Building anything requires us to follow the rules of building a building. No building can be built without a plan and no plan can be made without knowing the purpose.
Similarly, organisations that seek to build competency and capability must first seek, clarify and affirm their purpose. It is only when the goal is clear that a plan can be made to reach it; else which direction will you take if you don’t know your destination ? Once the road to be taken is decided, a study of the distance and the terrain is to be made to ascertain the kind of “competencies” and “capabilities” required to successfully complete the journey.
Organisations must begin the “competency/capability building journey” with first defining what they wish to do, where they aim to reach in the next decade or so. Often such advice is met with a blank stare, “How can I say anything about the next ten years when I do not even know what will happen next year?”
This is a twisted response. Nobody can say what will happen next day, much less next year or the next 10 years. But one can certainly say where “one wishes to be or reach” in the next 10 years. This distinction needs to be clearly understood – organisations have to articulate where they want to be, which is different from predicting what the future is going to be – an almost impossible task.
For example a drug company may say that it wishes to discover at least one new drug every three years and have one of its drugs amongst the top 3 drugs in the cardio care area or a petroleum company may say that it wishes to have one petrol pump every 50 Km along all national highways or a consumer durable company may decide that it wishes to offer a full range of both white and brown goods by such and such time.
This kind of “desire” needs to be clearly and specifically articulated, for it is only in this “ambition context” can one define and assess the kinds of competencies that are required. And it can be asserted that such ‘desire-stipulation’ can be – and is – certainly made.
The next refinement that will come is in the choice of the means to be adopted to reach the desired goal. For example, is growth going to be organic or through acquisitions; both require different competencies. Is the market going to be regional or national or global – once again, as can be readily appreciated, different competencies and capabilities are called for.
This longish preliminary discussion was essential to underscore the need for spending sufficient time organizationally to define or identify one’s goals, and the planned means of reaching them. Very often, we have found that companies plan for and work towards acquiring competencies that only serve short-term and very focused sectoral requirements. As a result, they almost always find themselves inadequately positioned and prepared for the long haul, and yet shift the blame to inadequacy of “good” people rather than recognize that it is more a case of not having the “right” people because one did not care to figure out in advance what kind of people were required in the first place.
Assuming that the goals are clear and the direction more or less agreed upon now, and, as a result, the desired competencies/capabilities are identified, the next step would be to estimate the gap between what is needed and what is available.
This gap should not be seen only in the context of quantity (i.e. number of persons required possessing a particular competency) or quality (i.e. the degree of competency in a particular area) but also a third dimension viz., time i.e. when will that competency be available in the quantity and of the quality desired.
Very often, this last factor is lost sight of during the planning process and therefore, despite having the right people or right kind of people, organisations still suffer because they are not all available at the time that they are required to be operational.
You can see that we are slowly veering round to the old and classical function of manpower planning. With due respect to all the dynamism that today’s managers possess (or claim to possess) and the even more aggressively asserted market orientation of HR that whatever talent you need is available in the “market-place” if you are prepared to pay the right price, may I submit that mere procurement of the right or best talent from the market place does not work in automatically imbuing the organisations with those competencies that the newcomer is purported to possess?
In fact, it may be worthwhile considering as to what we mean when we say “building competency and capabilities”. Does it mean an assemblage of people possessing the specified competencies? I feel it goes behind that. What is unstated in the phrase “building competencies and capabilities” is that it should read as “building organisational capabilities and competencies”. If you accept this formulation then a mere assemblage of right talent is not enough; it also requires a follow-through process which transfers such capabilities, in as complete a manner as possible, to various other people in the organisation so that it becomes a property of the whole organisation and is no longer dependent on the presence of one or two individuals having that particular competency.
Let us for a moment consider the case of an organisation that wishes to develop competency in the area of “customer–orientation” or “customer-sensitivity”. Assume you hire two extremely talented people who have this particular trait or competency. Can we then say that because of these two “customer-oriented” experts, the organisation itself has become “customer-oriented”? If that were so, what would be the fate of the organization if these two experts were to walk away? Can an organization afford to risk such an abject dependence on some individuals?
Hence what needs to be understood is that mere procurement of the required competency is not enough; it requires to be processed so that it gets ingrained in the rest of the organisations and becomes an organisational trait rather than only an individual one.
If this aspect of “processing” is accepted then we are now talking of a different journey viz, building the organisation. This is what building an organisation is all about – building systems and values that survive time and people, and tying every existing and future member to a certain chosen “way of working”. That, in essence, provides a unique signature to that organisation. It also means that people who come fresh into the organisation acquire certain capabilities that tie in with the organisation’s value systems as well as support its business objectives.
What does this orientation on building capabilities and competencies mean? It means that this is a long journey and not a “fast food order” that can be picked off a standard menu. It means that the organisation must be prepared to teach/train its employees to acquire the desired competencies, and the employees should be willing and eager to learn. This was the genesis of the “old trainee” system in the organisations of the old -- be it the Tata group or Hindustan Lever or ITC or ICI or GKW (in their heydays) or DCM where many of its highly successful and high-profile CEOs had joined the organisations fresh from college as Management or Engineer Trainees, and worked their way up, building up competencies – their and the organisation’s -- along their way up.
Unfortunately, this seems to have gone out of fashion in today’s “dynamic world” where everything is available by purchase and seemingly, money is the only determinant for acquiring talent. Perhaps, one may concede that money is the only determinant to acquire talent but it isn’t easy to agree that such acquisition embeds such talent in the organisation automatically. Look at what is happening in Reliance Retail. The country’s best retail talent has been purchased by Reliance at salary of Rs. Crores upwards -- an extremely fast and sure-shot way of building competencies and capabilities in retail area. Or so one would think. Yet, what happens on the ground? Rajeev Karwal, the king of Consumer Durable retail (with major success in LG and not such great success in Philips and Electrolux) wooed by Mukesh Ambanii leaves within 5/6 months of his joining.
Just as a theoretical extrapolation, imagine for a moment that all the high profile Retail champs recruited by Reliance, be it from RPG or Pantaloon or Shopper’s Stop leave Reliance today, will we find Reliance having the capabilities or competence for Retail?
On the other hand, if 5 senior mangers of HLL leave today, will HLL collapse or be bereft of competency or capability in the FMCG business? Of course, not. Clearly, therefore, building is something different from acquiring and this is the major point that this article wishes to make.
Every building requires a plan, a foundation, a bonding of bricks and mortar, a casting of slabs that requires its natural time for curing and setting so that the shelter it provides is of a permanent nature or certainly of a significantly long-term nature.
Hence the first acceptance about building competency and capability is that is not a “press button” affair. It takes time, which the organisation must be prepared to invest. Secondly, it needs to be done continuously just as a tree needs constant care and tending till it strikes firm roots. Thirdly, it needs to be constantly upgraded and modified to suit changing circumstance and demands of the business, as the latter evolves.
Finally, it calls for a teaching/training role for every manager. This is a major premise. If this is accepted, it means the selection of managers must take this “personality trait” into account and not merely the qualifications and the applicant’s ability to get things done as the only criterion for selection. I would even go so far as to say that between an excellent performer and an average performer I would bend towards the latter applicant if he/she is a better teacher.
What are the tools for building such competencies.
• Clearly teaching/training, as an integral part of the organisation’s functioning, is the first requirement.
This is best exemplified by the armed forces where every recruit is an absolute fresher (who knows nothing about the army or fighting or defending even though he possesses the minimal qualifications of physique and literacy). All of what he knows is taught to him by his employer and the army is no poorer in its capabilities and competencies when it comes to defending the country.
• Next, performance appraisal systems are required that reward both good teaching/training as well as good learning. Most performance appraisal forms or KRA listings do not touch upon this aspect at all.
• A working atmosphere that permits and, to some extent, even encourages mistakes so that the spirit of experimentation (which, many social scientists believe, lies at the foundation of all learning and innovation) is kindled and supported. A favorite “management guru advice” today is “innovation”; it needs to be understood that behind all innovation lies experimentation, the errors and failures that any experimentation entails and the re-experimentation that follows. It is only this iterative experimentation that can result in positive outcomes and breakthroughs. True, all experimentation does not lead to innovation but there cannot be any innovation without experimentation.
• A fair degree of “functional autonomy” which is not diluted by “administrative authority”, while ensuring that the minimum requirements of decorum and organisational discipline are adhered to by all, no matter how brilliant or valuable the individual is.
The best way to understand this is to consider a parallel from Hindustani Classical music. Every “raga” has a rigid discipline about the “sargam” used and the “beat” to be employed; yet within the confines of this “basic discipline”, every singer has full freedom to interpret, innovate and experiment with his “version” of that “raga”. This is what creates brilliant music.
Can organisations achieve this ambience -- maintaining basic discipline and yet allowing full freedom to experiment and interpret as per the individual genius of the employee? If they can do it, I have no doubt that the only result will be “world-beating performances”.
So how is this to be done in practice? Start from the beginning:
• Spend time and effort on recruitment and selection.
• Clarify your requirements so that you get the right recruits.
• Develop the right filters so that you select the right candidates from amongst the recruits you have attracted. Interview seriously and only after due preparation. Have multiple interviews to enable different aspects to come out and get assessed. Don’t act busy and don’t play smart – “I can assess any person in ten minutes time” !!
• Nurture them well through their early years in the organisation through well-conceived and continuously updated, induction programmes, periodic training and challenging assignments.
• Allow them the freedom to experiment and make mistakes; only this will enable them to learn from their [and others’] mistakes and thus bring out their best.
• Reward the performers generously; guide and counsel the laggards sincerely.
• If some of the latter do not respond to these inputs or simply cannot fit in despite your best efforts, do not hesitate to pluck out the weeds and cast them aside.
• Finally, ensure that every rising star -- indeed, every employee --has a mentor to whom he or she can turn to in times of confusion, successive failures or career disappointments so that they get the necessary emotional support to shrug off the past and get back to the work in hand with renewed energy and enthusiasm.
If the above is accepted, then recruitment and selection, training and teaching, nurturing and mentoring become the key competencies/ capabilities that an organisation must possess to “build competency and capability”.
This is my prescription for building competency and capability. It may appear that this is a rather passive prescription which is not action-oriented. If you think so, you are absolutely right.
I do not subscribe to the view that to build, you must build. Rather, my view is that to build, you must allow.
Your only task, as an organization i.e the top management, in this case, is to specify, as clearly as you can and as many times as necessary, the grand plan, the vision, the destination that you wish to reach. Then allow the employees to fashion the route map, decide the means they will employ and the technology they will use. Competency and capability required for such execution will get built alongside without any intervention from you.
Building organisational capability is not the role of the organization per se; allowing it to be built and providing the ambience to do so is their real responsibility and challenge. They need only define the goal and employees will build the competency and the capability themselves.
Organisations have to act as the enabler and resource provider for the employees to build competency and capability and the results achieved will be more organic, long-lasting and uniquely suited to the organisation than any overt intervention or action by the top management.
mumbai
December 15, 2006
Similarly, organisations that seek to build competency and capability must first seek, clarify and affirm their purpose. It is only when the goal is clear that a plan can be made to reach it; else which direction will you take if you don’t know your destination ? Once the road to be taken is decided, a study of the distance and the terrain is to be made to ascertain the kind of “competencies” and “capabilities” required to successfully complete the journey.
Organisations must begin the “competency/capability building journey” with first defining what they wish to do, where they aim to reach in the next decade or so. Often such advice is met with a blank stare, “How can I say anything about the next ten years when I do not even know what will happen next year?”
This is a twisted response. Nobody can say what will happen next day, much less next year or the next 10 years. But one can certainly say where “one wishes to be or reach” in the next 10 years. This distinction needs to be clearly understood – organisations have to articulate where they want to be, which is different from predicting what the future is going to be – an almost impossible task.
For example a drug company may say that it wishes to discover at least one new drug every three years and have one of its drugs amongst the top 3 drugs in the cardio care area or a petroleum company may say that it wishes to have one petrol pump every 50 Km along all national highways or a consumer durable company may decide that it wishes to offer a full range of both white and brown goods by such and such time.
This kind of “desire” needs to be clearly and specifically articulated, for it is only in this “ambition context” can one define and assess the kinds of competencies that are required. And it can be asserted that such ‘desire-stipulation’ can be – and is – certainly made.
The next refinement that will come is in the choice of the means to be adopted to reach the desired goal. For example, is growth going to be organic or through acquisitions; both require different competencies. Is the market going to be regional or national or global – once again, as can be readily appreciated, different competencies and capabilities are called for.
This longish preliminary discussion was essential to underscore the need for spending sufficient time organizationally to define or identify one’s goals, and the planned means of reaching them. Very often, we have found that companies plan for and work towards acquiring competencies that only serve short-term and very focused sectoral requirements. As a result, they almost always find themselves inadequately positioned and prepared for the long haul, and yet shift the blame to inadequacy of “good” people rather than recognize that it is more a case of not having the “right” people because one did not care to figure out in advance what kind of people were required in the first place.
Assuming that the goals are clear and the direction more or less agreed upon now, and, as a result, the desired competencies/capabilities are identified, the next step would be to estimate the gap between what is needed and what is available.
This gap should not be seen only in the context of quantity (i.e. number of persons required possessing a particular competency) or quality (i.e. the degree of competency in a particular area) but also a third dimension viz., time i.e. when will that competency be available in the quantity and of the quality desired.
Very often, this last factor is lost sight of during the planning process and therefore, despite having the right people or right kind of people, organisations still suffer because they are not all available at the time that they are required to be operational.
You can see that we are slowly veering round to the old and classical function of manpower planning. With due respect to all the dynamism that today’s managers possess (or claim to possess) and the even more aggressively asserted market orientation of HR that whatever talent you need is available in the “market-place” if you are prepared to pay the right price, may I submit that mere procurement of the right or best talent from the market place does not work in automatically imbuing the organisations with those competencies that the newcomer is purported to possess?
In fact, it may be worthwhile considering as to what we mean when we say “building competency and capabilities”. Does it mean an assemblage of people possessing the specified competencies? I feel it goes behind that. What is unstated in the phrase “building competencies and capabilities” is that it should read as “building organisational capabilities and competencies”. If you accept this formulation then a mere assemblage of right talent is not enough; it also requires a follow-through process which transfers such capabilities, in as complete a manner as possible, to various other people in the organisation so that it becomes a property of the whole organisation and is no longer dependent on the presence of one or two individuals having that particular competency.
Let us for a moment consider the case of an organisation that wishes to develop competency in the area of “customer–orientation” or “customer-sensitivity”. Assume you hire two extremely talented people who have this particular trait or competency. Can we then say that because of these two “customer-oriented” experts, the organisation itself has become “customer-oriented”? If that were so, what would be the fate of the organization if these two experts were to walk away? Can an organization afford to risk such an abject dependence on some individuals?
Hence what needs to be understood is that mere procurement of the required competency is not enough; it requires to be processed so that it gets ingrained in the rest of the organisations and becomes an organisational trait rather than only an individual one.
If this aspect of “processing” is accepted then we are now talking of a different journey viz, building the organisation. This is what building an organisation is all about – building systems and values that survive time and people, and tying every existing and future member to a certain chosen “way of working”. That, in essence, provides a unique signature to that organisation. It also means that people who come fresh into the organisation acquire certain capabilities that tie in with the organisation’s value systems as well as support its business objectives.
What does this orientation on building capabilities and competencies mean? It means that this is a long journey and not a “fast food order” that can be picked off a standard menu. It means that the organisation must be prepared to teach/train its employees to acquire the desired competencies, and the employees should be willing and eager to learn. This was the genesis of the “old trainee” system in the organisations of the old -- be it the Tata group or Hindustan Lever or ITC or ICI or GKW (in their heydays) or DCM where many of its highly successful and high-profile CEOs had joined the organisations fresh from college as Management or Engineer Trainees, and worked their way up, building up competencies – their and the organisation’s -- along their way up.
Unfortunately, this seems to have gone out of fashion in today’s “dynamic world” where everything is available by purchase and seemingly, money is the only determinant for acquiring talent. Perhaps, one may concede that money is the only determinant to acquire talent but it isn’t easy to agree that such acquisition embeds such talent in the organisation automatically. Look at what is happening in Reliance Retail. The country’s best retail talent has been purchased by Reliance at salary of Rs. Crores upwards -- an extremely fast and sure-shot way of building competencies and capabilities in retail area. Or so one would think. Yet, what happens on the ground? Rajeev Karwal, the king of Consumer Durable retail (with major success in LG and not such great success in Philips and Electrolux) wooed by Mukesh Ambanii leaves within 5/6 months of his joining.
Just as a theoretical extrapolation, imagine for a moment that all the high profile Retail champs recruited by Reliance, be it from RPG or Pantaloon or Shopper’s Stop leave Reliance today, will we find Reliance having the capabilities or competence for Retail?
On the other hand, if 5 senior mangers of HLL leave today, will HLL collapse or be bereft of competency or capability in the FMCG business? Of course, not. Clearly, therefore, building is something different from acquiring and this is the major point that this article wishes to make.
Every building requires a plan, a foundation, a bonding of bricks and mortar, a casting of slabs that requires its natural time for curing and setting so that the shelter it provides is of a permanent nature or certainly of a significantly long-term nature.
Hence the first acceptance about building competency and capability is that is not a “press button” affair. It takes time, which the organisation must be prepared to invest. Secondly, it needs to be done continuously just as a tree needs constant care and tending till it strikes firm roots. Thirdly, it needs to be constantly upgraded and modified to suit changing circumstance and demands of the business, as the latter evolves.
Finally, it calls for a teaching/training role for every manager. This is a major premise. If this is accepted, it means the selection of managers must take this “personality trait” into account and not merely the qualifications and the applicant’s ability to get things done as the only criterion for selection. I would even go so far as to say that between an excellent performer and an average performer I would bend towards the latter applicant if he/she is a better teacher.
What are the tools for building such competencies.
• Clearly teaching/training, as an integral part of the organisation’s functioning, is the first requirement.
This is best exemplified by the armed forces where every recruit is an absolute fresher (who knows nothing about the army or fighting or defending even though he possesses the minimal qualifications of physique and literacy). All of what he knows is taught to him by his employer and the army is no poorer in its capabilities and competencies when it comes to defending the country.
• Next, performance appraisal systems are required that reward both good teaching/training as well as good learning. Most performance appraisal forms or KRA listings do not touch upon this aspect at all.
• A working atmosphere that permits and, to some extent, even encourages mistakes so that the spirit of experimentation (which, many social scientists believe, lies at the foundation of all learning and innovation) is kindled and supported. A favorite “management guru advice” today is “innovation”; it needs to be understood that behind all innovation lies experimentation, the errors and failures that any experimentation entails and the re-experimentation that follows. It is only this iterative experimentation that can result in positive outcomes and breakthroughs. True, all experimentation does not lead to innovation but there cannot be any innovation without experimentation.
• A fair degree of “functional autonomy” which is not diluted by “administrative authority”, while ensuring that the minimum requirements of decorum and organisational discipline are adhered to by all, no matter how brilliant or valuable the individual is.
The best way to understand this is to consider a parallel from Hindustani Classical music. Every “raga” has a rigid discipline about the “sargam” used and the “beat” to be employed; yet within the confines of this “basic discipline”, every singer has full freedom to interpret, innovate and experiment with his “version” of that “raga”. This is what creates brilliant music.
Can organisations achieve this ambience -- maintaining basic discipline and yet allowing full freedom to experiment and interpret as per the individual genius of the employee? If they can do it, I have no doubt that the only result will be “world-beating performances”.
So how is this to be done in practice? Start from the beginning:
• Spend time and effort on recruitment and selection.
• Clarify your requirements so that you get the right recruits.
• Develop the right filters so that you select the right candidates from amongst the recruits you have attracted. Interview seriously and only after due preparation. Have multiple interviews to enable different aspects to come out and get assessed. Don’t act busy and don’t play smart – “I can assess any person in ten minutes time” !!
• Nurture them well through their early years in the organisation through well-conceived and continuously updated, induction programmes, periodic training and challenging assignments.
• Allow them the freedom to experiment and make mistakes; only this will enable them to learn from their [and others’] mistakes and thus bring out their best.
• Reward the performers generously; guide and counsel the laggards sincerely.
• If some of the latter do not respond to these inputs or simply cannot fit in despite your best efforts, do not hesitate to pluck out the weeds and cast them aside.
• Finally, ensure that every rising star -- indeed, every employee --has a mentor to whom he or she can turn to in times of confusion, successive failures or career disappointments so that they get the necessary emotional support to shrug off the past and get back to the work in hand with renewed energy and enthusiasm.
If the above is accepted, then recruitment and selection, training and teaching, nurturing and mentoring become the key competencies/ capabilities that an organisation must possess to “build competency and capability”.
This is my prescription for building competency and capability. It may appear that this is a rather passive prescription which is not action-oriented. If you think so, you are absolutely right.
I do not subscribe to the view that to build, you must build. Rather, my view is that to build, you must allow.
Your only task, as an organization i.e the top management, in this case, is to specify, as clearly as you can and as many times as necessary, the grand plan, the vision, the destination that you wish to reach. Then allow the employees to fashion the route map, decide the means they will employ and the technology they will use. Competency and capability required for such execution will get built alongside without any intervention from you.
Building organisational capability is not the role of the organization per se; allowing it to be built and providing the ambience to do so is their real responsibility and challenge. They need only define the goal and employees will build the competency and the capability themselves.
Organisations have to act as the enabler and resource provider for the employees to build competency and capability and the results achieved will be more organic, long-lasting and uniquely suited to the organisation than any overt intervention or action by the top management.
mumbai
December 15, 2006
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