Over the years that I’ve been working for GROCO and doing my radio program, American Dreams, I have met with a lot of people, many of whom are counted among the most successful and wealthiest individuals in the world. Most of my guests are also great leaders in their own right and they understand that being a leader isn’t about coming from a position of authority, it’s actually about learning to love those that you work with. To that end, I want to talk about identifying and keeping your core competencies within an organization. At the end of the day in order to implement any leadership strategy or any process, the person giving the process has to know his or her organization very well. He or she has to know the employees and they have to understand what it takes to motivate those individuals.
Identifying Your Core Competencies
When someone is looking to start a business the first thing they need to do is look at their core competencies. That means those in charge have to determine what advantages they have and what strengths they have to offer. They have to decide what their company is all about. So how do you go about identifying your core competencies? You need to look at whether or not it will have potential access to a wide variety of markets. Another question to ask is whether or not it makes a significant contribution to the perceived customer benefit of the end product? Is it something that will be difficult for your competitors to imitate?
Take Full Advantage of Your Core Competencies
It’s also important to understand that competencies are not the same as capabilities. You might have 20 or 30, or even more capabilities, but that doesn’t mean those are all core competencies. If you are about to launch a company you must be able to identify your core competencies, those things that you do well or better than anyone else. The business world is always changing, new technologies come and go, so it’s imperative that your core competencies are built on a rock solid foundation or your business will likely fall. You should be focused on building up the base of your core competencies and not get too focused on the outside sources and forces affecting you. You need to use those core competencies to your utmost advantage.
Building Your Business on a Solid Foundation
One of the most common debates that takes place in the corporate world is whether or not you should grow your company holistically or go out and buy other organizations and merge them in to acquire different customers? Both of these strategies have their pros and cons but if you prefer to have stronger core competencies that are built on a rock-solid foundation then building your company holistically is the better method. So as you prepare to launch a business, make sure that from the very first day you understand what the business is all about, what are the core competencies, know how build a vision and a mission statement off this competency and determine if the competency is actually scalable to the markets that you intend to serve.
The post How to Identify and Utilize Your Core Competencies first appeared on Advisors to the Ultra-Affluent – Groco.
