Chapter 6: Hiring People with Partnering Competencies

OVERVIEW

How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.

—SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET

People build an organization's culture—not noble ideals, neat org charts, or nifty software. People build a culture through what they believe and what they value and how they treat each other, their partners, and their customers. It comes down to what they do on the job every day, and how they do what they do. To build a partnering culture, the leaders of a company must know what kinds of behaviors propel human connections and, by extension, which competencies drive those partnering behaviors.

Over the past two decades many companies have come to adopt competency-based assessment as the selection methodology of choice. Consulting organizations and corporate human resources departments have invested mightily in empirical research to determine which competencies drive behaviors associated with outstanding leadership and with technical proficiency at every level. What they have discovered is that most every company is in the hunt for the same kind of people, whether the organization is public or private, profit or nonprofit, large or small, regardless of industry segment or governmental agency. Unfortunately, enterprise leaders, corporate human resources executives, and behavioral scientists have spent far less effort on figuring out what kind of people an organization needs to build a partnering culture. What they should be trying to find are smart partners.

Partnering Culture