Competences

What a competence is

A competence isn’t the same thing as knowledge. It’s the ability to see an activity through by putting three things together: knowing, knowing how, and knowing how to organise yourself. The first two without the third stay potential.

It depends on the person and it depends on the context. The same person is competent in one organisation and much less so in another, which makes assessing competences in the abstract fairly useless.

The question first, then the inventory

The right order is the one that occurs to you second. You don’t start from the competences that exist, you start from the ones that are needed: first you define what the company has to be able to do to get where it has decided to go, then you look at how much of that is already there, and at what level.

Done the other way round, an inventory of competences becomes a photograph with no criterion behind it, useful to nobody.

The uncomfortable step is assessing the level honestly. It’s the one where it’s easiest to be generous with yourself.

Technical and managerial

Small companies almost always start from technical competences, which are the visible ones and the ones the business was founded on. They’re necessary, and they’re rarely the ones that make the difference.

What moves the result is more often managerial competence, and that holds as true in a multinational as in a family business. They’re also the ones that get invested in last, because they look less urgent than everything else.

Buy or build

Some competences can be bought. Vodafone was strong in mobile and weaker in fixed line, and instead of building that capability internally it bought Tele2, which already had it.

The criterion you can take from that is a practical one. Competences you can find on the market are not the core business. The ones you can’t buy, because they come out of the particular combination of resources and people who are there, are hard to imitate and are exactly the ones worth investing in, protecting and growing.

Where it sits in the path

Competences come after the Vision. The vision says where you want to get to and stays on the plane of imagination. Here you come down to the concrete and ask what you get there with.

It’s the point where a lot of development paths stop. The objective has been defined, and when it comes to saying with which tools and which knowledge it gets reached, there’s no answer. Having the recipe without the ingredients takes you exactly where not having the recipe takes you.