competence is a feeling

Keeping their availability future-proof sounds fantastic. But getting started on this, as we have experienced ourselves, is a completely different matter. It requires insight, long-term thinking, and 'guts'. You can distil the search for internally available talent into five questions:

Which competences, in the broadest sense of the word, do I already have in-house today?
How inquisitive and willing to learn are my people?
What competences do I need today? And in five years' time, when my business or way of doing business may have changed?
How much of the talent available today can I safely transfer to that future? And what about people whose competences do not match, or who do not have a sufficient ability to learn, or are unwilling to learn?
What forces are levers for or against such competence management? And how do I turn (de)activate these?

To give intrinsic talents every opportunity to grow, we offer our people an environment in which they can give their best as freely as possible. And they constantly receive constructive, open feedback and stimuli. Not once a year, but at every meaningful moment and at every level. If I have remembered one lesson from the professor of change management Peter De Prins' book Six batteries of change, it is that people would rather be competent than incompetent. In specific terms, this means that competence is a feeling, not a skill. If you want people to change, you have to give them the feeling that they have the right competences to deal with the new situation. If not, they will fall back on their previous competences, even though they know that this isn't the right behaviour.

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