Robert Ashcroft our Chief Learning Officer at Auspicious Group, spent the best part of two decades working as Head of People Capability – here are some reflections on his time around what he learned trying to create and shape environments where people can grow, contribute and thrive.

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After two decades working across various aspects of people engagement, I've learnt that some of the most valuable breakthroughs are born out of a completely different intention. The kind where you are working to deliver one set of outcomes and accidentally stumble across something much more interesting.

One of those powerful discoveries came from a series of experiments around skill recognition. Like many in L&D, I started with traditional competency frameworks and assessment scales, the kind we've all seen a countless times. At one point I’d dedicated part of the FTE budget to have dedicated roles focused solely on managing the “competency curriculum”.

As the years moved forward and we turned our attention to benchmarking the competence within the organisation, we quickly encountered a familiar challenge. You know the one, where we as modest humans have a tendency to be much more humble and hyper critical of our own capabilities when asked to score them. Give someone a 4-point proficiency scale, and they'll invariably opt for a 2 "Has Working Experience," regardless of their actual expertise.

As we wrestled with this typical behaviour, we took the opportunity to build out an approach that helped facilitate a more rounded perspective of someone’s skills and capabilities. A rounded view that not only took into account the perception and scoring of their manager, but also that of their peers. Now before you jump the gun, this wasn’t a typical 360 questionnaire tool, and I’d love to say something profound like “I developed what I called a ‘three layers of truth’ approach” but in reality we stumbled across a beautiful, organic moment that was happening every day.

You see, we had already worked with our Culture team colleagues to create functionality in our custom built Colleague Experience Platform and it’s here that we stumbled across a set of opportunities that worked in tandem to the original outcomes.

We called it Kudos and when deployed, it facilitated the giving and receiving of appreciation on a scale none of us ever thought possible. It would have been easier to leave it at that, to let it continue doing what it was designed to do, after all it was surpassing all our expectations. But we saw an opportunity to leverage the popularity and transform it into something more, a mirror that could reflect back to people what their colleagues saw in the musing the very same skills taxonomy framework that ordinarily sat buried in the background. By integrating our skills taxonomy into this recognition system, it didn't just create another HR tool, it began to turn everyday appreciation into endorsed capability insights.

The results surprised us. When people received recognition that specifically called out their skills, not just their efforts or results but the actual capabilities they'd demonstrated, we started to see a richness in data that wasn’t just useful to us at the centre, but more importantly was “kudos”to the colleagues being recognised by their peers in such a publicly visible way. The skills taxonomy stopped being just another corporate framework that lived in the background and became part of how people naturally acknowledged each other's contributions.

This wasn't an overnight success, far from it. We had to experiment, adjust, and sometimes start over completely when things didn't work as expected. But what emerged was something powerful, a way for people to see their capabilities reflected in the everyday impact they had on others. It wasn't just about recognition anymore, it was helping people recognise powerful aspects of themselves.

Here's what struck me most about this part of my journey. The most accurate picture of someone's capabilities often comes not from formal assessments they complete in isolation, but from the daily recognition of colleagues who see them in action. When we stopped trying to measure capability and started capturing it as it naturally emerged, we discovered insights that had been hiding in plain sight all along.

Sometimes the most profound breakthroughs happen when you're not looking for them at all.

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