Competency frameworks: love 'em or lose 'em

John Burgoyne, programme director of management learning and leadership at Lancaster University Management School, questions whether competency frameworks succeed in what they were set out to achieve.

It is hard to find an organisation that does not have a competency framework or leadership and management capability, by this or another name. But both HR professionals who provide these and the staff to whom they are applied, seem to have great reservations about them. They are frequently seen as ‘tick box’ activities that have to be gone through for compliance reasons before getting on with the real work.

So, why do we have them?

Adrian Furnham in the Psychology Department at University College London has suggested that it is the TINA principle: There Is (or appears to be) No Alternative.

There are endless unresolved issues. Do they describe psychological characteristics that underlie behaviour, or the behaviour that manifests them? Are they simple or complicated – half a dozen or a phonebook-size document? Is there one for the whole organisation or, at the other extreme, a tailor-made one for each individual job, geared to delivering against a specific job description? Does an organisation have its own framework or does it look for an off-the-peg version?

Competency frameworks are, at best, arrived at by comparing high performing leaders with average or low performing ones, but this only focuses on what won the last war, not the next one. Armies are said to enter each war with the training and equipment needed to win the last one. Organisations do the same with leadership capability. But it is often not as good as that. I have personally helped make them up on a serviette in a wine bar at the end of a corporate project taking months and spending thousands of pounds. I have heard a story of a well-known consultancy company having to give back the fee for a competency project when the client – a bank – found, by checking the origins of a word document, that it was a lightly modified version on one done previously for another bank. Do remember to cut and past into a fresh document if you are doing this. This article is specially written for you, though it draws on pre-existing thoughts.

Many selection, performance management and development initiatives seem to proceed with scant attention to the competency frameworks that are supposed to inform them. It is a bit like organisations where staff don’t even know there is a mission statement, let alone be able to tell you what it is.

Many people say that it is the process of debating and agreeing what the competency framework should be, rather than actually is in use, which is beneficial because it brings up a shared discussion of strategy and behaviour, and alignment between people. Perhaps all is not lost.

There are, however, a number of critical interpretations one could make.

First, is this a power move? A takeover bid by the HR function for the core management job? After all, if you define, measure and seek compliance to the behaviour you think is needed, are you then doing the job of general management?

Second, there is a danger of inappropriately applying process to management and leadership jobs that only work for more prescribed technical and operational jobs. The skills of an electrician may be well known and standard across different situations, but this is not so for leaders and managers. They are the ones involved in dealing with the messy problems that are left when you take out the routine ones dealt with by technical and operational people.

Third, and along a similar line of argument, a starting point for competencies for most jobs is what it needs to deliver the (often new) strategy of the organisation. And this strategy needs to come from leadership. Leadership precedes rather than follows from strategy.

Are competency frameworks, and the practices they are supposed to support, simply patches for problems that should not exist if managers were doing their jobs properly? We need more competent managers. Only then can we avoid being stuck in some kind of Ground Hog Day loop.