Are Competencies Overrated?
Over the past two years (but even longer than that), I have been watching everyone talk about “competencies” and that competencies are critical to a talent management strategy.
While competencies are important, and embedded content will increasingly become more important in the talent management race, companies continue to struggle for that right competency model. Should they be centralized or decentralized? Where should they be stored and how should they be maintained? Who owns competencies? HR? business leaders? both?
Yesterday, I heard about one of the highest profile HR executives say she cares less about competencies and more about “attributes”. What is the different between a competency and an attribute? The easiest way to think about it is if a database was a competency then an attribute would be a component of the database such as a table or a field. Why are attributes more important? Because attributes contain a value.
Attributes became very important in the Red Sox-Indians Game 7 last night. Sure one of Manny Ramirez’s competencies is solid defense that has resulted in a .990 fielding percentage. And that was very apparent when he threw out Kenny Lofton as he tried to stretch a single into a double at a critical moment in the game. The attribute that got him there though…he takes 100s of practice balls off the Green Monster, on a weekly base, to ensure he knows the right bounces at every angle when the ball hits the wall.
It’s all about attributes!
Technorati Tags: attributes, competencies, Red Sox, talent management
13 Comments Add your own
1. Naomi Bloom | October 23rd, 2007 at 2:09 am
Jason, now you know why I’ve always used the term KSAOCs, knowledge, skill ability and other deployment related characteristics (i.e. behaviors, attitudes, specific outcomes, etc. that are relevant to human performance in a specific business context) rather than competencies. But it’s not the terminology that matters. It’s understanding in a profound, contextual way what it is about an individual that makes them effective in a specific business setting. If you want to use attributes and others want to use competencies and I prefer the term KSAOCs, no es importante. What matters is the underlying concept.
2. mike | October 23rd, 2007 at 12:18 pm
I agree. Terminology is less important than the concept - that competencies generally aren’t granular enough to catch the important details ( attributes) that make a person effective in a competency area.
It’s not enough to know Manny Ramirez is a strong defender. You need to know what makes him so good at defense
The other nugget here, though, is that having more granular definitions not only gives greater insight into what makes a person successful (so that you can acquire or develop it in others), but also helps you guide manager’s in making performance rating decisions This helps fill your talent management system with good, reliable data so that you can actually use it for decision support and analytics.
3. Lisa Rowan | October 24th, 2007 at 6:39 am
Was just about to wave the KSAOCS flag but see that Naomi stepped up right away and set the record straight. It’s not what you call it it’s that you do it that matters. You have to have some common language with which to describe what makes an individual successful in the role. Period.
4. John Bradford | October 24th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Companies loose out when they invest in the development of competencies models and fail to gain understanding and buy-in that the competencies if modeled will in fact lead to improve performance. Thus the average employee or leader see it as nice to know but not critical for the attainment of increased levels of performance. Competencies if used, must be integrated thoroughy in the organization. I have found when my clients take the time to get involvement at the appropriate levels of the organization and then demonstrate to that level the direct line of sight link to performance, then and only then do I see competencies being use effectively. Its all about what result is to be attained and how those results are to be attained.
I have seen many companies sink thousands of dollars and hours only to be able to check the box that they have competencies. SO WHAT? Competencies without proper integration are useless. Thanks for the opportunity to share.
5. Linda Moeller | October 24th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Jason,
I’ll admit I was also perplexed when during the shootout at HR Tech lists of competencies magically appeared to create a “successful” profile. Perhaps this added to the theatrics of the demonstration–Todd would be equally as successful on Broadway as Navy Pier!
I also agree that getting caught up in the semantics debate regarding how to operationalize competencies is a futile debate that renders all of us useless.
We need to be able to distill a method that brings competencies AND attributes to life in a successful profile.
For example, we will all agree that to be successful in sales a candidate needs to be resilient. However, do we all agree upon what resiliency looks like within the context of their organization (attributes)? A successful recruiter will know that their top sales people need to be able to take “no” for an answer at least 20 times a day and look for people who are resilient in this way.
Similarly, to make competencies and attributes come to life we need to be able to communicate to our candidates what it takes to be successful in a particular job within a particular organization in a meaningful way. Bland competency models and dry position descriptions are not going to solve the problem.
We need to engage in a dialogue with those who do the job in order to confirm what competencies are predictive and most importantly to find out how they are demonstrated for success. Finally, we need to enlist our friends from marketing to help us translate these competencies and attributes into compelling messages that will attract those players who can tame the green monster!
6. Jason Corsello | October 24th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Thanks to all for your comments. I’m going to agree to disagree with most of you. Whether you want to believe it or not, competencies are different from attributes. It is not semantics.
I will also respectfully disagree with you, Linda. When you say, “we need…we need” you lose sight of who the real stakeholder is, the managers, and what they need to make their job success. The fact of the matter is that managers don’t have time and in additional, like to do things their own way. Today, most companies have force-fit competencies into a deployment model that does not work. Translation…abandonment. Instead of forcing managers to a competencies that don’t work for them and they simply avoid, we should adapt to a model that puts the control in their hands. I have yet to find a company that has cracked the nut on competencies or thinks they are remotely close to be successful with competencies today.
7. DonaldHTaylor | October 24th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Hi Jason
I was following your argument until you started on the whole Red Sox-Indians thing then you lost me (but you know how I feel about the non-transferability of sporting metaphors :-)).
Here’s my take.
Competencies are an important idea, but if they are not graded, they are useless in practice. It’s vital to know a person’s competency level against something - against the required competency for their job, or a desired job in particular. Hence the need for competency frameworks, rather than simple lists.
Do competencies describe everything we need to know? No, the KSAOC model does a good job of describing other things about the individual. In addition, there is the question of management’s role in increasing / decreasing effectiveness, and the question of whether the environment allows them to go to work (the so called AMO model: Ability, Motivation and Opportunity to participate). This is what Linda was alluding to, above.
Okay, so competencies don’t do everything. But they do do something. They’re a vital part of the mix. If they’re overrated, then that’s probably either the fault of the the companies selling them or the analysts hyping them. I’ve seen enough good implementations where people understood what they were doing to convince me of their worth.
Cheers
Don
8. Chuck Allen | October 24th, 2007 at 11:59 am
As Naomi points out, differing semantics around competencies is why so many conversations about them breakdown and are unproductive. In 7 years of moderating discussions about competencies among people in the HR services industry, I can tell you there is no other topic that inspires so much violent agreement and disagreement.
KASOCs is a good neutral concept. I also buy into what you are saying about “attributes,” but I’d use another word (after 7 years of debating). We’ve settled on “dimensions”. That said, I’d violently agree with much of what people have said above. There does seem to be too much emphasis on ridged, force-to-fit competency content. Actually, I think the granular, atomistic definitional content is the low-value stuff should be severable or loosely coupled to value-added stuff — which are methods of contextualizing. The secret-sauce is in what you call “attributes,” what I call dimensions. The added value comes from analyzing and discovering which dimensions (measurable characteristics) are relevant in a given context and what levels are required/desired. This is the stuff that should be gathered from the bottom up analysis versus top down from a force-to-fit model. Once you’ve figured out what dimensions are appropriate for a given competency, the other part of this contextualization is discovering/analyzing what are optimum weights among the various competencies and clusters thereof.
If “competencies are overrated,” I think it stems from the fact that this process of “contextualization” and analysis and discovery is difficult, requires as much art as science, and because the tools and integration among talent management components don’t yet support it well.
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10. Dan Flanigan | November 20th, 2007 at 5:46 am
My issue with competencies is the level of detail that is needed to make them meaningful. This might be attributes or dimensions or behavioral examples or what have you. Once they get to the level of detail to make them meaningful, the burden placed upon the manager to assess these competencies is too great, particularly in any sort of focal event.
As an example, I worked with a customer once on a 360 project. Year 1 they measured competencies. Each employee had approximately 10 competencies they were measured on. Managers had approximately 5 employees. That meant every manager had about 50 clicks and comments to complete the process. The next year, they decided to measure at the behavior level. Every competency had approximately 4 behaviors. That now meant managers had to complete 200 clicks (and 50 comments) to complete the process. Guess what, participation rates plunged.
But this is an interesting nut to crack.
11. Luk Vervenne | February 3rd, 2008 at 12:08 am
My 4cents:
1. Competencies are a containter concept for any measurable characteristic (and their disparate semantic expressions) related to performance.
Or the other way around: competencies can be aggregated into ‘competency profiles’.
Currently there’s no xml standard for such profiles. We need one.
2. We need to start separating context from competency descriptions so the latter can become more reusable, thus improving semantic interoperability. So model context separately (you might then us that model for other things like tagging learning material or tests!)
3. A competency (profile) does not exist by itself but is generated dynamically as the result of a evidence distillation process.
So interlink your evidence sources into producing competency profiles. (no more clicking!)
4. A person does not have ‘a’ competency profile. Competency profiles are purposebuild and thus differ when interpreted by different assessors/HR-managers. (read: filtered by an enterprise/ HR policy)
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