The How-to Guide to Defining & Assessing Communications Capability

This article first appeared on Acorn Labs in June 2023.

For a more in-depth look at communications capability, have a read of the full article.

Communications capability is the combination of knowledge, skills, tools, processes, and behaviors that communications professionals use to deliver organizational objectives. Businesses need to develop communications capability to ensure they stay on top of new communication strategies that drive greater business success and performance.

How to define communications capabilities

There are three steps to follow to effectively define your communications capability.

Step 1: Define the landscape

First, make sure you understand the business need and context for your capabilities. What is your organization’s greater mission, values, and purpose? What role to communications play in that mission? And, what value does your communications function generate for your business, both now and into the future?

Step 2: Define the purpose

All communications capabilities should have a unique role within the business, which you can ensure by answering five questions:

1. How does the capability fit into business outcomes and strategy?
2. Is there market demand for capability?
3. Are there sufficient resources in the company to sustain the capability?
4. Does the capability complement or compete with existing capabilities?
5. What are the potential risks associated with building the capability?

Step 3: Define the outcome

The last step is to name the capability as descriptively as possible in order to indicate how it functions within the organization. Think along the lines of managing and creating investor relations, or managing and creating corporate identity. These names describe what needs to be done and the role it plays within the business.

Strategies to build communications capability

Your communications capabilities will be unique to your organization, and so will your methods of building them. That being said, capability development generally follows a six-step process.

Engaging leadership

Around 70% of change programs fail without leadership involvement, so you need to ensure you secure leadership buy-in. Highlight how developing capabilities for your communications function improves organizational health. In other words, how does capability development solve leadership’s pain points? So, demonstrate how developing communication capability in your business improves processes and revenue growth and meets desired KPIs.

Establish co-ownership between HR and communications

No single business unit has all the information needed to build a successful learning program, which is why you should establish accountability between HR and your communications department. If HR is left to work on capability development alone, they won’t have the context to create a program relevant to the communications function. But the communications department won’t have the big-picture view of business strategy as a whole, either, which is why co-ownership between both groups is essential.

Understand communications capability gaps

Changes in the market create a divide between your current capabilities and where your capabilities should be. You want to close these gaps, but you can’t do that without first assessing where those gaps are.

Capability assessments help you here, breaking capabilities down into levels of competency. Have employees complete self-assessments and compare them to manager assessments to get the most objective overview of an individual’s competency in a capability. If you’re looking at a specialist capability set, have a subject matter expert perform a capability assessment as well.

Assessing communications capability maturity

Where capability assessments are for measuring individuals’ capability, capability maturity is used to measure the business’s overall capabilities. You can show maturity in a business capability heat map to identify which capabilities should be developed (to increase maturity) based on their risk to the business. Maturity is measured in five levels, starting with initial, in which capability performance is reactive, and ending in optimized, where capability is in a constant state of continuous improvement.

Build communications capability

For any capability-building endeavor, consider using a knowledge management system or performance learning management system (PLMS) that employees can use to access learning in the moment of need, decreasing time to proficiency.

Offsite learning and informal coaching are particularly useful for developing communications capability, as they encourage collaboration within teams and learning on the job.

Track progress

Continuous improvement is crucial to ensure long-term organizational transformation. Track and monitor the effectiveness of learning (i.e. whether knowledge was retained and the ROI of training) using training surveys, proactive training needs analyses, and performance management embedded in learning.