Deepdive #5
Career Framework
This is how you anchor your Cultural DNA in all roles and growth paths
Culture is the sum of all behavior
You build your culture together with your team by actively steering which behavior you encourage and discourage.
But how do you ensure true alignment with your cultural values? How do you make these values central to team-forming decisions such as 'who do we hire?', 'who gets a promotion?' and 'who doesn't?'.
This requires more than just formulating your Cultural DNA: you need to implement the values as company-wide competencies. Anchor them in the growth paths that determine which skills different teams within your company develop.
Culture is the result of what people do. The challenge is to consistently implement your cultural values in all team-forming decisions, ensuring that you not only know what your company's DNA is but also how it is applied daily. Moreover, how do you ensure that both employees and employers commit to making these values leading?
In this deep dive, we address the strategic value of a culture-driven career framework and provide practical steps to integrate cultural values into team decisions and growth paths. Ensure that your organization not only understands its cultural DNA but actively applies it.
Career framework = a clear company-wide structure in which all growth paths and roles within the company are built from expertise-specific skills and company-wide cultural competencies.
PART #1
The strategic value of a culture-driven career framework
We all know it: a star team doesn't always perform better than a team with less skilled individuals that work well together. This is true for both sports teams and business teams. Numerous studies show that the likelihood of success doesn't depend on the sum of individual skills but on the extent to which team members feel connected, clearly know what is expected of them and each other, and can rely on shared collaboration principles. In other words: expertise and skills are important, but the ability to collaborate effectively is even more important.
Successful collaboration is facilitated by the presence and development of company-wide cultural core competencies. It is precisely these competencies that determine how the team communicates, shares knowledge, acts in new situations, develops collective knowledge, and interacts with customers. These competencies connect the company and all team members with each other and together form the company's cultural DNA.
In short, while expertise-specific skills vary depending on role and function, cultural competencies are consistent for all roles within the team. These competencies ensure that regardless of the specific function, the team collaborates effectively and keeps the company's shared cultural DNA alive.
Just like 'normal' skills, cultural competencies can also be developed, both for the individual and the team. This requires active steering in forming a strong team culture and centralizing these competencies in team-forming decisions, such as:
Who do we hire and who not?
Who do we promote and who not?
Who do we consider suitable for that leadership role and who not?
What is a growth path?
A growth path is the defined progression of roles within a company that helps employees develop and grow in their careers. It describes the skills, expertise, and cultural contributions expected at each level, as well as the criteria for promotions. This clarity enables employees to understand their career path and see what is needed to be successful at each level.
Developing cultural competencies goes beyond one-time checks on 'cultural fit.' It is an ongoing process in which team members need to develop themselves through every stage of their professional growth. This requires clarity and structure. The most effective way to provide this clarity is by incorporating cultural competencies into growth paths and role descriptions. This ensures that team members always know what to expect from each other at every level of experience.
Outlining clear growth paths offers two major benefits:
Growth perspective for ambitious talent
Ambitious employees value the opportunity to learn and grow in their roles. Clear growth paths are essential because they show how an employee can develop themselves within a specific area of expertise and what is expected of them at each level. This is crucial for attracting and retaining valuable employees and motivates them to continuously improve. A culture of ownership and professional growth emerges when team leaders have the context to effectively contribute to the development of their team members.
Concrete guidance on culture
Well-structured growth paths enable you to specifically focus on cultural competencies. By making clear what cultural contribution is expected at each level of experience, culture is not seen as a one-time check when hiring a new team member, but as a set of competencies on which team members can continuously develop and differentiate themselves.
PART #2
Step by step: how to implement your culture in a company-wide career framework and in all growth paths within your organization
STEP 1
Define your Cultural DNA
The first step towards culture-driven growth paths is to explicitly articulate the intended company-wide cultural DNA in a set of shared cultural values and behaviors. These values form the foundation for team success and should be formulated in such a way that they can serve as competencies in the growth paths. It helps to describe the cultural values with behavioral examples that show what a particular value looks like at the behavioral level in the context of the company. We use the structure as shown next to it for this purpose.
STEP 2
Distinguish expertise-specific skills and company-wide cultural competencies
Teams or companies can vary greatly in their composition. Some teams consist of members who share the same expertise and follow a uniform growth path. Other companies are cross-disciplinary, fostering collaboration between team members with different expertise, thereby employing multiple interconnected growth paths.
Just as musicians in a band must both master their instrument and have a magical dynamic with their bandmates, every team is composed of a combination of expertise-specific skills and company-wide cultural competencies that determine collaboration. Thus, a growth path always consists of two components:
Expertise-specific skills
These are skills you can develop, such as mastering an instrument in the case of a band. These skills vary greatly depending on the specific expertise within the team.
Cultural competencies
These determine how you collaborate, such as how you approach your work, how you position yourself towards others, and how you work with colleagues with both the same and different expertise.
STEP 3
Determine your Cultural Phases
The main goal of your cultural competencies is that they apply to everyone in the team, regardless of specific expertise. At the same time, it is realistic that someone in an influential management position is expected to have more cultural impact than a starter who has just begun.
Example
One of the cultural competencies within your organization is curiosity and the acquisition of new skills and knowledge. This value applies to everyone in the team, but how this value is applied in practice differs. You can expect a starter to be eager to learn and actively seek opportunities to learn new things. From an experienced manager, you expect not only to set a good example but also to provide others with the space and confidence to try new things.
By keeping the cultural values the same but tailoring the behavioral examples to the different levels of intended impact, you create the necessary nuance. This shows that cultural competencies are not a one-time check but a growth path with continually developing expectations as experience level and impact on the team increase.
To make this clear, it is practical to divide the illustrative behavioral examples into three levels:
Operational roles
Roles focused on independently carrying out tasks, developing skills, and being valuable to the team.
Tactical roles
Roles focused on independently assessing situations, making choices, and guiding operational roles in the execution of daily tasks.
Strategic roles
Roles focused on developing future value for the team/company and guiding the team as a whole.
STEP 4
Define the Roles & Levels
In this step, you determine which roles and subsequent levels exist for each growth path. Start by articulating the core of each specific role and describe the differences between levels, such as variations in responsibilities, skills, or expected output. Once this is clear, you plot the roles and levels on the previously defined cultural phases. This way, you link the relevant cultural behaviors to each specific role so they align with the responsibilities and expected impact at that level.
STEP 5
Determine the Skill Themes
A good growth path prepares team members for their next step. This works best when the skills that form the core of a particular growth path remain consistent across different levels while the expectations at each level are gradually built up. Instead of starting with a list of expectations per role, begin by defining
STEP 6
Transforming growth paths into role descriptions
Once the growth path is defined, it becomes easy to create clear role descriptions that merge expected expertise and company-wide cultural behaviors for each position. This clarity ensures that team members and leaders have a comprehensive overview of expectations, driving consistency.
STEP 7
Implementing values in daily collaboration
Your cultural values gain real impact only when every team member applies them consistently. With these values embedded in your growth model and across all team roles, they are poised to play a vital role in recruiting new colleagues, onboarding processes, feedback sessions, and performance and development conversations.
WRAPPING UP
A strong team culture arises when cultural values are not a checklist, but an ongoing process that supports employees in their development.
Creating a strong team culture starts with explicitly defining your cultural values as company-wide competencies. These values should form the basis for all team-building decisions, such as hiring new staff and granting promotions. By establishing a clear career framework that includes various roles and links these roles to expertise-specific skills and cultural competencies, you ensure that culture is not just a checklist, but an ongoing process that helps employees develop.
The distinction between roles and career paths is crucial: roles define specific responsibilities within the team, while career paths provide employees with direction in their development within the organization. By offering clear career paths, you give employees the opportunity to grow and contribute to a strong team culture. This requires consistency in the application of these values in daily interactions and decisions. Only then can your cultural DNA truly come alive within the team, leading to better collaboration and success.