Categories - Competencies

Posts to Salary.com HR Voice continually remind us of how competencies, succession planning and skills gaps are encountered outside of our own business world. A recent post weighed in on the issues associated with talent management and succession planning in NBC’s late night entertainment. We’ve also reviewed the relevance of competencies, succession planning and skills gaps in professional sports. 

Where else do we use or observe competencies in perhaps a more subconscious way?

- How do we select and rate our physicians and hospitals?

- What about contractors who are called to fix the plumbing or add a new room to the house?

Have you ever wondered how a particular colleague ended up in a certain job?

Chances are, you wonder that after someone's failed to deliver on a promise. Your teammate's incompetence has a direct impact on you being able to do your job. It's at those moments you'll find the old “the weakest link in the chain…” adage is true.

In today’s matrixed organizations, one person who can’t deliver on time, or who delivers incomplete and inferior work, has a direct impact on the rest of the team, and that's not good.

You ask yourself, “How did this guy get hired for this job?”  In most cases, the answer is that the hiring process was not “competency-based." That means the questions that were asked during the interview and selection process were not focused on determining the competencies of the job candidates. The result was that the hiring decision was based on the candidate's resume - and anyone can look good on paper - and interviewing skills.

A number of years ago, I was working with an organization that had spent six months and a hefty budget on customizing a public domain IT competency framework. They sent me a hard copy of their handiwork – a sizeable volume of paper.

Using this document - or should I say book? - each employee was required to carry out a self assessment of the competencies associated with their job. I can only imagine how long it took each of the 1,400 employees involved to complete this exercise!

What was the result? The 1,400 responses were placed on a shelf, never to be used – there was no way to make practical use of the results directly from paper. The initiative spluttered and died.

A moral of the story is this: a successful competency program has to deliver tangible operational and strategic benefits, and particularly for large organizations, this requires supporting technology.

Manufacturing is like any other industry, only the need to be nimble, flexible and cost efficient is more urgent.

Given the emerging global economy, manufacturing is always the first to explore new methods, processes and locations for providing higher quality products at a lower cost. This constant need to innovate will never subside, therefore manufacturing organizations need to be designed to change and improve constantly.

How would you do this as a manager within the manufacturing industry? First, you would need to have a workforce that is capable of constantly evolving and improving. Where do you find employees with these capabilities?

What are job models, and why are they important for the success of my company?

I have been getting this question a lot lately, so here is the simple answer.

Job models are a comprehensive set of data that clearly define each job in a company.

Job models include all of the relevant information that is needed to perform all of the following tasks...

Defining and aligning the job roles in your company to match your corporate objectives and operational needs is step one in creating a successful organization.  Yet, so many companies just don’t do it, or at least don’t do it well.

I recently spoke to a consultant who helps businesses in a specific vertical market define jobs and competencies for their organization.  He said, “Everyone has job data. It just isn’t very good.  They focus their attention on implementing these powerful HCM solutions, but they fail to realize that these solutions are only as good as the data that goes into them. Garbage in, garbage out.”

Does your company have reliable job data, across all departments? You’ll find good data is the foundation for hiring, assessing, developing, and compensating your most important asset – your employees.

In the wake of the past year’s challenges, talent management changed in two important ways, and these changes are likely to have a lasting effect on HR practices and systems.

Competency management became critical in executive decision making
The downward spiral that began in 2008 forced executives to rethink their organizations. They needed information about current skills and what would be needed as they reorganized. Organizations that assessed their workforce in relation to defined competency profiles were in a much better position to restructure departments with an eye toward future opportunities. Organizations that did not develop this discipline were left floundering, and found themselves poorly prepared to make adjustments.

Goal setting ceased to be an annual process
In fact, annual goal-setting became obsolete. As strategic objectives were repeatedly recast based on the changing market environment, goal planning was forced to evolve into ever shorter timeframes. Many organizations reset their operational plans to 90 day cycles. Individual goal setting had to be equally flexible, with numerous checkpoints throughout the year to ensure that goals remained relevant. Inflexible processes frustrated employees and managers alike and quickly became irrelevant.

Competency management and goal setting should be flexible and, among many purposes, serve as critical inputs to executive decision making.  Both help set specific expectations for performance and results. As 2009 proved, in times of change, both competency management and goal setting can be used to adjust expectations and define a new direction.

Go to an IT or facilities staff in most organizations and ask for an inventory of the organization’s hardware. Assuming that it’s a well-run outfit, you’ll receive a list of the number of computers, photocopiers, fax machines and other hardware that’s owned or leased by the business.


Now ask the HR staff in the same organization for an inventory of the competencies of all of the company’s employees. Guess what? Many organizations wouldn’t stand a chance. They wouldn’t be able to produce an accurate, up-to-date list of people’s competencies, and they wouldn’t know where to start.

Yet what’s more valuable to the organization, its hardware or its people?  Have a look at the P & L sheet and check what costs the organization the most – people or hardware? And yet many organizations know far less about the competencies of their workforce than they do about how many lumps of plastic they have lying around the place!

“Fourth down, goal to go and the clock is moving.”

Competencies, job models and proficiencies continue to garner great interest around the globe as human capital managers develop programs to understand and match the needs of employers in bringing about growth and profitability. At the same time, there is intense competition within organizations for budgets and resources. So how does an HR professional make his or her case to those C-level executives who may not be familiar with the importance of competency initiatives?

Story telling is one of the oldest ways of educating people. So, when presenting the value of competencies and job models, rather than use a drab description of frameworks, profiles, and accelerators, why not use a metaphor that resonates with many people: sports?

Although the idea of competencies as a predictor of employee success has existed for more than 30 years, there is still a lot of confusion and uncertainty surrounding competencies and how they can be used.

A competency is the combination of knowledge, skill, and ability demonstrated by the observable behavior of an individual who is successful at a given task. Although these terms are often used interchangeably, there are actually subtle differences between them:

• Knowledge refers to factual information that is acquired by a person through study or experience
• Skill is the application of training or knowledge in the execution of a learned physical task
• Ability is the capacity to perform a given physical or mental task naturally or without training