Competency Framework

Has your organisation got the key ingredient to integrate your people strategy?

The modern HR function is characterised by being “everything” to everyone; and, the implication can be spreading HR too thin with multiple initiatives across the employee life-cycle. Staying coherent and impactful while offering a comprehensive people strategy can be challenging to coordinate. Competency frameworks (also referred to as capability frameworks) can create synergies in HR activities and drive organisational performance by integrating your people strategy across the employee life-cycle.

A competency is a combination of skills, abilities, and attributes made explicit through describing the observable behaviours. As a cluster, these competencies form a competency framework that builds an organisation’s capability to deliver their vision and strategic plans. As opposed to goals that define “what” to achieve, a competency framework defines “how” the goals are achieved. Aligning the “what” and “how” is essential to the current and long term success of any organisation. The effective use of competency frameworks can help structure recruitment, selection, development, career progression, performance conversations, and succession planning processes. Specifically, the application of competency frameworks can help:

  • Identify high potential candidates that align to the role and organisation
  • Determine what thriving employees looks like in their current role and for different roles across the organisation
  • Provide tangible examples of expected behaviours to support performance conversations
  • Formulate a tailored career path for employee development and career progression
  • Uncover competency gaps across groups to steer targeted training and development initiatives
How to develop a competency framework

Traditional competency frameworks are a comprehensive library of behavioural descriptors but can be unwieldly and often take months to develop. The Steople PAIRS model enables a rapid turnaround time while ensuring a functional, flexible, and relevant competency framework. Our model distills competencies into those most relevant for the future success of the organisation. To ensuring a balanced framework, our model focuses on building competencies across five critical areas:

  1. People Management – Providing leadership and managing employees within an individual’s immediate control such as direct reports and project team members
  2. Activity Management – Implementing activities and how to deliver against objectives
  3. Information Management – Gathering and sharing of information and data via communication channels such as face-to-face interactions, presentations, and social media
  4. Relationship Management – Interacting with internal and external stakeholders outside an individual’s immediate control such as decision makers, peers, customers and suppliers
  5. Self Management – Managing emotions, including qualities such as optimism, resilience and ability to cope with pressure and stress

Steople’s methodology to quickly building a targeted competency framework involves ensuring the organisation, key employees, and managers are involved in identifying and defining the critical behaviours for success. In addition, the use of focus groups and key stakeholder consultation during the design and development stages ensure the competency framework captures an accurate reflection of the organisation’s needs, environment, and unique culture.

To learn more about integrating your people strategy or competency frameworks with Steople’s methodology, please contact the Steople team.