Why Competences

A competency can be defined as...

the underlying sets of skills, knowledge, personal characteristics and behaviours needed to effectively perform a role in the organisation and help the business to meet its strategic objectives. They define superior performance and excellence.

By using competences as a basis for performance management, an organisation can more effectively align people attitudes and behaviours with what is needed to be competitive and successful.

Competences have become widely popular in recent years for their multiple advantages. Through their use, organisations are able to align behaviour with organisational strategy and values. Competences clarify work expectations for individuals and create a shared understanding of expectations among individuals by using a common language across jobs and the organisation. They also clearly communicate consistent standards.

In turn, Human Resource systems can be linked to this language to facilitate selection and guide development. Selection processes increase effectiveness and efficiency when each facet of the selection process is designed to evaluate the “target” or competences needed for the job. For example, defined competences help recruiters to target and evaluate potential candidates and they help an organisation to identify, develop, and utilise assessments and interviews that are job appropriate.

All these components help to ensure informed hiring decisions with a higher probability of selecting the best person for the role. Lastly, gaps between current and future skills can also be identified and development resources can appropriately allocated for highest gains. In short, competences ultimately impact business results.

While popularised in recent years, the roots for competency model date as far back as the early 1900’s when Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management from the 1920’s, argued that the task of a management scientist was to break down the subject into its component parts in order to better understand behaviour. Thus, job success is best understood when broken down into its component competences and behaviours that lead to performance.

The popularising of competences in the workplace is credited to Hay-McBer company founder David McClelland through his work with the United States Information Agency in the 1970’s. In this work, he identified the attitudes and behaviours of outstanding officers so that the agency could begin selecting employees on the basis of relevant criteria rather than standard screening tests that were currently being used such as IQ.

He and his team did extensive interviews with outstanding and “secure but not outstanding” performers which focused on behavioural incidents with good and poor outcomes. He found characteristics such as Social Sensitivity and Political Judgment to be key differentiators. He then validated these results by developing personality measures of these competences and evaluating these against job performance. Later, McClelland published his results arguing that selection for many jobs should be based on competences rather than standardised tests. As he put it: “If you want to test who will be a good policeman, go find out what a policeman does. Follow him around, make a list of his activities, and sample from that list in screening applicants.”

With the movement towards competences to answer organisation needs, competences have been discussed further in terms of competency groups:

• skill based
• knowledge based
• motive based
• trait based
• and competences rooted by self-concept

Skill based competences describe the demonstration of expertise (e.g. negotiation) whereas knowledge based competences describe the information in that area of expertise. Both skill and knowledge based competences are referred to as “threshold competences” or “essential competences” since they describe essentials but don’t distinguish excellence from average performance.

Motive based competences describe individual wants or driving behaviours (e.g. drive for results) whereas trait based competences describe dispositions or manners of behaving. Lastly, competences rooted by self-concept describe attitudes and values. The last three groups of competences are referred to as “differentiating competences” in that they distinguish superior performers from the average performers. These differentiating competences are the crux of any successful competency model. Bearing these distinctions in mind, we developed our tool for competency building as the Strategic Success Modelling process.

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