20 Powerful Tips: How to Close the Skills Gap on Your Team

Last updated: June 2026

The fastest way to close the skills gap on your team is to start with an honest assessment of what your people can actually do right now, map that against what your strategy genuinely requires, and then address the gap through a combination of deliberate development, smarter delegation, and consistent leadership behaviour. Most teams have the raw capability. What they lack is a structured approach to surfacing it, developing it, and making it stick.

As of June 2026, skills gaps have become the single most urgent challenge for leaders at every level. According to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, 63% of employers name skills gaps as the primary barrier to business transformation, ranking above culture, regulation, and access to capital (CONFIRMED RESULT, WEF 2025). That figure held across 52 of 55 economies surveyed, which means this is not a sector problem or a geography problem. It is a leadership problem, and that makes it solvable.

McKinsey's research tells a related story. In a McKinsey Global Survey, 87% of executives said they were experiencing skill gaps in their workforce or expected them within a few years (CONFIRMED RESULT, McKinsey 2021). Fewer than half had a clear plan for addressing them. The gap between knowing the problem exists and knowing what to do about it is where most leaders are stuck.

This post is a practical guide to getting unstuck. The 20 tips below are drawn from what actually works across schools, corporates, and nonprofits globally, organised into five categories: diagnosing the gap clearly, developing people deliberately, building a culture where learning sticks, using frameworks to close gaps faster, and measuring progress without drowning in process.

Organisations looking for structured support to build team capability can hire Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, to run a Working Genius workshop, DISC session, or executive team offsite. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Do Skills Gaps Develop and Why Do They Matter?

Skills gaps develop when the demands of a role outpace the development of the person in it. This happens faster than most leaders expect. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that roughly 39% of core workforce skills are expected to change or become outdated by 2030 (FORECAST, WEF 2025). That is a projection, not a historical result, but it is based on data from over 1,000 companies across 55 economies and it reflects what is already visible in most teams: the skills that got someone hired three years ago are not the same skills that will make them effective in three years' time.

The consequences of unaddressed skills gaps compound quickly. Teams slow down. Decision quality drops. Talented people feel underutilised or overwhelmed, and they start looking elsewhere. Projects that should take weeks take months. Leaders find themselves doing work that should belong to their direct reports, because their direct reports do not yet have the capability to hold it. Skills gaps are not a soft problem. They are the operational reason why strategy fails to execute.

What separates the leaders who close gaps from those who manage around them permanently is intentionality. Closing a skills gap requires naming it clearly, owning the development plan, and modelling the behaviour of a continuous learner. Leaders who outsource that work entirely to HR or L&D teams rarely see the results they need. The research is clear on this: McKinsey found that 65% of respondents believe executives should participate in learning and development programmes as trainers, facilitators, or learners, not just sponsors (CONFIRMED RESULT, McKinsey 2021).

For more on building team dynamics that support ongoing capability development, check out my blog post "29 Simple Strategies on How to Improve Team Dynamics" at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/27-simple-strategies-on-how-to-improve-team-dynamics.

If your team's skills gap is connected to navigating AI-driven change, check out my blog post "27 Essential Keys for Leading Your Team Through AI" at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/keys-leading-your-team-through-ai.

Bring Jonno White in to facilitate a workshop or executive offsite that helps your leadership team build the capability conversation into your rhythm. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

These 20 tips were compiled from a combination of research into workforce capability building, competitor analysis of leading articles on skills gap strategies, and practical knowledge drawn from working with executive teams, school leadership groups, and corporate organisations. The tips are organised into five thematic categories, each with four tips. Selection criteria prioritised practical applicability, clear leadership ownership, and differentiation from generic L&D programme advice.

Category 1: Diagnose the Gap Before You Act

Effective skills gap closure begins with an accurate diagnosis. The instinct to jump straight to training is understandable but almost always premature. Teams that skip the assessment phase tend to run programmes that address the wrong gaps or address the right gaps in the wrong order. The four tips below create a foundation for everything that follows. An honest assessment of where your team actually stands is the single most valuable thing a leader can invest time in before spending money on development.

1. Run a Structured Skills Assessment Before Any Training Begins

The skills assessment is the starting point that most leaders skip. They sense there is a gap, identify a training programme that seems relevant, and book it. The problem is that a training programme designed for a generalised audience cannot close a specific gap in a specific team without a clear map of what that gap actually is.

A structured skills assessment compares what your team can do right now against what your strategy genuinely requires. The most practical approach for a team leader is a combination of direct observation, performance data, one-on-one development conversations, and a simple self-assessment matrix. Ask each team member to rate their own proficiency in the key capabilities your team needs. Then compare their self-assessment with your own observation. The gaps between the two are often as revealing as the gaps in capability themselves.

This process does not need to be a formal HR exercise. A whiteboard session with your team, focused on the question "what do we need to be able to do that we cannot do reliably right now?" can surface more useful information than a formal competency framework. The goal is specificity. A skills assessment that produces "we need to communicate better" is not useful. A skills assessment that produces "we need three people in this team to be able to present findings confidently to senior stakeholders" gives you something to work with.

Organisations looking to run structured capability assessments across their leadership teams can hire Jonno White to facilitate. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

2. Distinguish Between a Skills Gap and a Genius Gap

Not every performance problem is a skills gap. Some of the most capable people on your team are underperforming not because they lack the skills but because they are spending most of their time doing work that drains them rather than work that energises them. This is the distinction that Patrick Lencioni draws in the Working Genius model: the difference between a genius (where someone is both capable and naturally energised), a competency (where they can do the work but it costs more energy than it earns), and a frustration (where they resist the work regardless of skill).

When a team member consistently underdelivers on a specific type of work, the first question to ask is whether this is a skills gap or a genius gap. A skills gap can be closed through deliberate practice and development. A genius gap is better addressed through reallocation: moving the work to someone for whom it is a natural strength, or structuring the role differently so the person spends more time in their area of genius.

Confusing the two is expensive. Sending someone to a communication skills workshop when their actual issue is that facilitating group discussion is a deep frustration for them will produce no lasting improvement. Identifying whether the root cause is a skills gap or a genius gap first ensures that your development investment goes where it will actually make a difference.

Book Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, to run a Working Genius workshop for your team and help you map genius gaps alongside skills gaps. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

3. Anchor Your Assessment to Your Strategy, Not Last Year's Job Descriptions

Skills assessments that benchmark against current job descriptions are assessing for the past, not the future. A job description captures what the role required when it was last written. If your strategy has shifted, or if the environment has changed significantly (and in most organisations both are true), the job description is already out of date as a benchmark.

The right anchor for a skills assessment is your forward-looking strategy. What does your team need to be able to do to execute the plan you have for the next 12 to 24 months? What capabilities does that require at team level that you do not currently have? What capabilities does it require at individual level in key roles? These questions produce a more useful skills map than any competency framework built on what the role used to require.

This does not mean ignoring what is needed right now. Teams need to be able to do their current work while building the capability for their future work. The practical solution is to build a two-column map: current role requirements and future strategic requirements. Gaps in both columns matter, but gaps in the future column are where your development investment has the greatest strategic leverage.

Hire Jonno White to facilitate an executive team offsite that connects your capability conversation directly to your strategy. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

4. Use Behavioural Frameworks to Map Natural Strengths Alongside Gaps

A skills gap analysis tells you what your team cannot do. A behavioural framework tells you why certain capabilities come naturally and why others will require significantly more effort to develop. The two together give you a far more accurate picture of what your development investment will actually produce.

DISC, StrengthsFinder, and Working Genius are the three most practically useful frameworks for this purpose. DISC maps behavioural tendencies that affect how people communicate, receive feedback, and respond to pressure. StrengthsFinder (CliftonStrengths) identifies natural talent themes that, when developed into strengths, produce the highest performance return. Working Genius identifies the six fundamental types of work and where each person naturally contributes energy and where they consistently drain it.

The combination of a skills assessment and a behavioural framework gives a leader something that neither provides alone: a realistic picture of which skills gaps are likely to close quickly with the right development support, and which gaps exist because the work itself is fundamentally mismatched to the person doing it. That second category is not a development problem. It is a role design or delegation problem, and no amount of training will solve it.

Engage Jonno White to run a Behaviours That Bond (DISC) session or StrengthsFinder Amplified workshop for your team, giving your capability conversation a framework that sticks. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Category 2: Develop People Deliberately

Identifying the gap is only the first step. The development work itself is where most capability-building efforts fall short. The tips in this category focus on the methods that produce lasting change in team capability, rather than the short-term knowledge transfer that comes from a course or a one-off training day. McKinsey found that only 33% of capability-building programmes always or often achieve the desired results (CONFIRMED RESULT, McKinsey 2021). The tips below are drawn from what the successful 33% consistently do differently.

5. Apply the 70-20-10 Model to Your Development Planning

The 70-20-10 model is one of the most durable frameworks in learning and development, and one of the most consistently ignored in practice. The model reflects the research finding that roughly 70% of effective development happens through on-the-job experience, 20% through learning from others (coaching, mentoring, feedback), and 10% through formal training (courses, workshops, reading).

Most organisational development plans invert this proportion. They rely heavily on formal training, with on-the-job application treated as an optional follow-through. The result is knowledge that sits in a notebook and never changes behaviour. Closing a skills gap at team level requires designing development plans that spend most of their budget and most of their time on the 70% and 20%, with formal training providing the framework and the language, not the substance.

In practice, this means treating every significant work assignment as a deliberate development opportunity. It means pairing formal training with a structured application task that happens in the week immediately following the session. It means building a feedback loop into ongoing work so that the learning from formal training gets tested and refined through real practice. The team leader is the essential variable in making this model work. Without a leader who actively creates development opportunities in the flow of work, formal training almost never transfers.

6. Use Stretch Assignments as Your Primary Development Tool

Stretch assignments are the most consistently effective tool for developing team capability at speed. A stretch assignment is work that is slightly beyond someone's current confident capability, given with clear support structures and permission to learn through imperfect execution. The "stretch" is the gap between what they can do comfortably and what the assignment requires, and it is in that gap that genuine capability development happens most quickly.

The criteria for an effective stretch assignment are specificity, safety, and support. Specificity means the assignment targets a particular capability gap identified in the assessment phase. Safety means the stakes are calibrated: high enough to matter, low enough that a developmental stumble does not cause irreversible harm. Support means the person has access to coaching, feedback, and resources during the assignment, not just at the end.

Stretch assignments work poorly when leaders use them as a disguised performance test rather than a genuine development investment. If the expectation is flawless execution from someone who does not yet have the capability to deliver it, the assignment produces anxiety and failure rather than development. The framing matters enormously. An effective stretch assignment begins with a conversation that names the capability being developed, explains why this assignment was chosen to develop it, and establishes clear expectations for what success looks like at each stage.

7. Build a Mentoring and Peer Learning Structure Into the Team

Formal training programmes represent the 10% of effective development. The 20% that comes from learning from others is often the most underinvested category in a team's development approach. Structured mentoring and peer learning are the most practical ways to access this category without significant additional budget.

Mentoring, in this context, does not require an elaborate matching programme or an external provider. A team leader can implement informal mentoring by deliberately pairing people whose gaps in one area align with another person's strengths, and creating the space and expectation for that knowledge transfer to happen. A half-hour conversation each fortnight, focused on a specific capability the mentee is developing, compounds significantly over a quarter.

Peer learning is even more accessible. Regular team practices that create structured opportunities for team members to share what they are learning, including what they are trying in their work, what is working, and what is not, build a collective learning culture that accelerates individual development. Team retrospectives, brief peer coaching circles, and "what we learned this week" check-ins are low-cost practices that produce meaningful cumulative development.

Hire Jonno White to facilitate a team session that creates a practical peer learning structure for your leadership group. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

8. Make the Development Conversation a Regular Leadership Habit

Development conversations that only happen at annual review time are too infrequent to close a skills gap. By the time a formal development review occurs, the person has either made progress on their own or the gap has widened. Neither outcome required the review.

Closing a skills gap at individual level requires a regular, low-pressure development conversation that is separate from the performance management process. A 15-minute fortnightly check-in focused on the specific capability being developed is more effective than an annual 90-minute review that covers everything. The frequency is what makes the difference: regular check-ins catch obstacles early, allow for real-time adjustments to the development plan, and signal to the team member that their development is genuinely a priority, not a compliance exercise.

The key to making these conversations effective is specificity and forward focus. The conversation is not a review of what went wrong. It is a focused discussion of what the person tried, what they noticed, and what they want to try next. The leader's role in the conversation is to ask good questions, surface patterns the team member may not be able to see in their own development, and create accountability without pressure.

Category 3: Build a Culture Where Learning Sticks

Individual development initiatives fail when the team culture does not support them. The tips in this category address the environmental conditions that make capability development sustainable over time rather than productive in the short term and forgotten by the following quarter. A learning culture is not a nice-to-have. It is the infrastructure that makes every other tip on this list work.

9. Model Continuous Learning From the Front

The most powerful signal a leader sends about the value of learning is the visible evidence of their own development. When a leader actively shares what they are reading, what they are trying differently, what they found useful from a recent conversation or experience, they establish the expectation that continuous learning is normal, expected, and visible at every level of the team.

The inverse is equally powerful. When a leader treats professional development as something that applies to their direct reports but not to themselves, the message received is that learning is remedial, not professional. High performers, in particular, notice this gap quickly and interpret it as evidence that the development culture is performative rather than genuine.

Practical modelling does not require grand gestures. It requires consistency. Sharing a useful insight from something you read in your team meeting. Naming a mistake you made and what you learned from it. Asking a direct report to teach you something they know that you do not. These are small actions with significant cultural impact. Over time, they establish the norm that every person in the team, including the leader, is always learning something.

10. Create Psychological Safety Around Learning From Mistakes

Development requires experimentation, and experimentation produces mistakes. In teams where mistakes are consistently met with blame, public criticism, or a disproportionate focus on what went wrong rather than what was learned, people stop experimenting. They retreat to the safe territory of doing what they already know they can do well. Skills gaps do not close in that environment.

Psychological safety, in this context, means that people believe they can try something new, fall short, and speak honestly about what happened without career or relational consequences. It does not mean the absence of standards or accountability. A psychologically safe team has high standards and a culture in which members support each other in reaching those standards, rather than enforcing them through fear of failure.

Leaders build psychological safety through their response to mistakes. A response that asks "what did you learn?" before asking "why did this happen?" establishes the norm. For more on the leadership conversations that build or erode team trust, check out my blog post "17 Signs Your High-Performing Team Is Falling Apart" at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/signs-high-performing-team-falling-apart.

11. Recognise and Celebrate Capability Growth, Not Just Results

Most recognition systems in organisations are built around results. The team member who hit the target gets recognised. The team member who significantly extended their capability but did not yet hit the target goes unacknowledged. Over time, this recognition pattern sends a clear message about what the organisation actually values, and learning is not it.

Recognising capability growth separately from results is a practical cultural signal that development matters. This does not require a formal system. A brief, specific, public acknowledgement in a team meeting of the fact that someone took on a significant stretch assignment, tried a new approach, or developed a capability they did not have three months ago costs nothing and signals loudly.

The specificity of the recognition is what makes it effective. "Great work this quarter" is noise. "I want to specifically acknowledge that you led your first client presentation last month, something that was genuinely outside your comfort zone, and the feedback from the client was strong" is recognition that reinforces the behaviour the organisation needs more of. Make the capability growth visible and the message becomes: development is valued here, not just delivery.

12. Connect Learning to Team Purpose, Not Just Individual Career Goals

Development conversations that focus exclusively on individual career goals can inadvertently create a team in which learning is seen as a personal project rather than a collective responsibility. When each person is developing for themselves rather than for the team, the benefit of that development is captured personally and partially, rather than shared and amplified.

The most effective learning cultures connect individual capability development explicitly to team purpose. When a team member understands that the skill they are building matters not just for their own career but because the team genuinely needs it to deliver on something that matters, the motivation for development deepens. The learning stops being something they do for themselves and becomes something they do for the collective.

This connection requires the leader to regularly articulate the link between individual development and team strategy. What is the team trying to achieve? What capabilities does that require? Who is building which of those capabilities, and why does it matter to the whole team? When these questions are answered publicly and regularly, development becomes a shared project rather than a series of individual transactions.

Category 4: Use Frameworks to Close Gaps Faster

Frameworks do not close skills gaps on their own, but the right framework at the right moment dramatically accelerates the process. The tips in this category focus on the practical application of proven frameworks within the context of skills gap closure, with a specific focus on tools that help leaders understand not just what their people can do but why they work the way they do.

13. Use Working Genius to Identify Where Energy Gaps Masquerade as Skills Gaps

Patrick Lencioni's Working Genius model identifies six fundamental types of work: Wonder (asking big questions), Invention (creating new solutions), Discernment (evaluating ideas), Galvanising (rallying people to action), Enablement (providing support), and Tenacity (pushing through to completion). Each person has two areas of genius, two competencies, and two frustrations.

The practical application for skills gap closure is this: before investing development budget in closing an apparent skills gap, use the Working Genius assessment to determine whether the gap is actually a genius gap. A person whose frustration is Tenacity will never develop the energised, consistent follow-through that naturally comes to someone whose genius is Tenacity, no matter how much training they receive. The development investment is better spent on role redesign or delegation than on closing a gap that Working Genius reveals to be structural rather than developmental.

The more powerful application is building team capability maps using Working Genius. When you can see that no one on the team has Discernment as a genius, you have identified a gap that will manifest in bad decisions and costly course-corrections until it is addressed. For more on applying Working Genius to your executive team, check out my blog post "30 Effective Tips: Working Genius for Executive Teams" at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/working-genius-executive-teams.

Book Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, to run a Working Genius workshop and team map session for your organisation. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

14. Apply DISC to Understand How Your Team Members Learn Differently

DISC maps four primary behavioural styles: Dominance (direct, results-oriented), Influence (enthusiastic, collaborative), Steadiness (patient, process-oriented), and Conscientiousness (accurate, analytical). These styles have direct implications for how people prefer to receive development support, how they respond to feedback, and what kinds of learning experiences will be most effective for them.

A high-D team member will typically want to know the strategic reason for a development investment before engaging with it. They learn well through challenge and competition, and they respond poorly to highly prescriptive training. A high-S team member needs a safe, supportive environment for developmental experimentation and responds poorly to being pushed into stretch assignments without adequate preparation and reassurance. A high-C team member wants detailed information, clear structures, and the opportunity to work through implications before committing to a new approach.

Understanding these differences allows a leader to design development support that is more likely to land. The same stretch assignment presented differently to a high-D versus a high-S team member produces very different responses. The DISC framework gives leaders the language to explain why people develop differently, and to stop interpreting a preference for a particular learning style as resistance or lack of commitment.

Engage Jonno White to deliver a Behaviours That Bond (DISC) workshop for your team. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

15. Use CliftonStrengths to Focus Development Where the Return Is Highest

The Gallup CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsFinder) assessment identifies 34 talent themes, organised into four domains: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. The core insight of the StrengthsFinder approach is that development investment produces the highest return when focused on areas of natural talent rather than areas of weakness.

In a skills gap context, this means that a person with strong Strategic Thinking talents will develop strategic capability faster and to a higher ceiling than a person whose natural talents lie in the Executing domain, given the same level of investment. This does not mean weakness-areas can be ignored entirely. It means that the development strategy should be oriented primarily toward amplifying natural talent themes into genuine strengths, while finding team-level solutions for persistent weakness areas.

The team application of CliftonStrengths is particularly useful for skills gap closure. When you can see the collective talent distribution across your team, you can see not only where individual gaps exist but where team-level strengths can be leveraged to support development. A team member with strong Learner talent can be positioned as a peer learning partner for a colleague building a capability in their Learner's domain. The team's collective strengths become a development resource.

Hire Jonno White to facilitate a StrengthsFinder Amplified session for your team. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

16. Build a Skills Taxonomy That Gives Your Team a Shared Language

A skills taxonomy is a structured, agreed vocabulary for the capabilities your team needs. Without it, conversations about skills gaps are vague and unactionable. With it, every development conversation, every role description, and every hiring decision can reference the same shared understanding of what "strong communication skills" or "analytical capability" actually means in practice for your team.

Building a skills taxonomy does not need to be a lengthy exercise. For most teams, a working document that lists the 10 to 15 most critical capabilities, defines what each looks like at three levels (developing, proficient, advanced), and maps each person against those levels is sufficient. The value is in the shared conversation, not the document itself.

Once a team has a shared taxonomy, development conversations become far more specific. Instead of "I want to develop my communication skills," a team member can say "I want to move from developing to proficient in stakeholder communication specifically," which gives the leader and the team member a concrete target to design development around. The taxonomy also makes it much easier to identify team-level gaps where multiple people need to develop in the same area, enabling group development approaches that are more efficient than individual plans alone.

Category 5: Measure Progress Without Drowning in Process

The most common failure mode in skills gap closure is not a lack of effort. It is a lack of visibility on whether the effort is working. Without measurement, development programmes continue regardless of their impact, and gaps that are closing get the same attention as gaps that are not. The tips in this category establish a lightweight measurement approach that gives leaders the information they need without creating a compliance burden that crowds out the actual development work.

17. Define What "Closed" Actually Means Before You Start

One reason skills gaps persist despite sustained development effort is that "closed" was never defined. Development programmes continue indefinitely because there is no agreed standard against which to assess whether the gap has been addressed. People feel busy doing development without accumulating the evidence that a specific capability has genuinely changed.

Before any development plan begins, establish a concrete definition of what it will look like when the gap is closed. This definition should be observable and specific. Not "better at stakeholder communication" but "able to present findings to the executive team without preparation support and receive positive follow-up from at least two executives." Not "more comfortable with data" but "able to pull and interpret the weekly performance report independently within 30 minutes."

Specific definitions accomplish two things. They give the team member a clear target that makes the development work feel purposeful rather than open-ended. And they give the leader an objective basis for deciding when further investment in this gap is no longer necessary and the development budget can shift to the next priority.

18. Track Development Through Work Products, Not Just Course Completion

Course completion rates are the most commonly tracked metric in organisational learning and the least useful indicator of whether a skills gap has closed. Completing a course confirms attendance. It says nothing about whether the capability has transferred to real work.

The most reliable evidence that a skills gap has closed is a change in what the person can produce in their actual work. A stakeholder presentation that did not require the level of support it previously needed. A decision made independently that would previously have required escalation. A conversation handled with a confidence and effectiveness that was not present six months ago. These work-product indicators are observable, specific, and directly relevant to the gap that was being addressed.

Building a lightweight tracking system that captures these indicators is more valuable than any learning management system dashboard. A simple shared document or a brief note in a one-on-one meeting record, updated each fortnight, gives the leader and the team member a running record of real capability change. Over a quarter, that record tells a clear story about whether the development investment is working.

19. Review Your Skills Map Quarterly as Strategy Evolves

A skills gap that was the priority six months ago may no longer be the most critical gap today. Strategy shifts, market conditions change, team composition evolves, and new priorities emerge. A development plan built on a one-time assessment and then left unchanged quickly becomes misaligned with what the team actually needs.

Building a quarterly review of the team's skills map into the leadership rhythm ensures that the development investment stays aligned with the current strategic priority. The review does not need to be long. A one-hour team session each quarter that asks "what do we need to be able to do now that we could not do three months ago, and what is the most important gap to address in the next quarter?" is sufficient to maintain alignment.

The quarterly rhythm also creates natural recognition moments. Reviewing the skills map against where it was three months ago makes the capability growth visible. Teams that can see their own development accumulating are more motivated to continue investing in it. The review becomes a moment of collective acknowledgement of what has been built, not just a diagnostic of what is still missing.

20. Connect Skills Gap Closure to Succession Planning

The most strategically important application of skills gap closure is succession planning. Every leadership transition in an organisation is either smooth or disruptive depending on whether the capabilities required for the new role exist in the people most likely to step into it. Organisations that invest in closing skills gaps with succession in mind create resilience. Organisations that address gaps reactively, after a transition creates a crisis, pay a much higher price.

Connecting your skills gap closure work to your succession planning requires two lists: the critical roles in your team or organisation, and the capabilities required to perform each of those roles effectively. Then a third question: who on the team is closest to having those capabilities, and what development investment would close the remaining gap? The answer to that third question is your succession development plan.

This does not mean placing undue pressure on high-potential team members by signalling succession expectations prematurely. It means being deliberate about investing in the capabilities that the organisation's future genuinely requires, in the people most likely to use them. Closing skills gaps with succession in mind transforms development from a retention perk into a strategic capability investment.

Hire Jonno White to facilitate an executive team offsite that connects your capability conversation to your succession and strategy planning. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Notable Approaches Worth Knowing

While the 20 tips above focus on what team leaders and executives can do from within, it is worth acknowledging several established approaches that complement this work.

External coaching accelerates skills gap closure in a way that internal development rarely can. A skilled external coach provides an objective perspective, surfaces blind spots that familiarity hides, and creates the accountability structure that makes development conversation translate into genuine behaviour change. For complex capability gaps, particularly in leadership communication, stakeholder management, and decision-making under pressure, a coaching engagement is often the most cost-effective development investment available.

External facilitation of team sessions is similarly valuable when the gap involves team-level dynamics rather than individual capability alone. A facilitator who is external to the team can run the conversations that internal leaders find difficult to facilitate objectively. The Working Genius workshop, the DISC session, and the executive team offsite all produce different results when run by an experienced external facilitator than when run internally.

Common Mistakes Leaders Make When Closing Skills Gaps

The most expensive mistake is treating skills gap closure as an L&D programme rather than a leadership practice. When closing skills gaps is delegated entirely to HR or a training provider, the development work loses the context, the accountability, and the daily reinforcement that only a direct leader can provide. McKinsey's research found that only 33% of capability-building programmes always or often achieve their desired results (CONFIRMED RESULT, McKinsey 2021), and the primary differentiator between the successful 33% and the rest is active leadership involvement throughout the development process, not just at the sponsorship stage.

The second most common mistake is running one-off training events as the primary response to a persistent gap. A single workshop produces knowledge and momentary motivation. It does not produce the sustained behaviour change that closing a skills gap requires. Behaviour change requires repeated practice in real work, with feedback and adjustment. A single event provides none of those conditions. The workshops that work are the ones followed by a structured application period, regular coaching check-ins, and a team culture that creates ongoing opportunities to practise the new capability.

A third mistake is addressing symptoms rather than root causes. A leader who sees that their team consistently misses deadlines may send people to time management training. But deadline misses are often not a time management problem. They are a clarity problem (people do not know which work is the actual priority), a capacity problem (the workload genuinely exceeds what the team can deliver), or a genius gap problem (the people responsible for follow-through do not have Tenacity as a genius). Diagnosing the root cause before committing to a development response is not optional. It is the step that determines whether the response will work.

Implementation Guide: A 90-Day Plan for Closing Your Team's Most Critical Skills Gap

This guide addresses one skills gap in one quarter. The principle is that a focused, well-supported effort to close one critical gap produces more measurable progress than a scattered effort across many gaps simultaneously.

In the first two weeks, complete the diagnosis. Run the skills assessment. Map your team's current capability against your forward-looking strategy. Use whatever frameworks your team has already engaged with (Working Genius, DISC, StrengthsFinder) to distinguish skills gaps from genius gaps. Identify the single most strategically critical gap: the capability whose absence is most directly limiting your team's ability to execute on what matters most. Define what "closed" looks like for that gap specifically.

In weeks three and four, design the development plan for the gap you have identified. For the target person or people, establish a stretch assignment that directly addresses the gap. Pair it with whatever formal training input is genuinely relevant, scheduled in the first four weeks so that the application period follows immediately. Identify the peer learning partner or mentor who has the capability being developed and set up fortnightly check-ins.

From weeks five through ten, run the development plan. The leader's primary responsibility in this period is removing obstacles and providing regular, specific feedback. Check in fortnightly. Ask the same two questions each time: what did you try since we last spoke, and what did you notice? Adjust the stretch assignment or the support structure if the development is stalling. Recognise capability growth publicly when it becomes visible.

In weeks eleven and twelve, review. Measure the gap against the definition of "closed" established at the outset. Recognise the development publicly. Update the skills map. Identify the next priority gap. Feed any lessons from this 90-day cycle into the approach you use next quarter.

For teams that want external support to design and run this process, Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, is available to facilitate the initial assessment session, the development planning conversation, and a review offsite at the end of the 90-day cycle. Email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect, and the combination of an initial assessment session and a 90-day follow-up offsite produces lasting results that one-off workshops rarely achieve.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a skills gap and how do I know if my team has one?

A skills gap is the difference between the capabilities your team currently has and the capabilities your strategy genuinely requires. Most teams have one. The clearest signal is the gap between what your team is expected to deliver and what it can deliver reliably without undue effort from the leader. If you are regularly supplementing your team's work, stepping into roles that should belong to your direct reports, or watching important projects stall because no one has the capability to move them forward, your team has a skills gap. The question is not whether the gap exists but how significant it is and what specifically needs to change.

What is the difference between upskilling and reskilling?

Upskilling means developing a deeper level of capability in an area where someone already has a foundation: taking an existing skill and extending it toward a more advanced level of proficiency. Reskilling means developing capability in a genuinely new area, typically because a role has changed significantly or because the organisation needs a different skill set in that position. Both are valid responses to a skills gap, but they require different development approaches and different timelines.

How long does it take to close a skills gap?

A realistic timeline for closing a focused, clearly defined skills gap with active leadership support is 90 to 180 days. Broader cultural gaps, such as building a team-wide capability in strategic thinking or stakeholder management, take 12 to 24 months to shift meaningfully. Leaders who expect a single training event to close a significant gap in four weeks are consistently disappointed. Leaders who invest in a structured development approach over 90 to 180 days with regular feedback and real practice are consistently surprised by how much changes.

Should I hire to close a skills gap or develop from within?

The answer depends on the urgency, the nature of the gap, and the development potential of the people currently in the team. Internal development produces higher team engagement and retention, lower cost, and greater cultural alignment than external hiring. It is also slower. When a skills gap is critical and urgent, and the timeline for internal development is too long, hiring is the right answer. When the gap is significant but the timeline permits a 90 to 180 day development investment, building from within is almost always the better choice.

What role does the leader play in closing a skills gap?

The leader's role is the primary determinant of whether a skills gap closes. Development programmes that are designed well but receive no active leadership involvement produce minimal results. McKinsey's research found that 65% of respondents believe executives should participate in learning and development as trainers, facilitators, or learners, not just sponsors (CONFIRMED RESULT, McKinsey 2021). The leader's specific responsibilities are naming the gap clearly and honestly, creating the development conditions, modelling continuous learning visibly, recognising capability growth publicly, and maintaining the accountability rhythm through regular development conversations.

Final Thoughts

Closing the skills gap on your team is one of the highest-leverage investments a leader can make. The teams that perform consistently over time are not the ones with the most talented individuals at the moment of hiring. They are the ones that get better together, year on year, through deliberate development, genuine feedback, and a culture in which learning is normal and visible at every level.

The 20 tips in this post will not close every gap overnight. What they will do, applied consistently over 90 to 180 days, is create a team that is measurably more capable, more aligned, and more resilient than it was. That is the compound return on development investment.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 39% of core workforce skills are expected to change by 2030 (FORECAST, WEF 2025). That is a projection, not a certainty, but the direction of travel is clear. The organisations that build strong capability development habits now will be far better placed to adapt when the specific skills that need changing inevitably do. Start with one gap. Define it specifically. Design a 90-day plan. Measure it. Then do it again.

For leaders who want structured support to build team capability through workshops, offsites, and facilitated team sessions, Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. Whether virtual or face to face, international travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss how a Working Genius workshop, DISC session, or executive team offsite could help your team close its most critical skills gap.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025 (January 2025).

McKinsey Global Survey, "Five Fifty: The Skillful Corporation" (January 2021).

Next Read

Every team that is working to close its skills gap will hit a point where the capability issues are inseparable from the team dynamics issues. When people are not working well together, the individual development work stalls. Understanding the structural and behavioural patterns that cause teams to underperform is essential context for any leader investing seriously in capability development.

For more practical guidance on building high-performing team dynamics, check out my blog post "29 Simple Strategies on How to Improve Team Dynamics" at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/27-simple-strategies-on-how-to-improve-team-dynamics.