The Competency Crunch
The Competency Crunch This is a good time to ask, ‘are you getting what you want from your competency framework?’ Russell Connor, Dynamic Link In less than ten years the world’s financial system has been subject to two seismic events. Firstly there was the massive devaluation of all things tech-stock. Now the credit-crunch makes the internet-bubble look like the froth on a derivative trader’s daily cappuccino. What can we put this down to? Are there simple explanations? Maybe. Greedy bankers and brokers promoting over inflated stocks, the herd instinct, dubious accounting practices and plain foolhardiness are likely candidates to take the rap. For sure, the humble competency framework is unlikely to be called to account. However, the innocent looking competency framework may have left faint finger–prints at the scene or at least could be guilty through negligence. The question has to be asked, ‘how come so many large and respected companies, using tried and trusted competency frameworks, selected leaders that didn’t see the gravy train was about to hit the buffers?’ Sorry about the messy metaphor! Ok, it is true that the global financial meltdown was a systemic failure with many factors contributing to its cause. But the near collapse of the financial system does show that long established competency frameworks have serious defects. Waves of Change Managing constant change has been a theme for a decade or more. Dealing with discontinuous waves of change is a much more recent phenomenon.
situation by viewing a tidy set of graphs. Wellcrafted mission statements and perfectly controlled projects could guide any changes. Within this world, high performance behaviours could be identified and, with the right management training, future leaders could be cloned. This view disguises the messy, interconnected and ambiguous reality of getting things done, making things better and securing a long-term sustainable future in an increasingly complex environment. What is more, with a shift from producing products to providing financial services the general level of complexity increases. Does your competency framework reflect today’s reality? Most competency frameworks are predicated on the basis that tomorrow will look like today and very few take into account the fact that uncertainty and unpredictability is the way things are around here. If tomorrow is not the same as yesterday, what do leaders draw upon to help guide them to make wise decisions? Clearly, past experience or yesterday’s competency list cannot be the whole answer. One of the reasons for having a competency framework is to help people act in a relevant and appropriate manner. But if appropriate behaviour is conditional upon the complexity of the environment within which you work, certainly the ‘one size fits all’ competency framework will be sadly lacking.
Once we could get away with treating the world as if it consists of lots of parts that could be separated out, measured and managed. In this way, relationships could be reduced to organisation charts, roles to list of tasks and understanding the current
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The Competency Crunch
The Fatal Flaws? How to lead and manage in a complex environment is a key competence area but competency frameworks don’t usually address this. This is because there is a gap in the practice of social and management science. In everyday experience we do not see what precedes action – the thought processes that gradually lead to the development of entrepreneurial ideas and initiatives. We do not see the full process of coming-into-being of decision taking. Even when we take decisions we do not see our movement from intuition to thought and consciousness through to language, behaviour and action. We see what we do. We also form theories about how we do things. These theories tend to suggest that we act rationally, having fully comprehended the inputs and consequences. To bring ‘science’ to the party, many theorists and practitioners have focused on what we do. The resulting competency frameworks solely focus on demonstrable behaviours that that are associated with high performance. Whilst well-intentioned, these behaviour-based frameworks actually miss a key point. Behaviour is an output - an end result of something else. To really understand management and especially leadership behaviour it is necessary to go upstream, to the source - to the thinking process. Our ability to think, especially our ability to think about thinking, defines us as human beings. What is more; Thoughts and words are incredibly powerful, they have caused many of the great unions and the great conflicts throughout history, Awareness of our thinking intentions is real selfinsight, Our perspective (the breadth and depth of thinking and the ability to handle ambiguity) equips us to handle different types of work.
This body of work can be summarized as Work Levels. Work Levels is a management methodology used by some of the world’s leading organisations. Work Levels makes the dynamic link between people and jobs by referencing the context, especially the complexity of the decision-making environment. Jobs vary in the degree to which there is uncertainty and complexity and likewise, people vary in the ability to make decisions in conditions of uncertainty and complexity. The essence of Work Levels is that all work can be allocated to one of a specified number of levels of work - each with its own theme, purpose and core contribution.Core contribution describes the outputs of the job and the value of these to the organisation is in direct proportion to the complexity of the environment in which decisions have to be made. Based on the integrated framework, a direct 'mirror-image' connection is made between the outputs of work and the inputs- the personal capabilities required to achieve these. At each successive level the capability to get one's head around the scale of the challenge needs to change profoundly. Making this connection provides a dynamic link between people and jobs and this enables us to delve into the inner world of leaders. Work Levels addresses how someone has to think in order handle varying degrees of uncertainty and complexity. This is in contrast to psychometrics, where thinking (i.e. the essence of being human) is limited to the classical aptitudes of logic and analysis.
An Alternative Approach There is an alternative approach to relying on the tried and tested behaviour based competency frameworks This is a body of work that arose out of sociotechnical systems theory. Socio-technical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects in an organisation.
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The Competency Crunch Making a Difference Let’s take the example of recruiting the next CEO of a large multinational financial services institution to illustrate how the use of Work Levels would ensure a correct fit between the job and the person. It is likely that a Work Levels analysis of the role would show that the type of problems that the CEO would have to tackle: Involve a network of interconnected units with frequent and multiple linkages, Have arisen in the external environment of the unit, Are concerned with the long-term direction, Appear to have no clear boundaries or established context, Are presented as dilemmas between abstract ideas such as wealth creation and corporate social responsibility. In order to undertake this role a person must be equipped with a range of industry relevant skills, knowledge and experience. They must also have the required perspective (that is the mental flexibility that they bring to bear in dealing with new and different situations) to enable them to get their head around the size, scope and complexity of the decisions that need to be taken. Even a life-time in financial services does not necessarily equip everyone with this.
Careful exploration of the decisions that people have taken in the past are the windows that can be used to see how a person patterns and organises their thoughts in order to create alternatives, make choices and live with the uncertainty that making choices always brings The outcome of such a process would ensure that someone not only has the technical skills and knowledge to do the job but will critically, also have what it takes to make decisions in conditions where precedent does not apply and there is a high level of ambient uncertainty. Conclusion What is absolutely clear is that at least in the postindustrial western economies people will be developing and building value-propositions based on complex concepts with multiple inter-dependencies and consequential risk. If organisations don’t want to be surprised and overwhelmed by so-called unforeseen change, management theorists and practitioners had better wise-up to the limitation of current competency frameworks. At best these are behaviour based and identify yesterdays high performance factors. At worst they are a mish-mash of behaviours, values and aspirations.
Exploring the context, expanding on the complexity of the decisions that need to be taken and defining the required perspective provides the basis for a well constructed assessment process. The very heart of this process is to test out the breadth and depth of a candidate’s perspective or, to use another term, their mental model. In this way it is possible to identify how they make sense of complexity for themselves and others. Competency based interviewing that begins, ‘tell me about a time when you…….’ may be a good start but often illicit the polished answers to anticipated questions. When seeking to understand what a person has actually achieved it is necessary to engage in a dialogue that is uncluttered by practiced responses that so often occurs in interview situations. A rigorous approach is required and seemingly scientific psychological profiling falls short.
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Russell Connor Dynamic Link (www.dynamic-link.com) Russell is the Managing Director of Dynamic Link. Dynamic Link uses a Work Levels framework to provide integrated human resource services.
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