Adapt to Win

Chapter 11Organizational Fitness Through Capabilities and Competencies

Identifying the organizational capabilities and competencies that are essential to realize your strategic objectives and optimize your business and operating models is a critical first step toward achieving organizational fitness. Once identified and prioritized, those capabilities and competencies must be deliberately developed. Developing a great strategy and designing the ideal business and operating models are huge steps toward realizing your objectives and winning, but the organization and its employees must build the muscles to realize them. The path to achieving competitive fitness requires long-term dedication and hard work, with regular measurement and tracking of progress.

Let’s envision an enhancement to our house of strategy model (Figure 11.1) that adds supporting capabilities and competencies.

Figure 11.1 Layers supporting the house of strategy.

Capabilities and competencies are related concepts, and the distinction is not always clear. Since I’m using the word “skill” a lot, and it’s related, I’ll define it as well. For my purposes, I’m going to define and distinguish them thus:

• A skill is a person’s natural and learned ability and expertise to perform critical tasks or activities (as well as necessary “soft skills”) that enable them to function in their role and provide value to the organization. ...