Do you know what the core competencies of your company are? Is there just one or are there many organizational attributes? If you answered that there are many, how would you describe them succinctly? Core competencies are one or a combination of some unique or rare skills; however, a description of core competencies is not simply a long list of various organizational attributes. It seems like a simple task, but naming your core competencies can be very difficult. This is because we as business leaders or managers get caught up in the day-to-day tactical tasks that we perform and often confuse them with our core competencies.
Years ago, when I walked to the flight line to take my first solo flight in an F-15 fighter, I was struck by an all-encompassing passion that has driven me and all my team members to achieve the success. That passion was defining and teaching the core principles that helped me, a Kentucky farmer, become one of the few elite fighter pilots in the US Air Force.Every individual on my team shares that passion. Be it a fighter pilot, a US Navy SEAL, a US Army Ranger, a Delta Force or Special Forces operator, or one of many other classes of military professionals of Elite. We have built a great company. But we've done it with a clear understanding of our core competencies and organizational attributes that have guided us for years.
Defining Your Core Competencies: Examining Complex Organizational Attributes
Often times, your true core competencies are elusive and difficult to pin down, making it difficult to define your competencies, even when examining the attributes of your organization. However, I believe that an expression of their true core competencies can be articulated simply and elegantly.
Expressing core competencies is about getting to the root cause of why you do what you do and what makes it successful. A core technical competency dictionary is not a mission or vision statement; nor is it a statement of competitive advantage. It is not a statement of the level of quality of the products it manufactures or the services it provides. A core competence is something more fundamental. It is both a fundamental cause of success and an expression of the unique character of the organization or its reason for being. A simple and elegantly expressed core competency is a summary of what is likely to be a complex set of organizational attributes.
Proof of the complexity of a core competency can be found in the way that academics in the field of business management and leadership have defined the term. In his 1990 Harvard Business Review article titled "The Core Competence of the Corporation," C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel argue that an organization's core competencies can be attributed to success in a wide variety of markets, increase perceived customer value, and avoid imitation of competitors. The authors conclude that these benefits are due to a "complex harmonization" of organizational attributes, creating core competencies.
How passion contributes to core competencies
Jim Collins characterized basic competencies as "hedgehog" traits in his book "Good to Great." Rather than describing these competencies in terms of benefits, Collins describes them in terms of three dimensions: what can you be better at in the world; what drives its economic engine; and what you are deeply passionate about. Although each is important, it is often the last "dimension" that falls outside of an organization's description of its organizational attributes. What he is passionate about is an essential competence: it is the fire in his stomach that drives him to do what must be done every day. Without that passion, descriptions of these core competencies are simply statements of what you do well and do not include what you love. Describing the passion that drives your organization is essential to overcoming complexity and arriving at the simple and elegant truth of your organization's identity.
The science of physics offers an excellent example of simplicity and elegance. Physicists are often driven to refine their theories to an "elegant" formula. Physics is an elegant science because it seeks to find the fundamental laws of the universe. For this reason, physicists call these laws "fancy" because they are, in essence, simple and effective.
For example, consider the famous formula E = mc2. This formula simply states that energy is equal to mass times the square of the speed of light.
