Competency mapping is one of those processes, which despite being old in its inception, is still new in its implementation. Though corporate giants and top HR consultancies have developed customized competency frameworks and do use them religiously for recruitment and evaluation purposes, the concept has still not penetrated medium sized companies. Of course the cost of developing and using such frameworks cannot be justified in a small company of say 50-100 employees. There are however a huge number of organizations who have reached maturity to implement this but are struggling to do so because of lack of experience in this field. Not all HR professionals have undergone a competency mapping cycle and it is definitely difficult to manage if you have not even seen one .
A large amount of documentation can be found on the internet for competency models. Even if you read all of these, you still cannot be prepared to face the process and interpersonal challenges involved in the process. For developing an effective framework, copy paste just wont do, nor would modification of some other organization’s model. As in any other project, the process has to be really strong to come up with a solid framework meeting the requirements of the organization. It could be a 4 page framework or a 100 page one, no one is better than the other, if they help their respective organizations achieve their performance objectives.
Though competencies have traditionally been defined more in terms of behavior rather than technical ability, more and more firms are opting for technical plus behavioral competency definitions these days. When construction projects begin to get delayed unprecedently and when safety standards are not met despite all your best efforts, you do begin to wonder if having thorough subject knowledge and experience is ultimately more important than “willingness to learn” and “good attitude”. Having said that, it is heartening to see line managers giving more importance to behavioral competencies than the technical ones, and am sure HR folks would heave a sigh of relief when they find such understanding managers. But the question is , are companies willing to pay for technical training in today’s scenario? Would they prefer to hire an aggressive performer with people issues or a person with excellent interpersonal skills, with high delivery focus, trainable but lacking experience? Its not that companies have not faced these questions before, they have just become more urgent in the current economic situation.
Whatever an organization might choose to do, the process used for coming up with behavioral and technical competencies is the same. It is obvious that involvement of line managers is imperative, HR cannot do this job alone. Some organizations have HR as strategic business partners but most, even today, unfortunately don’t. HR executives in these companies do not have sufficient business knowledge to come up with the entire competency framework on their own, hence increased time requirement from line managers. HR would be lucky if line management already understands the importance of an accurate framework (which cannot be prepared from copy and paste), but mostly HR would have to get the buy in from departmental heads even if the initiative is driven from the top. Inputs received out of pressure and those received out of genuine interest do vary significantly.
A competency list can be prepared after job analysis interviews of various incumbents, role shadowing can also be done if feasible (in my experience it is not). Each competency then needs to be defined and then described at different levels. The number of levels can also vary from organization to organization (varies between 3-5 usually). A lot of focus groups, query solving sessions , review rounds and intermediate templates later, you can come up with a competency framework that actually works.
I have an experience of one such cycle and what an experience it has been! Before the start of the project, the General Manager asked me “Do you know how many companies in the world have successfully implemented competency framework? “ I said “Maybe a couple”. His response: “Zero. You might be the first one to do it”. If he was trying to motivate me, well good luck with that, I only got more scared!
Thankfully, we had consultants to do all this :D and I thank them for helping me gain immense knowledge on the subject. Now I am confident that I can prepare competency framework of any organization on my own and maybe will be the first one to deliver two successful frameworks in a row. ;)
Good Job Tanya, its really good you started a blog, hope to see more things coming. Would be good to detail a little more about the task, action and results :)
ReplyDeleteWe still think about the fantastic job you did with the competency mapping.
Please do follow my blog :P to get updates, next on the list: a book review...
DeleteLoved reading this... Keep up the good work! Miss you!
ReplyDeleteThanks Neethu. :) Miss you guys too!
DeleteHi, we are also in process of makinga competency framework for our company but it is minus the consultants & long time taken in group discussions. We have simpleified it (or we will find out later) the process by giving a list of competencies that may be reuired while working. It is irrespective of roles & hence mostly behavioural based than technical (for which we have job descriptions & KPA's).
ReplyDeletethis list is given to HOD's to understand & eveluate their current team with that. after collecting the responses from all HOD's, we ddrill down dept wise to find the distribution of competencies across the dept as well as role & hence finalise them. This framework will later be used for training interventions & modifying KPA's for all.
Also i would have loved to know more about your approach for competency mapping (i e kindly expand the last 2 paragraphs in the things you conducted, typcal difficulties you faced & outcomes of the same)
In the end, good to read the article. keep it up.
Hi Pallavi, thanks for the comment. I am listing some challenges that I faced, maybe this will help you:
Delete1. its not easy for managers to put their thoughts into words, some need more time than others. But this applied to technical competency list that we were creating from scratch. Since you have already handed over a list to your managers, it might be easier for them to work with it.
2. Overlapping inputs from different departments: Since the approach that we followed was of deriving competency clusters out of job analysis information, clarity of processes was very important. There were some tasks that multiple departments claimed to handle. We then had to go back to basics (referring to the quality manual etc.) to check who is supposed to do what.
3. It is difficult to determine the level of detail you want to go with in your framework. My manager always told me that all competency descriptions should be simple to read and more importantly they all should be measurable. Infact, we used to review everything keeping these 2 things in mind.
4. Determining the no. of levels in the framework- Again, due to our approach, no. of levels was dependent on the hierarchical depth of the department. Since this number was not consistent for all departments, there was some difficulty in deciding the number of levels.
5. Behavioral vs Leadership competencies- At one stage,our model went back and forth between "behavioral + technical" and "leadership+behavioral+ technical". You should be clear on how you want to categorise your competencies. This will help you during assessments of employees.
6. Quantifying the framework- We quantified the framework for the purposes of recruitment and employee assessments. You need to figure out a feasible way to do it. It should not get complex or employees get wary of the framework.
7. Interpersonal issues- Since a lot of people were involved in carrying out the project, there were some interpersonal challenges. You would always find that some people are more supportive than the others. It helped that the initiative was driven from the top. But you, as HR, can also help managers see the value addition of using such a framework for training, recruitment, evaluation etc. Be a good listener, be clear with what your goals are, be assertive and you will sail through these challenges easily.