Today, we’re going to focus on the discrepancy between organizational identity and competency. Identity statements are ubiquitous. It’s the first thing you see on every website. They appear on letterheads, business cards, and in corporate lobbies. They often contain a mission or purpose and a reference to a core competency. How often have you seen a variation of one of the following?

• Market Oriented
• Product Driven
• Brand Focused
• Idea Centered
• Accounts Driven
• Technologically Innovative

The need for organizational identity is talked about ad nauseam in every business degree because such statements are powerfully tied to brand image. Surely you’ve heard that Apple is full of engineering gurus, Microsoft is an idea-stealing marketing bureaucracy, Amazon is a technology company disrupting distribution across the planet, while Google is the holy grail of information brokers.

Pursuing a good opportunity that fits organizational identity but not competency will lead to trouble.

In addition to identity and brand, every company is driven by unique strengths and culture. These are the competencies that dictate how a company actually works. It's what I mean when I say a company is [ ––– ] driven. However, pursuing a good opportunity that fits organizational identity but not competency will lead to trouble.

Two Different Points of Origin

First, it’s helpful to consider that these two sides of the coin, identity and competency, actually come from different places. Identity statements are usually written in one of two ways: as aspirational values by founders and CEOs, or by advertising professionals for target markets. In contrast, competency and culture come from the strengths, weaknesses, passions and biases of the individuals at the top of company leadership.

Wait a second, didn’t I just affirm that both identity and competency can come from the same leadership? The nuanced distinction I made is that leaders often choose positive or aspirational identity statements that they value, but this is no way guaranteed to be concretely founded in that leaders existing strengths, experience, and biases. To understand why this is the case, let’s talk some more about bias.

The Center of the Universe

Before I found my niche and worked my way into Product Design and consulting, I wandered through a handful of fields and titles that I held with at least some degree of competency. If there’s one thing I can confidently say about all of them, it’s that they each believe they’re the center of the universe.

Let’s go through a few examples:

1. As a marketing manager, I learned from my director that every business decision is inherently a marketing decision. The context of business happens in markets and can only be understood by marketing professionals. Product, promotion, place and price cover every conceivably important topic.
2. As a Communications Director I found out that the key to managing people was an ability to influence perceptions, relationships, conflict and motivation within a framework of empathy, coherence, and flexibility. This was the foundation beneath every knowledge framework, and it explained why certain smart people could successfully manage in any context.
3. When I was a front-end developer, I learned to resent all of the games that managers play. We knew that producers are the heart of the company, and nobody understands the product like the people who are making it.
4. My current field believes that every other department in a software company should be directed by the User Experience. We’re actively working to subvert every other title until it has ‘UX’ tacked on to the front of it. Stage two is to bring UX into every type of business. Stage three will be to hijack government and the social order with design thinking (I didn’t make that up).
5. When I worked in sales, my friends and I believed that we should make the largest of commissions for it was by our own sweat, blood and tears that any commerce on this forsaken planet could exist. The melodrama might have been alcohol induced. Sales, man.
6. When I was a copyeditor I learned that content is king and everything else was marketing bull_.
7. Before I was a Digital Creative Director, my first CD taught me the power of that one sacrosanct word to rule them all: Brand. Then we tacked that word onto other words and inserted them randomly into sentences until we usurped enough authority that everyone let us make nice things. Yes, that’s what your creative director is doing right now.
8. Here’s some more overgeneralization: I’ve had several angry account specialists tell me that they should always have the final say because, frankly, they represented the client and the client is paying for a service. I’ve seen financial analysis take over companies and reorient them entirely around numbers, because it has been independently verified that spreadsheets are a superior art of decision making. I’ve also known my fair share of entrepreneurs who think they’re solely responsible for the economic wealth of our country, but that might be a political position that I’d rather avoid discussing in this article.

A philosopher might say that this is the human condition, that we cannot easily see beyond ourselves and so we make the world into our own image. It’s difficult for us to accept that everyone around us is experiencing a similar level of complexity, and the weight of their entire life experience conflicts with many of our own closely held assumptions and beliefs. It’s the nature of human limitation; we simple lack the ability to validate abstractions outside of our own experience, awareness, reach, and framework.

What this Means for Companies

Even the most self-aware leaders have will have biases that are rooted in their personal experiences, strengths and values. In this way, they make companies into their own image. It’s the nature and purpose of top-down leadership to wield influence to shape the culture, structure, and values of their organization.

Many of the best leaders I have worked beneath and beside were visionaries, and some of them were wildly successful by the definitions of their sphere of influence. What surprises me is how often I have seen them throw time and energy into pursuing plans that are solidly outside of their competency and value framework.

new influence is only effective when it has the
ability to reshape culture, identity, and values

Usually this is address by bringing in someone new with the necessary competencies, and then aassigning that person resources and authority. This is sometimes effective but is never a silver bullet. Why? Because authority and influence are very different beasts, and new influence is only effective when it has the ability to reshape culture, identity, and values.

The traditional way to enable this is to silo their responsibilities and let them form their own microcosm with the necessary strengths, and then let them fight for resources against other silos. Everyone has experienced the internal conflict between competing silos in a company. The only alternative is to invite that person into the highest levels of leadership, and give them the right to profoundly reshape the leaders not just the organization.

In summary, companies can pursue opportunities outside of their competency if their leaders embrace deep interdependence and trust with people who are smarter than them in contrasting, even conflicting ways.

In Practice

One of my favorite things that I get to do as a consultant is help leaders build systems and structures that empower their core competencies. The most common obstacle to this is when, after asking a lot of questions, it becomes clear that their company is hitting a wall in their growth because they are pursuing opportunities outside of their competencies.

The hero image at the start of this article shows a shot from a white boarding session I did with a marketing agency in the fall of 2017. They brought me in to help them define a digital design process for their creative department. You can read more about it on the **process page** of my website, and I think it turned out really well. However, they also brought me in to provide a frank perspective on how they could grow as an agency.

They had three strong competencies: they were doing groundbreaking work in the marketing field, they had excellent people in place to manage client relationships at a highly professional level, and they could make a pitch like you’ve never seen. All of these were clearly reflected in the skills and passions of their founder and secondary key personnel. They also knew they had some weakness in their creative department. They were producing good work, but every project had unexpected and profound obstacles.

This wasn’t unique to them. All agencies struggle more with one side or the other: the clients or the work. The reason for their struggle was straightforward: they had an accounts driven culture because their leaders were motived by client relationships.

These growing pains don’t reflect poorly on them as an agency. They recognized that they could benefit from an outside voice that could say, “this is your culture, and this is what it will take to change it if that is your desire”. They wanted to continue to take on larger digital projects, and they were doing the right thing by starting with better processes and structure.

I was able to sit down with their CEO and tell them that they had a decision to make: to move in the direction he wanted, he needed to bring in a counterpart with opposing skills and motivations. That person would have to be given weight in deciding how the company worked, thought of itself, and made decisions. Even if that person worked for him, he would have to find someone he could treat as a counterpart, not just a VP.

Final Thoughts

Leaders often pursue great opportunities that fall within their organizational identity only to later find out that it was outside of their competency. When this happens, their best course of action is to weigh the cost of growth against the perceived benefit. Because business is structured hierarchically to bring people into lines of responsibility and authority, that kind of growth best happens when they embrace interdependent relationships and shared influence. This will require you to expose and explore your weaknesses with partners who are completely different than you to, and entrust them with your future.

The seeds of growth and change are planted when you recognize that you’re already completely [ --- ] driven. They are watered when you recognize that your background, perspectives, and pursuits have given you profound biases. Growth happens when you embrace and depend on people who are also driven, just by very different [ --- ]s than you.