Context, Character, Competency, Capacity – what’s your challenge?

We are often asked by leaders to come in to help understand a particular challenge in their business.

We’re often presented with a set of symptoms and a presumed reason for their existence.

However, what we mostly find is that their diagnosis is a bit ‘off’.

This is not due to any particular failing in their thinking or reasoning, but is more due to perspective.

I like to understand why things are happening since this allows you to address the cause, rather than just the symptom. So, when looking at these situations and assessing the symptoms, I use the 4 Cs.

Character. Is the given problem being caused by the character of the individual or individuals that are in the mix. If you’ve given your most process oriented person a startup to run, you’re going to see some difficulties. Equally, take a startup person and tell them to sort out the processes in a large organisation, everyone will feel that pain.

Competence. I don’t mean this in the rude sense, but more do the people have the right competencies to do the things you’re asking of them. It’s probably no great surprise to find that people are asked to do things that are a way outside their competencies and get themselves into a little difficulty. And just because you can do it, doesn’t mean that everyone can.

Capacity. This one is often confused for one of the first two. Someone being unable to do something can be simply down to them having insufficient time to do it. Getting frustrated with them is pointless unless there’s a way to offload some of their work and reprioritise so they have the capacity to do the new thing.

Context. Probably the most difficult. I saw a post recently talking about how to deal with toxic people poisoning your culture. I rarely meet poisonous people. I often meet good people put into situations (or contexts) that mean they behave in a way that’s less than positive. Change the context, and the person suddenly changes behaviours. Always question whether the person affects the culture or the culture affects the person.

This model is pretty effective and very simple to apply when you’re able to look at this objectively and strip away the day-to-day.

So, this can be easily used to help diagnose what’s going on in an organisation.

But it can also be used on an ongoing basis.

For example, when bringing in extra people, being clear about why so you get the result you intended.

If you are clear about the why, you can hire much more effectively. You’ll also set them up for success.

Capacity. When you’re hiring for capacity, the assumption is that you’re the experts and that you’re largely going to say how the work will be done. These new additions to your business made bring valuable insights, but you already know what you’re doing.

Competence. If you’re hiring to add a competence, then you need to allow that competence to be expressed. If you don’t, you’re not only wasting your money hiring an expert, you’re probably also risking the project that this expert is working on. You may not understand what they are doing, but that’s why you’ve hired an expert. For those of you old enough to remember Red Adair and his famous saying ‘If you think it’s expensive to hire an expert, try hiring an amateur’ – as true today as it was when he was the world leader in extinguishing oil rig fires.

Character. If you’re looking to bring a different attitude into the business, you need to do so in a way that lets everyone else know that’s what you’re doing. Otherwise there’s a risk that the new entrants will be rejected for being ‘difficult’.

I’ve talked about using this framework when working with others, though I also use it on myself, even in my personal life. If something isn’t feeling quite right, I try to work out why using this method, which then gives me some clues as to what I can do about it.

As with many of the things we teach and use at AFGP, they’re just as useful at home as they are at work.