up. Focus on practical applications of concepts like customer-centricity and human-centred design rather than just training.
Use your existing change-makers to drive the shift
Every organisation has people who are willing and skilled beyond their current role. Identifying those change-makers, removing some of their workload by reprioritising or even part backfilling their time, and giving them the chance to help drive transformation, not only helps you move forward, it also signals to your organisation that the change is what others in the org want and need. A great example of this came from Prostate cancer UK where someone who had been relatively junior in the charity was supported to learn to be an Agile champion for the organisation. They learnt to champion and guide others to use a more test-and-iterate approach, and even colleagues who had resisted other change were willing to follow her lead because they already had relationships of trust and saw her as one of their own. Read case study>
Borrow resource from your agencies
Many modern agencies will loan you some of their specialists for fixed periods. This isn’t cheap in the short term, but it lets you rapidly bring in highly experienced specialists who can be briefed to teach your staff those skills while they work together.
Recruiting in the expertise
If you have the budget to hire, then do it! But even when new roles aren’t possible, every leaver creates an opportunity to bring in skills that will help create the change you want to see. Don’t let any hiring manager simply repost an old job description in a hurry - adapt roles to attract people with skills others can learn from. Hire for attitude not just skills. One of the smallest changes you can make is to change expectations about what’s in your role descriptions, job ads and hiring process right now. This will change your organisation more rapidly than almost anything else
For HR leads: Include behaviours like test-and-learn approaches, continuous prioritisation, data-driven decision making, asking questions, cross-functional collaboration, and empowerment in your role descriptions, job ads and hiring process. Focus on recruiting people with a growth mindset who are willing to try and learn new things. Use interview questions that explore examples of what candidates have learned from both successes and failures.
“Backfill your best. Even when budgets are very tight, it’s worth not just asking your best people to take on extra work, but actually backfill part of their role just to give them the head space, the bandwidth to be able to drive change. It doesn’t take a lot of money.
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Start small, then scale
Begin with just one project or area. When people directly experience these new ways of working, they become your most powerful advocates. Heavily champion and celebrate early wins and successes from this work, and talk openly about what is being learnt from any failures or pivots.
The below quote comes from a service manager at Parkinson’s UK. Initially skeptical about the services transformation work, she was invited to be part of the team co-designing improvements to the charity’s service delivery alongside people with Parkinson’s and healthcare professionals. Having seen the impact from working in new ways with small-scale tests that helped the team learn as they went, she became one of the strongest advocates for the programme:
“I had huge doubts at the start, but I’ve loved this journey I’ve been on. I’ve got so many new skills, a new career path, and it’s the most fun I’ve ever had in a role.”
- Service manager at Parkinson’s UK
“You get people going, ‘oh now I know it works, I’ve seen that it’s fun and I want a piece of it.’ Instead of imposing a change, we had people coming to us for projects to do and [wanting to] work in that way.
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“It’s not one person’s role to consider technology’s impact - it needs to be a cross-cutting mindset. It’s not just about bringing in a CTO or CIO; it’s about how we all come together to be greater than the sum of our functional parts.
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Tips to do right now
In our discussions with leaders who have successfully guided their organisations through change, we've gathered practical advice that can help you take those crucial first steps:
“Think BIG, then start small. Go where the energy is.”
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Do you have the right mix of skills and mindsets at the top? Consider how your leadership team structure and capabilities might need to evolve, based on your biggest gaps or unmet needs.
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Make sure everyone is recruiting for growth mindset and adaptability. This will change your organisation more rapidly than almost anything else.
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Invest in developing culture and behaviour, skills needed for change as well as getting everyone on the same page on how your organisation approaches transformation. <insert link to leadership dev coaching offer from us or thing like the unthinkable
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Fund a strategic but contained initiative where you can test and learn from new ways of working with limited risk.
Resources
How to measure progress
Measuring the impact of capability development helps maintain momentum and secure continued support. Here are practical ways to track your progress:
People Indicators
Regular staff surveys provide valuable insights into how capability development is progressing:
Psychological safety - Are staff comfortable speaking up, asking questions, and challenging assumptions?
Role clarity - Do team members understand how they contribute to the bigger picture?
Voice and agency - Do staff feel heard and able to influence their work environment?
Consider using pulse surveys between larger surveys to catch issues early and celebrate quick wins.
Performance Indicators
Monitor how new capabilities affect operational performance:
Delivery speed - Save the Children saw projects completed in 6 weeks that previously took 3-4 months, thanks to cross-functional autonomous teams
Quality improvements - Track reductions in errors, rework, or customer/supporter satisfaction
Resource efficiency - Measure whether you're delivering more value with the same or fewer resources
Maturity Assessment
Use established frameworks to benchmark your progress:
Digital maturity - Tools like the Digital Maturity Assessment (www.digitalmaturity.org) help assess capabilities across key dimensions
Focus on specific competencies - Measure progress in areas like Capacity, Learning, Recruitment, and Project Management
Set measurable targets - Establish a baseline, define 12-month goals, and create a prioritised roadmap for achieving those goals
Early Signs of Success
Watch for these positive signals:
Cross-functional collaboration - Teams working across traditional silos without management intervention
Experimentation mindset - Teams trying new approaches and learning from both successes and failures
User-centred language - Staff naturally discussing impact on users rather than just internal processes
Data-driven decisions - Teams come to meetings with data and insights and use them in planning and decision making
Reporting principles
Share results transparently across the organisation
Celebrate improvements while honestly addressing challenges
Use insights to refine your approach, not just to validate it
Remember that meaningful change takes time - look for trends, not just point-in-time snapshots
“10 years ago you needed ‘digital’ people - and lots of organisations have developed good products and engagement by doing that. Now you need the curious people who can help you test and learn your way into the future despite all the uncertainty.
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Case studies
Collective thoughts on… Skills and capabilities
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