How To Ease The Pain Of Communicating Culture

Changing corporate culture isn’t easy. Sometimes it feels like pulling teeth. Whether the result of a merger or acquisition, or simply the result of an internal transformation, the most difficult part is showing each person how the change in culture directly impacts them. Even when culture isn’t changing, communicating culture to new hires/new employees is tough. That’s where competency models can help.

Why competency models assist culture change

When you have a properly developed competency model, it contains the categories or competencies of things that people need to be able to do within a role to be successful. By successful, we mean to accomplish their part of corporate strategy. (For more on that, see the blog post about the value of a competency model.) The capability model also contains the tasks and skills required to demonstrate competence in each category. It contains the behavioral examples of what a skill looks like at various levels of proficiency, and the proficiency level needed for that job.

There are 2 places where we can weave corporate culture into competency models: the description of the task or skill, and the behavioral examples.

Let’s look at an example of a model’s skill: Create a partnership with the internal or external customer so they feel I work for them

When someone in the role sees this skill in their model, they learn that customer-focus is extremely important to the organization.

Here’s another: Identify opportunities for process improvement and optimization

This one communicates that you should always be looking at continuous improvement.

And this approach continues into the skill behaviors. Let’s say you are creating examples of behaviors at various levels of proficiency, and you are trying to instill a culture of learning. For the skill “Use appropriate sources to develop industry expertise and insight”, you might have the following examples, where 1 is not very good and 5 is great.

1. Occasionally read industry related publications, web sites, blogs, and new to maintain industry awareness

2. Read industry related publications, web sites, blogs, and news quarterly to maintain industry awareness

3. Dedicate at least an hour each week to reading and exploring industry information to stay up to speed

4. Receive daily news alerts from key sources including industry and customer sources and social media, but allocate 2-3 hours a week for learning

5. Recognize that the more I know about my customer’s business, the more I can help them – so I review customer news daily or as it happens and allot at least 30 minutes a day for learning

When you see those examples, and you want to be great at your job, you instantly learn that the organization thinks learning is important, and what it looks like to embrace a culture of learning.

Activating the culture change

The competency modeling process alone will not communicate or change your culture. You next need to make those models accessible. People must be able to assess their skills against them, so they become self-aware of any gaps in both skill and behavior. And they must re-assess their skills as part of a routine, so they can continue to refine their behaviors against the skills and organizational behaviors that are important, and organizational changes can be easily operationalized. For example, if the organization wanted people to spend more time each day or each week learning, they could update the behaviors which people would absorb during regular re-assessment.

If you want to ensure that the organization embraces your corporate culture, or you’re trying to change the existing culture, consider embracing competency model benefits.

Also found on LinkedIn and at ATD.