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Competencies and Behaviours, by Richard Nelson.
The editorial from Issue Six of our newsletter.
Competencies and behaviours have been a concern of organisations during the recent past. At a strategic level, some businesses have tried to focus their special value to customers by codifying their core competencies and then building capability in relation to these. This is important work because it focuses the business’s strengths and clarifies how employees should direct their efforts.
Others have concentrated on developing competency frameworks. These have defined the common knowledge, skills, behaviours and attitudes managers and employees need to execute tasks in order to gain the right business results.
Why have organisations been concerned with this area of development? Although a variety of reasons can be cited, they largely have the same aim - the desire to improve performance. Specifically, ever increasing competitive pressures and the consequent need to change have emphasised the need to achieve clarity with respect to competencies and behaviours.
Our position, in Nelson Consulting, is that an organisation’s competencies and behaviours should be used as a source of competitive advantage and to underpin the leadership of the business. However, the value to the business depends on some key principles of design that the development of competencies and behaviours should recognise. These are:
Competencies and behaviours should demonstrate the organisation’s core values.
They should be fully aligned to the business’s measurement framework – driving results in relation to critical areas of success.
The technical and commercial capabilities required in the business need to be embraced by the competencies and behaviours, even if every detailed professional and technical skill is not included.
In Edition Five of The Column, we said that ‘values indicate the behaviour that can be expected from an organisation’ and that they ‘need to underpin the governance of the organisation and the brand identity’. Competencies and behaviours are the practical demonstration of the organisation’s values. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. Equally critical is the alignment with the measurement framework. There must be a ‘clear line of sight’ for the application of competencies and behaviours to the work that needs to be done to achieve the right results.
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