While companies manage their finances with great precision, they struggle to strategically manage skills to use them as a lever for performance and adaptation. For what ?
Companies excel in managing their finances, based on clear, shared and regularly updated indicators. Conversely, skills, although at the heart of value creation, still remain, in many cases, a blind spot. However, they determine the value of an individual in the world of work, the capacity of an organization to adapt and therefore its performance over time. But they are still too rarely approached with the same level of requirements. This discrepancy is not trivial and says a lot about the companies’ relationship to the decision.
Without measurement, there is no management
If finance has established itself as a pillar of management, it is because it is based on a common language and standardized indicators: revenues, costs, margins, return, risk. This reliable and up-to-date data facilitates continuous action and adjustment. Conversely, skills often remain difficult to grasp. We describe them more than we measure them. They appear in a resumean annual interview or a job description, but rarely in real management tools. In the absence of solid indicators, they struggle to establish themselves as a strategic lever and, in fact, fall outside the scope decision-making.
I often see it in companies: no one would agree to manage their cash flow by intuition. However, many still manage their skills in this way, with a partial vision of what already exists and too little understanding of future needs. However, an organization that does not know precisely what it can do, what it lacks and what becomes critical is, basically, moving forward in the open.
This is the difference between a subject that we administer and a subject that we govern. As long as skills remain perceived as too fluid or too complex to objectify, they will continue to be relegated to the background. And what does not enter into a dashboard struggles, sooner or later, to enter into strategy.
Skills suffer from a temporality handicap
The other big difference is time. Finance imposes a rhythm. The accounts fall every month. Budget decisions are made quarterly. The tensions of cashthey do not warn long in advance. This pressure creates discipline and requires anticipation.
Skills, on the contrary, take a long time. Train, learn, transmit, develop an employee, organize a mobility internal… all this takes time. The effects are progressive, sometimes invisible at the start and even rarely spectacular on the scale of a reporting monthly. It is precisely for this reason that the subject is often postponed. In many organizations, we continue to treat skills as one HR subject among others, whereas they should be a strategic and operational subject. Because when a skill is lacking, the consequence is not always immediately seen in a income statement. It appears later, in the form of a slowed down project, a blocked transformation, impossible recruitment or excessive external dependence.
And that’s the paradox. We know how to invest in what protects the short term, but we still struggle to invest with the same rigor in what secures the medium and long term. As if the skills still belonged to a horizon too distant to enter into the logic of immediate decision. However, in an environment where professions evolve quickly, where AI recomposes activities and where needs are constantly changing, this long time becomes a management imperative.
We pay more attention to what is tangible than what actually creates value
Finally, there is a more intimate bias. Money is tangible. He sees himself, counts himself, gets lost. It immediately activates our vigilance because it affects security or comfort. The skills remain more abstract. They are moving, contextual, sometimes difficult to name, and even more difficult to value. This is particularly true in France, where we learn very early to talk about salary, costs, charges or taxationbut much less to objectify what we know how to do, what we could learn or what we could transfer from one profession to another. As if the skills were still qualitative and therefore secondary. As if they were acquired once and for all, when in reality they constitute the main living assets of organizations.
Behind this, there is also a classic cognitive bias: we overinvest in what seems concrete, risky, immediate and we underinvest in what seems diffuse, intangible or more difficult to grasp. However, in the world of work, an individual’s value is not only based on their background or their title. It is also due to its ability to mobilize know-how, develop new ones and adapt faster than the environment changes. The day we look at skills with the same frequency, the same precision and the same requirements as our finances, we will no longer only talk about talent management, we will finally talk about value management.
