Competency
What is Competency Mapping
It is about identifying preferred behaviours and personal skills which distinguish excellent and outstanding performance from the average.
A Competency is something that describes how a job might be done, excellently; a Competence only describes what has to be done, not how. So the Competences might describe the duties of a Sales Manager for example, such as manage the sales office and its staff, prepare quotations and sales order processing, manage Key Accounts and supervise and motivate the field sales force. The Competencies which might determine excellence in this role could include Problem Solving and Judgment; Drive and Determination; Commercial Awareness; Inter-personal skills etc, all of which might be described further by Behavioural Indicators relating specifically to that post in that organisation.
The broad concept might be said to be based on the frequently quoted adage: people get hired for what they know but fired for how they behave!
Competency mapping
When should they be used
The use of Competencies can include: assessment during recruitment, through specific work-based exercises and relevant, validated, psychometric tests; assessment during further development; as a profile during assessment to guide future development needs; succession planning and promotion; organisational development analysis.
Techniques used to map Competencies include Critical Incident Analysis and Repertory Grid.
Individual Improvement =
Organizational Improvement
Robin Throckmorton, M.A., SPHR
If you could find a tool that would provide beneficial feedback to employees that would lead to performance improvement and bottomline results to the organization, would you take advantage of it? Many organizations have found such a tool and found many uses for it. For a number of years, this tool was viewed as a fad but it has survived that first impression and become a tool for organizational improvement. This tool is multi-rater feedback or 360 degree feedback.
Let's start by defining multi-rater feedback so we are all on the same page:
Multi-rater feedback is a behavioral assessment focused on obtaining feedback on an individual's performance relative to key behaviors from those around the individual including direct reports, peers, customers, supervisor, and even themselves.
The concept of multi-rater feedback is that everyone who is interfacing with an individual has perceptions of how they feel the individual is performing. Too often, the supervisor is relied upon to provide this feedback. Not all supervisors have the opportunity to see the employee perform on a day to day basis or in all situations that the employee's peers, direct reports, or customers may. Plus, by focusing the feedback on the behaviors needed to succeed on the job, the individual will have a better chance of identifying and implementing changes and improvements to those behaviors like communications, team orientation, or customer service.
But, before we get too far, we need to realize that multi-rater feedback is not necessarily the right tool for everyone. To begin with and most importantly, your organization must have a very high trusting culture. If employees don't trust each other or the organization, they will either not participate in the multi-rater assessment or fail to provide the open and honest feedback necessary to benefit [next page]