What are three sure-fire ways to frustrate and disengage your employees?

1. Don’t tell them what they need to do to be successful. 

2. Don’t give them the ability to see if they have the skills to accomplish what they need to do. 

3. Don’t give them the opportunity to close skill gaps.

In a Deloitte study on human capital trends in 2015, skills gaps and employee engagement problems were top of mind for 87 percent of the leaders in HR and executive management. Only 14 percent of learning and development (L&D) leaders believed business leaders view them as strategic partners, with 52 percent seen as mediocre partners or worse. This is because skills gaps and employee disengagement continue to grow, and leadership doesn’t see L&D as the solution.

Want to ensure that your business leaders don’t view you as a strategic partner? Follow these three steps.

Don’t tell your employees what they need to be successful.

A competency model describes what it looks like to be great in each role. It defines the skills required to execute the corporate strategy in a specific role. If you don’t want to tell your employees what they need to be successful, don’t create a competency model for each role.

Don’t give your employees the ability to see if they have the skills to accomplish what they need to do.

To make a competency model actionable, you need to enable people to self-assess against it and identify their specific skills gaps. If you don’t want to give your employees the ability to see if they have the skills required for their role, don’t enable them to self-assess against that model with a competency assessment tool.

Don’t give your employees the opportunity to close skill gaps.

After people have self-assessed against a competency model for their jobs and know what specific skill gaps they have, you need to automate the identification of competency-based learning relevant to their needs, known as personalized learning. This eliminates guessing. If you don’t want to give your employees the opportunity to close skill gaps, don’t provide a personalized learning plan. Just hope that their managers can coach them up.