Why You Should Develop Tools, Methods and Standard Procedures for Building Organisational Capability
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SubscribeOrganisational capability is the sum of all its parts: skills, knowledge, and behaviours. Building each of those is key to success.
Building organisational capability isn’t just about developing the skills and competencies of your workforce. It also means building the tools, methods and standard procedures to continue developing your workforce’s organisational capability in the future.
What are the benefits of developing tools, methods and standard procedures for building organisational capability?
The main benefit of developing tools and methods for capability building? The process becomes scalable.
There are always growing pains associated with knowledge sharing as your organisation evolves. The larger your workforce, the more roles you’re likely to have, which means more capabilities and a greater need for support structures for those capabilities.
Scalable knowledge systems help to mitigate hurdles that arise with new hires, new teams, new locations and even new goals. Plus, having the right tools, methods and procedures in place means that successes can be replicated.
As we said, capabilities encompass tools, methods and processes—so, without them, you’re really creating solid capabilities to begin with. And since capabilities are the foundation of your organisation, you’re going to be working with poor data when doing capability assessments and other capability development plans.
This is really the main reason why methods, tools and procedures should be part of organisational capability from the start. You can use them to streamline or even automate the capability building process, from assessing current and needed capabilities to laying out a framework for building capability.
What are the challenges of developing tools, methods and procedures for building organisational capability?
Your organisation is only as strong as its foundation. That foundation encompasses the structures designed to support strategic outcomes: What you have determined are critical knowledge, behaviours and skills. Capabilities take these and multiply them by the tools, methods, systems and processes you have in place to create structured and standardised ways of work. That’s things like centralised knowledge systems, documentation, development programs, and capability and skills assessments.
Consider how that impacts not only organisational goals, but also performance reviews, role design, succession planning and organisational development. Lacking a foundation of standardised systems means you lack the ability to enact even baseline business activities.
That’s before you even consider that industry trends will change the skills, knowledge, tools and even mindsets needed in your capabilities. Without support structures in place that standardise the way in which capabilities are defined, assessed and developed, you could find it infinitely harder to create truly sustainable structures while simultaneously matching an external pace of change.
What are the impacts of not developing tools, methods and standard procedures for building organisational capability?
In short? You may find capability building a costly and unsuccessful enterprise.
The long answer is that standardised (and often centralised) tools, methods and procedures maintain BAU. That leaves you room to innovate, seek best practices and better position yourself as a strategic business partner—but the inverse scenario sees you too entrenched in less critical tasks to generate that high-value impact.
It may also mean that capabilities themselves are weak or inaccurate. That’s because you’ll likely be without the quality data offered by replicable tools and procedures to create impactful programs to begin with, meaning you’re always on the back foot when it comes to proving value. Capability assessments are one such procedure; without which, you’ll have very little understanding of the organisational impacts of your capabilities at all. That’s without even mentioning how constant false starts, poor systems for knowledge discovery and transfer or meaningless training programs will degrade learner motivation amongst your workforce.