You can bank on one thing – skills don’t come in sets

In the official statement from Barclays last week announcing the sacking of Antony Jenkins as CEO, three little words stood out.

At first I did not notice them as I was too dumbfounded by the rest of it. Never was there a more naked display of cunning contained within a Regulatory News Service announcement. Here was a newly installed chairman deposing his CEO and temporarily promoting himself – without giving the impression of doing anything nasty at all.

John McFarlane got his deputy chairman and all the non-executives to stand in front of him and take responsibility for the deed, claiming merely to “respect and endorse the position of the board”.

He went on to profess himself disappointed not to have worked with the sacked CEO for longer, to offer him “personal thanks” before going on to make his main point. He, John McFarlane, was going to be brilliant at running the bank. “I have experienced good results in dealing with these matters elsewhere,” he gloated.

It was only after I stopped marvelling at the apparent duplicity, the speed and the terrifying self-satisfaction of the new Barclays chairman, that I noticed the three words.

The reason that Mr Jenkins had to go, the announcement said, was that he no longer had the right “set of skills”. It explained: “It became clear to all of us that a new set of skills were required for the period ahead.” How logical, how impersonal and how very clear that sounds.

New skills

But what does it mean? What are these new skills that the bank needs for the period ahead that it didn’t need for the period behind? I phoned the bank’s PR man and put the question to him. He admitted he didn’t know and scurried off to fetch the chairman.

Mr McFarlane duly came on the line and started to explain to me that Barclays was very big – just like a tanker. I said I already knew this, and it wasn’t quite what I was after. He then laid out the four new skills he was looking for in Mr Jenkins’ replacement: a) strategic vision; b) charisma; c) “the ability to put plans in place that deliver shareholder value”; and d) “ability to ensure results are delivered”, which strikes me as a slightly more threatening reiteration of skill c).

I protested that these things weren’t skills exactly, and in any case the need for them wasn’t new – they were just as necessary in the past as they were now. From Mr McFarlane’s reply I was left with the distinct impression that what was new about these skills was that the departing CEO didn’t possess them.

Which proves the point. Whenever anyone starts banging on about a need for new skillsets, they mean the incumbent isn't up to the job.

The very idea of a skillset (or skill set – no one seems able to decide whether it is one or two words) is a relatively recent one. It started to appear in the dry writings of academics in psychology journals in the 1970s, but migrated to management literature in the 1980s, and is now everywhere. There is hardly a LinkedIn profile that doesn’t have a skillset in it.

Yet skills do not come in sets. They are not like a train set, which consists of tracks, engines, carriages, stations, signals, junctions, bridges and tunnels that all fit together nicely. Instead, the skillset of a leader is a mix of things that are not skills at all, but a mishmash of experience and aspects of personality. Trading derivatives is a skill. Charisma is not. It is a personality trait.

Abilities

The word skillset is almost always used about jobs for which there is little agreement on the abilities required to do them. Engineers and electricians are deemed to have skills; managers and leaders to have skillsets. The word makes things that are necessarily imprecise sound almost scientific. Hiring decisions can be defended by saying “x has the requisite skillset” while firings can be made to sound equally defensible, by claiming the absence of an appropriate one.

When Ellen Pao, former interim CEO of Reddit, unsuccessfully sued a previous employer for sex discrimination, the lawyer for Kleiner Perkins said discrimination had nothing to do with it: Ms Pao was "an employee who never had a skillset".

To invoke skillsets in hiring is not only ugly, but dangerous. Finding the right person to run a big bank is very hard, and having a list of skills that you are matching an applicant against is not necessarily the best way of going about it. Yet, if Barclays insists on doing it this way, it has omitted a couple of vital skills from the CEO set – the skill to win a bare-knuckled fight with the head of the investment bank, and the skill to win the support of the chairman, who is not called Mac the Knife for nothing.

Had Mr Jenkins either of these skills in his set, he might have lasted in the job a little longer. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015