Changing the layers of organisational culture - Competencies

An article in the 'Onion' series by Niels Kooi

Artist unknown

When it comes to transforming a culture sustainably, you need to touch the values, the paradigms, but also the organisational competencies.

This is part 3 of a 4-part series on changing organisational culture! In this segment, I continue to explore changing the layers of an organisational culture. After focusing on the core (values) and paradigms in previous posts, I now focus on organisational competencies, as a third layer of the cultural 'onion' you need to cut. The final post will be on behaviours.

While changing values and paradigms can be challenging, when we get into the realm of competencies we're actually getting closes to the foundations of HR, so it's almost like it's business as usual.

Changing organisational competencies is not hard per se; connecting them to the (new) values and paradigms is a bit harder. Anyway, feel free to explore this slider again. It's a bit longer than the previous ones, because I need to build a bridge to those inner layers of values and paradigms to continue to make sense of it all. This article has also been posted on LinkedIn before.

Would you like to read more on the subject? Explore the other articles in this series:

• An intro in the layers of a company's culture

• The first layer: values, and how to change them

• The second layer: paradigms, and how to change them

• The third layer: competencies (this post)

• The fourth layer: behaviours, and how to change them (not published yet)