Skills & Diversity Snapshot

Treat the team as a portfolio of skills and perspectives matched against the work, not as people to be graded, and leave with a short list of gaps you will close this quarter and how.

Inclusion theory is well developed, and the evidence on diversity and its initiatives is mixed (Shore et al., 2011; meta-analysis on diversity training: Bezrukova et al., 2016). Tuckman's stage model of team development is descriptive, with mixed support (Tuckman, 1965; critique: Gersick, 1988). The skill scale, the thinking-style dimensions and the gap options are practice, not research.

Use it when:

• You are planning hires, training or contractors for the coming year.
• A team is forming or restructuring and you need to know what it can and cannot do.
• One person's absence would stop a piece of work, and you want to fix that before it happens.

Skip it when:

• You are mapping your own skills, not a team's: use 1.5 Skill Gap Map & Priority List.
• You need an organization-wide view of equality and inclusion: use 4.17 EDI Reality Check, which has the data guardrails for it.

A team is a portfolio of capabilities and perspectives to be matched against the work. Inclusion theory is well developed: Shore et al. (2011) argue that people contribute most when they both belong and are valued for what makes them distinct. The evidence that demographic diversity on its own improves performance is mixed and depends on the setting, so this page looks for gaps in experience and ways of thinking, not quotas. If the team is new, some apparent gaps are about working together rather than skill; the well-known stage model of team development is descriptive, with mixed support (Tuckman, 1965).

So the hard core is the skills table and the gap list: a required level, a current level, and a named fix with an owner. The perspectives step is a conversation starter, not a personality test. Counting identities in a small team can expose individuals, so this page keeps special categories of personal data out entirely. And the biggest payoff is often redundancy: a second person who can do the critical task, which no amount of individual talent replaces.

Start from the work, not from the people. List the skills the next twelve months require, rate the level needed, then the level the team has today, and note the gap.

Strong answer: "Tender law and procurement rules: required 4, current 2, gap 2, because only one person has run a tender above the threshold." Not: "Communication: required 5."

Scale, practice not research: 1 aware of it, needs support; 2 does it with guidance; 3 does it alone to a standard quality; 4 does it well and can teach it; 5 recognized authority others consult.

Illustrative example: the organization, roles and levels are made up.

A procurement lead in a Swedish municipality runs the snapshot with a five-person team before the yearly budget.

Section 1: tender law (required 4, current 2), contract follow-up (required 3, current 3), supplier analysis in spreadsheets (required 3, current 2), AI fluency (required 3, current 2: two people use AI tools to draft, nobody checks the output against the rules).

Section 2: the three gaps. Tender law: train the junior buyer, owner the team lead, by May. Supplier analysis: contract an analyst for the spring, owner the team lead. AI fluency: a one-page checking routine, owner the senior buyer, by March. No hire this year.

Section 3: only one person knows the contract archive; the administrator pairs on the next two renewals.

Section 4: everyone has a public-sector background, while most suppliers are small firms. Two local suppliers will read the next tender draft before it is published.