Using core and leadership competencies to reinforce organizational culture
About McKinstry
McKinstry is a national leader in designing, constructing, operating and maintaining high-performing buildings. From new construction and ongoing operations to adaptive reuse and energy retrofits, the company provides a single point of accountability across the entire building lifecycle.
The Challenge: Bringing organizational culture to life
Theresa Little, Senior Employee Development Consultant, and her team had a task on their hands: how to bring clarity to the specific behaviors that lead to organizational success?
Many companies have well-articulated corporate values, and McKinstry was no different. They had four well-established company values that provided a strong foundation for success over the past 60 years, but wanted to provide their employees with more direction that supported individual performance and career growth.
Leaders needed to understand the behaviors that were most important to their culture so that they could be reinforced, recognized, and included as the basis for all talent development programs.
The Solution: Core and leadership competencies
HRSG’s team of HR specialists and industrial organizational psychologists helped McKinstry address the challenge of bringing their culture to life by selecting core competencies that aligned with each core value. Whereas values identify a core belief, core competencies outline the specific, observable behaviors that demonstrate the value in action. This helps solidify the expected behaviors required of all employees. Next, HRSG helped McKinstry select the specific leadership competencies that were most important to their culture. These competencies were designed to crystallize the specific behaviors required of leaders at each organizational level.
Finally, the core and leadership competencies would help establish a solid foundation for employee development at McKinstry. As part of the business case, they explained that the implementation of a new competency model would support the full talent management life cycle including:
1. Recruitment and Onboarding – How will we hire and select the best?
2. Talent Development – How will we develop our people?
3. Performance Management – How will we evaluate performance results and behaviors?
4. Workforce Planning – How will we plan for the future?
5. Succession Planning – Who will be our next leaders?
The Results: A foundation for assessment and development
At the end of the engagement, McKinstry had the core and leadership competencies they needed to effectively assess, guide, and develop leaders and employees to align their workplace behaviors to organizational culture.
McKinstry has started using their new competencies to build a learning curriculum and to assess talent. They have piloted selected competencies and behaviors in talent development programs, including their manager development cohorts.
