A REFRESHER ON COMPETENCIES

Since the introduction over twenty years ago of job competence assessment (JCA) as a behaviorally anchored methodology for selection and development, various definitions of a competency and diverse kinds of competency models have emerged. JCA is a generic term describing an empirical methodology for isolating the historical characteristics of outstanding performance in a given job or role. JCA grew out of long-term research that found that certain traditional job selection criteria such as curriculum studied, alma mater, and grade point average are unreliable in predicting everyday performance on the job. Job competence assessment is founded on the premise that the best indicator of future performance is past performance under similar circumstances. Indeed, we are all creatures of habit.

In its "academically rigorous" form, JCA involves controlled interviews of both outstanding performers and average performers in the targeted job or role. Certified interviewers probe for detail around behavior in a series of specific situations known as "critical incidents." Note, however, that if an organization wants future performance to be substantively different from past performance, then some of the data that emerge from these interviews may oppose desired sets of behaviors going forward. In its rigorous form, JCA can take months and cost a bundle. Few organizations want to spend that much time and money for the incremental "validity" that comes with a rigorous approach. Other approaches have proven effective for creating a reliable, practicable competency model.

The branches of competency-based selection and development are both varied and numerous. And devotees of each throw rocks at each other with comparable abandon. The authors have personally worked with client companies whose competency models have comprised as few as a dozen competencies (or less), as well as with others whose competency models have totaled as many as three hundred (yes, three hundred). We have seen the same competency descriptor— for example, communication—defined in some models as a discrete competency, and in other models as a cluster encompassing as many as a half-dozen individual "communication competencies" (e.g., listening, oral presentations, writing, giving feedback, and so on). We have seen competency models in which a particular competency—for example, leadership—is defined by as few as two or three tightly written one-line behavioral indicators, and we have come across other models in which the specific behavioral indicators for leadership number as many as fifteen or sixteen, with many of the behavioral indicators in fact consisting of a mixture of several different behaviors. Thus, before introducing the partnering competencies vital to building and sustaining a partnering organization, it is important to set the stage by clearly defining the authors' understanding of competencies.

We define competency as a characteristic of an individual that can be shown to predict outstanding performance in a job. In short, competencies are the traits, knowledge, skills, and abilities that enable the behaviors essential to producing the principal outputs of a job. Accurate self-assessment is an example of a competency; keyboarding (nee touch-typing) is not. Initiative is a competency; knowing how to jazz up a slide presentation by inserting a flapping blue butterfly is not. Neither keyboarding nor jazzing up a slide presentation will drive outstanding performance. In certain organizations, however, accurate self-assessment and initiative can be crucial to delivering superior results. The main purpose of competencies is thus to paint a detailed picture of what outstanding performance looks like in terms that can be openly—and ideally, rationally—debated with empirical data.

The picture of success must be painted in terms of observable behaviors that apply specifically to a particular job, in a particular unit, in a particular organization. In behavioral terms, for example, the competency teamwork for a reactor engineering supervisor in a nuclear power plant will look different from that of a financial analyst in an insurance firm. In both cases, however, a selecting leader would develop a job profile to help define the future-focused traits, knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to carry out the organization's strategic goals (see the section "The Partnering Paradox in Job Design" in Chapter 5). Competencies can enable the accomplishment of enterprise objectives such as the following:

• Set behavioral norms that will foster desired cultural changes

• Lay the groundwork for a new kind of employer-employee compact

• Increase the effectiveness of a selection process

• Raise performance standards

• Improve alignment of individual behaviors with strategic direction

• Serve as a set of criteria for measuring performance and career growth

• Enable innovative pay programs such as broadbanding and pay for knowledge

• Focus training and development plans on the most critical areas of need

• Foster a learning organization

In summary, competencies can serve as the centerpiece of an integrated human performance system.

An organization's competencies are most directly derived both from its strategic framework and from the corresponding business processes, both core and enabling. An organization's purpose drives its business processes, and its purpose and its processes together define its core competencies, the subset of the myriad competencies that define how the enterprise would like to be viewed by customers, employees, and owners. Usually, twelve to fifteen competencies serve as an adequate means of making sound selections and as the basis for an empirically based human performance and development system.