Austin Powers had it right. The big screen icon’s immortal words, “Oh, behave,” aren’t just for attracting a potential mate. They work for marketing and communications career growth and team effectiveness, too.
I spend a fair bit of time these days helping companies identify technical marketing and communications competencies that will help their people grow, and their functions develop faster, more integrated capabilities. But not one – I repeat – not one of them wants to stop there.
They understand that embracing technical competencies without articulating the behaviors that make them stick is a lot like getting in a canoe without a paddle. Like peanut butter without the jelly, Laurel without Hardy. Like – well, you catch the drift.
Think about the deeply competent digital media guru who doesn’t collaborate well with others, or who doesn’t take ownership of projects in her area of accountability. Now think about the highly ethical, great-relationship-builder employee engagement professional who can’t write his way out of a paper bag. You literally can’t have one set of competencies without the other.
The technical skills are more common to find in many companies, and arguably simpler to define. Those same sets of articulated skills tend to gather dust on the shelf, too. Research shows that few marketing and communications organizations effectively launch and support growth plans tied to them. A large part of the failure, I observe, comes from a lack of attention to the “softer side” of effectiveness: the equally important behaviors.
We’re talking about the good stuff that just about everybody wants to see more of, but typically isn’t spelled out and doesn’t necessarily have metrics attached to it: working with a sense of urgency, collaborating well with team mates, getting greater perspective when developing strategies — those kinds of behaviors. They’re different for every organization.
One company’s communications group used P.O.S.S. as the acronym to help them remember Perspective, Ownership, Speed
and Skills (part of what they call P.O.S.S.- ibilities for growth). Under each of those concepts, the team further defined very specific behaviors that would help every team member become more successful. They’re specific to the most immediate needs of their function, and at a particular point in time. Other clients have used differentacronyms to capture and simplify the behaviors and make them easy to remember. Then they’ll put them on a screen saver or a laminated desk-top handout, and keep them handy. But most importantly, they constantly reference them in day-to-day interactions to reinforce the right behaviors, or correct the wrong ones.
While technical competencies most often are identified and articulated by senior leaders of marketing and communications functions, behavioral competencies are a different animal. They can be framed by leaders, but really need to be shared and enhanced with inputs from everyone in the function. That’s what ultimately gives every employee ownership in them, and
gives everyone license to hold each other accountable. When everyone gets a say in articulating the behaviors that matter, it works up, down and all around. That’s a bit of change management, too.
On the surface, it might seem like simple stuff. But without articulated behavioral competencies, moving the needle on technical skills is much tougher, and slower. With them, people can accelerate their work on the technical side of development with those softer-side skill sets, and move everything forward faster. And for organizations that want to take on the world, it’s hard to imagine a more competitive advantage. I suspect even Dr. Evil would agree.
