Every organization and team “culture” is different. The culture is the organization’s unique personality, its set of unwritten (and often unspoken) rules and expectations about how work gets done, and how people should treat and how relate to one another. And obviously, for a person to be successful within a specific organization, requires a unique set of personal qualities and competencies that fit that culture.

So because there’s no one right formula of personal qualities and competencies that work in every organization, with the help from an organizational psychologist, we’ve identified those qualities and competencies necessary for a person to be successful, over the long run, at SpringHill. The process we used included gathering feedback from a large number of our staff about the qualities they see in successful SpringHill staff. And to this feedback we added the best that leadership research says on the subject.

When we finished we ended up with 13 different, clearly defined “Leadership Competencies” that members of our team need to possess if they’re going to have a long-term impact within SpringHill. These 13 competencies have become the core to all of our “people” processes such as hiring and selection, performance management and appraisals, training and development, and finally succession planning.

Below are these 13 SpringHill “leadership competencies” divided into four categories:

Mastery of Self

Life/Work balance        Personal Learning

Decision Making        God Immersed

Mastery of Relationships

Community Focus        Compassion and Sensitivity

Spiritual Leadership        Customer Focus

Mastery of Performance

Leading People            Resourcefulness

Professional Will        Continuous Improvement

Mastery of Vision

Culture Bearer

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll share with you more details of each of the competencies and their importance within the SpringHill culture.

This is part 1 of 14 in a series of posts about what it takes to be successful at SpringHill.