Organization and individual performance is only as strong as its weakest link. As such it’s important to measure the overall skills, motivation and capability present over time. It makes sense that a person with very high technical skills but is not motivated is not likely to generate a commercial success from a project he or she is given. Likewise a very motivated individual who doesn’t have the technical capability to carry out a project will equally fail. Finally someone that can only serial process information is not likely to commercialize a global product that takes into account national influences in consumer desires, manufacturing practices, and taxes.

A good way to visualize the overall organizations capability in these three areas is to plot each skills, motivation, and capability as a percentage of what an organization has versus what the total is that is needed. The “Summary of Human Capital Capability” figure shows this as a bar graph.

In this particular example the organization needs to hire and/or replace individuals with the skills that have been identified as needed to succeed in delivering the business end technology strategic plans. When hiring these individuals they needed the same time to find people with increased mental capabilities. These can either be early career individuals with strong technical skills that show promise to rise to stratum III, IV, or V or more senior people with the same skills that have already demonstrated the mental capability needed for success.

To reiterate once more it is extremely important that all three of these human resource elements required for business success be addressed in the human capital / resources strategic plan. If the company is struggling versus its competition it is often helpful in the human capability strategic plan to put in best estimates of what the top competitors’ human capabilities are. This allows very senior management to determine if its own team possesses the necessary leadership to build out each of these three factors or if replacing members of its own team is necessary for success.