Becoming a Competency Driven Organization
Competency-based management standardizes all people management activities based on competencies designed to deliver on an organization’s goals. This framework is called a competency architecture. This architecture defines the rules that guide the integration of competencies into all aspects of organizational planning. There are six steps to developing a competency architecture for your organization.
Step 1: Goals into Behaviours
The sole purpose of a competency model is to ensure that an organization’s talent is optimized to deliver on its defined goals. Therefore, the competency model must be anchored to the goals of your organizations. Thus, the first step is to translate the goals (and associated processes) of an organization to increasingly discrete behaviours. For example, if a strategic goal of your organization is to be the industry leader in customer service, what behaviours are essential to delivering this? Active listening? Time management? Emotional intelligence?
Step 2: Behaviours into Competencies
A well-designed competency architecture incorporates both enabling and job specific competencies. discussed earlier. For your competency architecture, your enabling competencies can anchor to the Competencies for Life. The job-specific competencies can be structured in job families. A job family are roles in an organization that require similar competencies and form a logical career path for an individual. This often is structured by departments, as jobs in sales are often very different than jobs in engineering.
Step 3: Proficiency Levels
To be operationalized, a competency model must include the following three elements:
Competency Definition: All competencies must have a clear and concise definition.
Proficiency Scale: All competencies must have a proficiency scale to reflect the progression from basic demonstration to advanced demonstration. Each proficiency level should provide a summary of the expectation for achieving this level.
Observable Behaviour: Each proficiency level should provide a concise description of the observable behaviours that an individual must demonstrate.
Below is an example of these four elements for the competency of verbal communications
Competency Definition
Verbal communication is the ability to share information and explanations with a target audience by speaking in a persuasive and influential way. This includes vocabulary, tone, pace, volume, and articulation, with or without, technological support.
Proficiency Scale and Level Summary
Basic Proficiency: This is the foundational level of verbal communications required to be demonstrated by all employees when communication internally in both one-on-one and small group contexts.
Intermediate Proficiency: This is the ability to demonstrate effective verbal communications for increasingly complex messages and diverse internal and external audiences.
Advanced Proficiency: This is the ability to demonstrate effective verbal communications as tool to persuade influential internal and external audiences.
Examples of Observable Behaviours
Proficiency scales are often multi-dimensional and may include numerous sub-indicators. Click HERE to see diverse examples for assessing verbal communication proficiency.
Step 4: Assessment Mechanisms
Competency assessments can be accomplished through a wide variety of other methods, such as competency-based behavioral interviews, role-plays and simulations, and track record and portfolio reviews. As well, formalized assessment is often included as a component of employee development programs for the purpose of assessing the employee’s skills and competencies pre- and post-learning.
Step 5: Competency Gap Analysis
A competency gap analysis involves three stages. The first stage is assessing the current and forecasted enabling and job specific competencies demand by proficiency level. The second stage is assessing the current enabling and job specific competencies supply. Competencies can be acquired internally, or they could be acquired through outsourcing or other mechanisms. The final stage is conducting a gap analysis between the supply and demand of competencies. This will identify any imbalance. In some cases, you may find you are short in some competencies; and in other cases, you may find you are over supplied in other competencies.
Step 6: Integrating the Competency Model
The final stage is integrating the competency architecture into your human resource management process, including recruitment, retention, and development.
Competency-Based Job Profiles
A traditional job profile emphasizes the work by listing the roles and responsibilities. For example, a job description for a bookkeeper may just list activity such as responsibility for bank deposits, keeping a ledger, bank statement reconciliations and account payables.
In contrast, a competency-based job profile emphasizes the competencies and experience the candidate requires, or will be required to develop, to succeed. In the example of a bookkeeper, a competency-based description includes the specific enabling and job-specific competency levels and defines the evidence required to demonstrate it. Examples of evidence include:
Coursework in bookkeeping, accounting, and finance
Specific software certification
Level of job-specific experience (occupation and/ or industry)
Specific length of time performing tasks associated with a job
Additional licenses or certifications required to complete this job
This is important not only for recruiting, but also for creating different levels of positions within a department and providing a staff an opportunity to identify a professional pathway. Moreover, a competency-based profile will provide you a path to offering professional development seminars, workshops, and other training. In sum, competency-based job descriptions provide the following benefits:
Supports the design of a concise recruitment and hiring process.
Provides efficiencies by developing standardized recruitment and hiring tools.
Provides an objective and transparent standard to assess an individual’s capacity to perform a job.
Provides explicit and transparent criteria to enable current or aspiring staff to reflect on their competency development.
Creating a detailed list of activities and responsibilities for a role, not only to help with recruitment, but also to support performance evaluation and understand the role of each position in a small business.
To deal with this problem, we spent the past two years developing the Competencies for Life.
The Competencies for Life are an integrated set of 25 enabling competencies anchored in six clusters.
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