McKinsey&Company

Nearly 60 percent of respondents to a recent McKinsey survey1 say that building organizational capabilities such as lean operations or project or talent management is a top-three priority for their companies. Yet only a third of companies actually focus their training programs on building the capability that adds the most value to their companies’ business performance.

We defined a capability as anything an organization does well that drives meaningful business results. The survey explored which capabilities are most critical to a company’s business performance and why they focus on the capabilities they do. It also asked executives how their companies create and manage training and skill-development programs and how effective those programs are in maintaining or improving on their priority capabilities.

It’s notable that the majority of companies don’t focus on a specific priority capability for purely competitive reasons; most often, the reason is that the capability is part of their culture. Further, some three-quarters of respondents don’t think their companies are good at building the capability that is most important. When senior executives are involved in setting the capabilities agenda, companies are more successful at aligning those agendas with the capability most important to performance and more effective at building the needed skills.