Assess the Human Capital Maturity Curve

Human capital maturity is a concept we mentioned briefly in chapter 2 , but it’s an absolutely critical—and often overlooked—concept for managers who want to be successful in developing countries. In the West, we typically assume that our employees possess a certain degree of experience, that they’ve acquired a basic level of savvy and skills. We believe that most if not all of them understand the rules of getting work done in an organization—that they know how to behave in various organizational settings, how to turn out work in a timely fashion, what to do if they don’t understand something, and so on. A curve can be plotted for every organization to represent the combined maturity of all employees. If your human capital is at the top of the curve, your organization is full of people who are savvy about business concepts, emotionally intelligent, and willing and able to learn. If your human capital is at the bottom of the curve, many of the employees in your organization have not yet mastered essential business knowledge and skills, often act arrogantly or rudely, and are not adept learners. In most Western companies, the human capital is often at least in the middle of the curve (if not higher) because most employees have acquired sufficient knowledge through education, experience, and acculturation to function with some degree of maturity.