Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills, said the late Jim Rohn. If you play an instrument or join a sports team and want to make an impression, it is obvious that you need to practice your skills. Still, as a business owner, executive, or employee, you may wonder why you should care about capability in your business. Isn't it enough to just focus on achieving your objectives, delivering products and services, and staying competitive in the marketplace?
While those are all important goals, it’s your team’s capability that determines whether your business will achieve sustainable growth and success over the long term. And the capability is mainly the sum of your team’s skills. Let’s take a look at what capability is, why it matters, and how you can increase your team’s capability to achieve better results.
What is Capability?
In a business context, capability refers to the skills, knowledge, resources, and infrastructure that a company has. It’s the toolkit that a company uses to perform tasks, processes, and functions to bring its products and services to the market. Capability is the company's ability to execute its strategies, and deliver products and services but also to react and adapt to inevitable changes. At large capability includes people skills, but also organizational structure, technology and infrastructure, financials, culture, and processes.
Why Does Capability Matter?
It’s the capability that determines a company’s ability to achieve its objectives, compete in the marketplace, and create value for its stakeholders. Capability is the ability to gain a competitive advantage and achieve sustainable growth over the long term. Better capability leads to better results in businesses in several ways.
Increased Productivity
With better capability, a company can complete tasks and processes more quickly and accurately, which leads to increased productivity. This, in turn, allows the business to produce more output in a shorter amount of time, with fewer people, yet resulting in better quality.
Improved Quality
With better capability, a company can produce higher quality products or services. This brings in increased customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.
Reduced Costs
Better capability eventually leads to reduced costs in several ways. For example, it can help a company to streamline processes, eliminate waste, and reduce errors and defects. This can result in lower production costs, improved efficiency, and increased profitability.
Increased Innovation
Better capability when talking about people’s skills means that the team is more innovative in developing new products and services. This helps the company to stay ahead of its competitors in the marketplace.
Improved Employee Morale
When employees know that they are skilled in what they do, they are able to perform their jobs more efficiently and effectively. But even more so, they feel more motivated, engaged, and satisfied in their work. This has a positive impact on productivity, quality, and innovation.
How to Increase Your Company's Capability?
The first step is to learn how to measure the capability. With a numeric value, it is much easier to evaluate how capability is changing over time. Capability is an abstract and complicated thing and it is highly recommended to get a proper tool to gain a holistic understanding of it.
- Hire and train the right people with the right skills and knowledge. Value willingness to learn. Help your team to educate themselves. Try to find the right people for the right positions.
- Invest in technology. Adopt new software, tools, and equipment and learn how to use them. Stay curious. In time technology changes everything - you want to be an early adaptor.
- Take care of your company culture. Strong company culture invites motivated people in and increases their willingness to stay. Foster a positive work environment, promote work-life balance, and recognize and reward teams’ achievements.
- Focus on innovation and creativity. That way your company will succeed in a constantly changing business environment. Cherish new ideas and provide resources to support innovation.
- And finally, a company's success depends on the strength of its relationships with customers and partners. So make sure to build a good relationship with your stakeholders.
Overall, increasing a company's capability requires a comprehensive approach that involves measuring, and investing in people, technology, culture, innovation, and relationships. It’s not rocket science, a few simple principles, but when made every day it makes all the difference for your business.
