Building a resilient organisation through Competence Development

All organisations survive owing to the paying customer. These organisations were started by those who could dream (have vision), gamble (take risk) and act (deliver). Once they realised that their ideas and actions worked, more jumped in to the fray to win the hearts and purses of the customers.

 Challenges to organisations are fickle minded customers, fierce competitors, new technologies and increased expectations from the stakeholders (employees, investors, and the public). No organisation can rest long on past laurels. They must continue to dream, gamble and act. We use the term ‘competence’ to denote the knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable an organisation to exhibit a constant readiness to survive. Organisational competence is an ‘average’ of the competence of all ‘professionals’ of the organisation. Competence is not merely being able to do the job. It is also about knowing the gaps that prevent a person from doing his/her best. It is about anticipating changes and being change agents themselves.

 Even in best of businesses, development is limited to top-down and one time or periodic ‘needs analysis’ and ‘training’. At best, this works if the need gaps are big. It merely enables the employees to ‘do the job’, let alone enable the specialists such as engineers, technicians and nurses to achieve

mastery in their area of work and initiate change process. It also does not guard against ‘unauthentic’ competencies which can largely remain unnoticed. Reasons for this are many...training departments not aligned with

the business process, assessment difficulties, HR overemphasis on ‘soft skills’, employee cynicism to the training programs, use of interchangeably used fashionable jargon (knowledge, competency, innovation), management’s focus ‘on here & now’ etc.

 I believe a successful competence development program is about the successful articulation of micro competencies. It is about developing a bottom-up approach for creating a pipeline of micro competency definitions to the training department. It is enabling & empowering the individual to identify and develop portable competencies for his professional success. It is about individualising the learning needs and making everybody a winner. It is creating networks and enabling people to ‘steal ideas’ to take shortest routes to development. It is forming cross functional teams to work on new projects. It is mining the capabilities and converting them in to new products. It is all these and more.

 Implementing this program must be fun. The program should build excitement and improve motivational levels.

In short it is making every one in the organisation dream, gamble and deliver.