While consulting to a large, integrated energy company in the late
seventies, I was confronted with some major corporate culture issues. When
I correlated the competencies of the various professionals and managers
with their performance, I found some interesting relationships that did
not surprise me, but was nevertheless disturbing to the company's
executive committee. The performance ratings were significantly negatively
correlated with measures of listening, trusting and empathy. In other
words, employees at high job levels were seen as better performers the
less empathetic and trusting they were and the less they listened. The
executive committee felt that this state of affairs was not acceptable and
believed a change of culture was in order. It was their feeling that a
change would result in greater productivity and profitability.
This was the ideal opportunity to demonstrate how selecting on
competencies could impact on corporate culture. As I was in charge of
assessing the competencies of mature external candidates for jobs in one
large staff department--candidates for senior positions, I was in a
position to influence the culture through who would be hired.
Aside from
including other core competencies, an emphasis was put on on certain
competencies which would, no doubt, result in more empathic and people
friendly hires, thereby, changing corporate culture.
In
1985 I calculated the correlations again between employees' scores
on empathy and listening skills on the one hand, and their performance
ratings on the other. There had been a change: the correlation was now
neutral--essentially zero. By 1993 many employees had been replaced
through attrition, promotion, etc. and the original culture was diluted
to a major extent. I took another look and calculated the correlations for
the third time. I now found that the correlations had become quite
positive. This meant that more-listening, more-trusting and more-empathic
employees were now seen as the better performers. It was of possible of
course that this change was not due to my competency intervention
but simply a function of time, fashions in management or some other
process. To determine which it was, a control group was
scrutinized--these were employees who had competency assessment data and
performance ratings but whom I had no input into their selection. The
result was negative, proving that my efforts had paid off.
In
retrospect it was not surprising that hiring based on specific
competencies resulted in, or at least, contributed to, organizational
culture change, but it was certainly gratifying to see that a relatively
minor, cheap and unobtrusive intervention contributed to, if not created,
a desired, improved culture.
Michael Godkewitsch PhD,
C. Psych
Consulting Psychologist & Partner
