I hate the term “individual contributor” because it’s so … corporatespeak? Also it’s just long and annoying to write over and over again, so for this post I’m just going to use the term “worker” to mean “individual contributor” which means “a professional who doesn’t manage anyone” that is to say, most people.

You may be going “Hold on, does this mean that you’re grouping lumberjacks and dental hygienists and secret agents and lead guitarists all together and saying there are some skills that ALL those diverse workers should have?”

Yes, friend! There are some skills that I think will help you literally, LITERALLY in any professions anywhere in the world no matter what you do.

Putting this list together took a lot of effort, and it’s still subject to improvement, but here are the skills that every worker should have.

1. Self Development

We start with the skill that unlocks all other skills — the ability to improve yourself.

I’m not going to go in depth about this one because I’ve written about it before (twice), but the reader’s digest version (remember when shortened versions were called “reader’s digest versions” and not “TLDR”? Pepperidge farm remembers) is that self development is the ability to improve your own skills.

That doesn’t mean you’re doing it entirely on your own. As Liker and Convis clarify(1) “For a leader or potential leader to self-develop, however, she must be given opportunity to do so, and she must get support from others. Leaders do not self-develop on their own.”

A better way to define self development, then, might be the ability to recognize opportunities, combined with the effort to take advantage of them.

2. Communication

As I’ve worked on this list I’ve broken this one out into multiple categories, only to combine it again several times. But to me communication involves:

1. The ability to listen and understand others
2. The ability to know which medium is best suited in any given situation
3. The ability to make yourself understood to others in the appropriate medium

There is a lot contained in those three items. But when you think about it, even if you work in complete isolation (maybe as one of those people that live in towers and watch for forest fires or something), you still need to communicate occasionally, and because that communication is so infrequent it is so much more important that you get it right! Every worker needs to be a good communicator.

3. Continuous Improvement

This section could’ve been called so many things — kaizen, Toyota Kata, TBP, scientific thinking, PDCA, A3 thinking and more.

The main point is that every worker should be able to improve their work. That means they need to be able to:

1. Understand the target or goal
2. Understand the current condition
3. Determine any gaps
4. Work in a systematic way to overcome gaps

Toyota Kata(2) is my favorite presentation of this concept, but “continuous improvement” feels … vendor agnostic, I guess.

4. Personal Productivity

Can you effectively collect all the work that needs to be done, organize it, prioritize it, schedule it, track it, communicate it and just plain get it done in a timely fashion, without burning yourself out but also without cramming at the deadline?

Personal productivity is all about how you fill your days, so it includes tracking work, but also time management. Although there’s lots of project management approaches that will do that for you, every worker should start with an understanding about how they can get work done, and my favorite method for that is David Allen’s GTD(3).

Getting Things Done is great because it brings all this work management back to fundamentals, and applies with a personal scope. The best part is that most project management methodologies actually build on the concepts Allen introduces.

Final thoughts

I think those four you can look at and easily say “yes, these would help any worker, in any job, anywhere in the world.”

There are so many more things that would be helpful, but maybe aren’t as universal, or aren’t as specifically meaningful. There are two skills that I waffled on a ton, but ultimately left them out of this version:

• Root cause analysis
• Managing stress

I may add them in officially later after I think about it, but for now I left them out. Root cause analysis could have its own section, but it also is a part of “continuous improvement” so it’s a tough call. Managing stress is hard for me because it may not be as universal — some people may just love their jobs, and never get stressed and, thus, never need to manage their stress! I don’t know. I’m not one of those people, but they could be out there. Watching. Waiting. Silently just … enjoying their lives.

Do you disagree with any of these? Is there something obvious I missed? Let me know! I’m happy to be corrected as I work this out, and look forward to future blog posts where we dive in to these one by one.

Footnotes

1. The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership, Liker and Convis
2. See Toyota Kata by Mike Rother, Bringing Scientific Thinking to Life by Sylvain Landry, Developing Lean Leaders at All Levels by Liker and Trachilis, and many more.
3. Getting Things Done, David Allen