As a business leader you invest a fair proportion of your time in your organisation’s brand – consciously and unconsciously. Your efforts are conscious when setting strategy and corporate culture objectives but mostly unconscious when overseeing daily operations. Needless to say, this can have a diluting effect on your brand building.

Why?

To communicate effectively you’re going to need

1. Information, which becomes
2. Knowledge, which leads to
3. Experience, which leads to
4. Proficiency, which gives you
5. Wisdom, which gives you
6. Deeper Experience, which gives you
7. Authority

At least that is what I learned from a recent “Wizard of Ads”, Roy H Williams’, weekly newsletter. Impressed, I decided to depict it graphically.

In creating this, I realised two important lessons.

1. Each “need” is effectively a stage or milestone and thus, in and of itself, effectively inert.
2. The process is a cycle and thus continuous.

These are significant because they mean:

1. Their qualitative measure is not innate, but dependent on how they are derived.
2. Even “authority” becomes redundant if it is not continually updated.

Nevertheless, this provides a useful start in the quest for proficiency, which you would have to think is the objective of any and every organisation. Certainly it provides a solid argument for “continuous improvement.” So let’s examine how this can help you and your organisation.

Developing proficiency is a people-dependent process. It can perhaps be better depicted as delivering milestones using a simple equation or series of equations as follows:

1. Consciousness x Context = Knowledge
2. Knowledge x Application = Experience
3. Experience x Practise = Proficiency

And, if you want to move beyond Proficiency to Authority

4. Proficiency x Challenge = Authority

Naturally these terms are subjective and the equations perhaps simplistic, but hopefully they give you some indication of the scope of the process and the iterative nature of what is involved if you wish to optimise your level of proficiency. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you wish to find out more or need my help to further your efforts.

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If you like what you have read contact me today to explore how my original thinking could help you break though logjams that are inhibiting your business or how my ‘Every Individual Matters’ Model could help you value your people and provide the catalyst to help you create an organic culture where everyone cares and the business becomes our business, embedding continuous improvement that engenders ‘love at work’ and transforms – and sustains – organic business performance.

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Bay Jordan

Bay is the founder and director of Zealise, and the creator of the ‘Every Individual Matters’ organizational culture model that helps transform organizational performance and bottom-line results. Bay is also the author of several books, including “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and “The 7 Deadly Toxins of Employee Engagement” and, more recently, The Democracy Delusion: How to Restore True Democracy and Stop Being Duped.