People are the heart of organisations. People make organisations. Sometimes in the myriad of activities, initiatives and deadlines, we often forget that behind the tasks and deliverables, breakthrough innovations and setbacks, are people, real people, engaging with context, making sense of situations, making decisions and performing actions.
People are at the centre of organisations, driving financial performance, controlling risk exposures and sustaining operational activities and outputs.
Capabilities determine how people behave, deliver and add value. It determines how we engage with context, how we make sense of situations, how we make decisions, what decisions we make, what we choose to do, and how we choose to do it.
Our capabilities limit or expand what we know we can achieve and what achievements we choose to pursue.
The goal in building capabilities is to help people form a clear, complete, and aspirational picture of their value through the results they can achieve in the role. To help them understand how their actions and deliverables can produce those results and help them believe they can perform the actions to achieve the results.
The idea here is not about one-off successes or some exclusive access club for a select few, but a system that scales and allows everyone to perform and grow in their role.
But this doesn’t come easily. Life is complicated. Multiple variables impact a person’s ability to be effective in various settings and situations. Configuring the right support system or architecture around each role and person in the role is key to achieving the described capability goal.
Such a system has to be true to the construct of the role, empowering the individual in the role. It has to be natively adaptive, be person-specific and must be highly scalable. Hence it must be principles/framework/architecture driven and technology-enabled.
What I am describing here is not a solution but a solution concept. A set of connected descriptive and interpretive frameworks. Together, these frameworks integrate various concepts to guide ongoing decisions on designing and configuring employee support systems that enable performance and growth.
In each organisation's context, the support system will align the performance and growth of individuals at all career levels with identifying and addressing the organisation's capability to develop and execute strategies for continued success.