Our approach to skills: driving our teams to success

Defining skills for R&D Teams always leads to philosophical and tortuous discussions. Company to company, product to product, team to team. Context changes, and what is valued, what makes you the fit for the mission, varies greatly.

On top of this, companies are living organisms: what is great today might not be so tomorrow. A great engineer for an established company might not be the best fit for a scale up, and might not fit at all in a start-up environment.

When defining our R&D Team at Luxclusif [tag], we had the opportunity to start fresh. We wanted skills to serve as a map — where we are and where we want to be — and to be used way beyond evaluations.

In our approach, skills are being used for:

• Scouting — helping us understand and identify what we need.
• Hiring — helping us position the candidates inside our structure.
• Evaluating — helping us assess the performance of the candidate based on how the skills were used.
• Growing — helping us understand what skills do we need to invest on to achieve the next desired state.
• Team Building — helping us understand what is lacking in a specific team, and which skills would fit to balance it, strengthen it and take it a step further.

Overall, skills have to crisply communicate what we are looking for, and value, in each team member. Now and in the future.

Our journey took us through an exercise of deep discussion and extended research, until we had a strong belief that the right skills were considered.

We ended up deciding our Skill Book based on what we find critical for overall success in this field:

• The market — what set of companies do we value and want to learn from.
• Our company — what we already know and could be the skills that influence success internally.
• Our experience — what we previously saw working well in other R&D Teams as a result of skillset.
• Our role models — who had an impact on us previously and led us to adapt a skill.

With all this in mind, we created our unique mix of Hard and Soft skills. Each of them has a set of actions for success — a guide to put you in the right direction — and a set of competency levels — a description of what is the exact rating that will grant you a 1 to 5 rating inside your Luxclusif Journey.

In these next few weeks, we’ll be sharing a series of articles on which we approach the Hard and Soft Skills we ended up selecting. Giving you a glimpse of what we value in our R&D Team inside Luxclusif.