When it comes to enterprise-wide transformations, we know that most companies miss the mark on capabilities during their initiatives. While the majority of organizations recognize the importance of a skilled and motivated workforce, many don’t devote enough time and resources to developing one. The priorities lie elsewhere, and an irreplaceable opportunity is missed. For others, foundational capability building sounds too simple—we are already doing this, a CEO might think. But in our experience, what sounds like common sense is rarely common practice across an organization, and that leaves opportunities to better performance on the table.

Capability building goes well beyond traditional training of employees: it’s about fundamentally changing how the work gets done. It’s also one of the best ways to energize people, from the C-suite to the factory floor, to support the transformation in the first place. Without that energy, achieving and sustaining a successful transformation becomes exceedingly difficult—perhaps impossible. But with effective capability building, companies develop the mindsets and behaviors to deliver transformational gains and add to these gains over time, embedding an execution engine for continuous value improvement.

In this article, we explore the essential elements of a robust capability-building program. We show how empowering employees with new skills not only enables sustainable change at scale but also helps the bottom line, as it did during the holistic transformation eventually undertaken by the international manufacturing corporation previously described.

The building blocks of an effective capability-building program

Because this disconnect is ultimately behavioral, we turned to behavioral science for solutions. Three key elements are necessary for an effective capability-building program: leadership role modeling, widespread employee engagement, and virtual delivery.

Role modeling

Research tells us that people mimic—both consciously and unconsciously—the actions of the individuals and groups around them. One of the best ways to drive the adoption of new mindsets and behaviors is by ensuring that senior leaders model the desired change. ¹ When employees see highly visible colleagues behaving differently, it reinforces the new way of working and signals a commitment to the transformation. Indeed, when senior leaders role model the behavior changes they’re asking employees make, transformations are 5.3 times more likely to be successful. This means it’s often best for senior leaders to be the first participants to complete a capability-building program.

This was the case at the international manufacturing corporation mentioned previously. When executives first took the pulse of its employees, the company scored in the bottom quartile of McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index (OHI). ² Survey results and further discussions showed that many employees lacked trust in top management as the organization’s financial position deteriorated. Leaders weren’t communicating their goals or progress clearly, and no one was accountable for results.

By role modeling new norms, senior leaders helped rebuild trust in the organization and the transformation itself—capability building included. By changing their own behaviors, they signaled to the organization that this change was real, thereby building trust.

The company’s former chief transformation officer recalls that employees were convinced that capability building was a worthwhile endeavor only when they learned that they could trust what management was saying. “Management had to actually do things that were different, show some evidence of change, take some risks.”

The CEO joined in as well, attending many of the capability-building workshops that the company held and interacting with employees across role levels around the world. Employees, watching closely, responded in kind when it became clear how important the program was to the boss. A virtuous cycle of encouragement and recognition was born. The CEO even began calling employees directly if they did something well or demonstrated the behaviors that the program was trying to enforce. To this, frontline employees at first expressed disbelief. Some actually hung up on the CEO, thinking that the call was a prank. When it became clear that it wasn’t, employees proudly related the turn of events to one another.

Not all top managers readily accepted the program, however. For one, the company’s head of talent, a key player, was skeptical. He thought that the skills felt too basic and that the company was already doing enough. He changed his mind when he realized that however simple the capabilities may have sometimes appeared, the organization didn’t consistently apply the skills effectively, which dragged down productivity, reinforced silos, and generally short-circuited the value building, threatening the ultimate aspiration: the success of the broader transformation.