When Let’s Talk Culture came out it had five conversations in it. Expectation, clarification, communication, confrontation, celebration. I was proud of the five. I still am.
The work since has taught me there is a sixth, and it sits in a particular spot.
It showed up in the gap between the offsite and the follow-up. A team would leave the room with a clear set of behaviours they had chosen themselves, in their own words. Genuinely good work. Then a few months later we would look at what had actually changed and find that one or two of the behaviours had never got going. Not because anyone disagreed with them. Because nobody had ever been shown how.
‘Give feedback in the moment’ is a lovely behaviour to agree on. It’s also a skill, and most of the people agreeing to it had never been taught it. So they didn’t do it, and then, because the team had also agreed on confrontation, someone got pulled up for not doing it.
You can’t fairly hold someone to a behaviour they haven’t been equipped for.
That’s the sixth conversation. Capability. And it belongs between communication and confrontation, because confrontation without capability isn’t accountability, it’s just unfairness with a process around it.
I’ll admit it took me longer to see than it should have. I had been running leadership programs for years, and running culture work for years, and treating them as two different businesses. Leaders would ask me for the culture work or the skills work. It took the gap between the offsite and the follow-up to make it obvious that they are the same work. The culture asks for behaviours. The behaviours ask for skills. If you skip the second half, the first half is a nice day out.
Practically, the capability conversation is short. Look at the behaviours your team has agreed to. For each one, ask honestly: do we know how to do this, or have we just agreed that we should? Name the gaps you can’t close in house, and decide what you’ll do about them. That’s it. It’s not glamorous. It’s the flat-packed wardrobe left in the box because nobody had the right screwdriver, and the fix is going and getting the screwdriver.