The Problem with Competency Frameworks: Why They Fail and How We Can Do?Better

Competency frameworks are essential tools for outlining the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) that employees need to thrive in their roles. They are used for various purposes, including talent acquisition, performance management, learning and development, and succession planning. By using competency frameworks, organizations expect to improve employee engagement, increase productivity, reduce turnover, and improve overall organizational performance.

However, despite their widespread adoption, competency frameworks often fall short of these lofty goals. Instead of driving employee growth and improved performance, they frequently become relegated to HR’s administrative back-end, disconnected from the realities of day-to-day work. This disconnect stems from several common issues: frameworks can be overly rigid, suffer from inconsistencies in their structure and definitions, and, perhaps most critically, fail to reflect the dynamic and nuanced ways professionals actually develop and apply their capabilities.

A Closer Look at Some of the Challenges

They Tend to Be Designed for HR, Not for Employees

Competency frameworks aren’t built for those who should use them most?—?employees and managers. Instead, they are developed as HR artifacts, meant to support structured processes like job evaluations, training programs, and performance reviews.

The problem? Employees don’t experience work through competency lists. No one starts their day thinking, “Today, I will demonstrate my ability to collaborate at a Level 4 proficiency.” Instead, people experience work as decisions, actions, and interactions in a dynamic environment.

The consequence is that competency frameworks become compliance-driven rather than capability-enhancing. Employees struggle to see their relevance, managers find them too bureaucratic, and organizations end up with a system that adds complexity without improving performance.

They Can Be Too Rigid and Unnecessarily Specific

Many frameworks attempt to hyper-specify competencies, breaking them down into detailed proficiency levels and behaviors. While structure can be useful, excessive specificity ignores the fluid and contextual nature of work.

Instead of enabling development, such rigid definitions create artificial barriers. Employees don’t grow in neatly structured levels?—?they build skills through experience, exposure, and adaptation.

The Taxonomies End Up Being More Academic Than Practical

Competency frameworks typically separate capabilities into categories like:

• Core competencies (e.g., problem-solving, collaboration)
• Leadership competencies (e.g., strategic thinking, influence)
• Technical competencies (e.g., financial analysis, coding)

However, these categories often overlap significantly. Consider “strategic thinking,” for example. While clearly a crucial leadership competency, its effective application often relies heavily on specific technical competencies. A leader in a technology company, for instance, can’t formulate sound strategies without a solid understanding of the underlying technologies and market trends. Furthermore, even core competencies like “communication” are essential for effective strategic thinking, as leaders must clearly articulate their vision and plans. These super detailed splits and reductionist approaches render competency frameworks confusing and challenging to apply. Employees are pushed into artificial distinctions that fail to capture the integrated nature of their actual work.

A Possible Alternative Way to Think About Capabilities in the Workplace

Instead of rigid and fragmented competency frameworks, organizations could focus on deconstructing the real capabilities employees need to perform effectively and providing them with a mental model that aids deliberate and intentional management of their ability to perform and adapt.

An example of such a model organizes capabilities into three meaningful buckets:

You: Foundational Human Capabilities

At the core of all professional performance are human capabilities that shape how individuals interact with the world. These include:

? Cognitive abilities (critical thinking, learning agility)

? Emotional intelligence (self-awareness, resilience)

? Social skills (empathy, influence, collaboration)

These aren’t just “soft skills.” They are the foundation of all work performance. No matter the role, every employee needs the ability to think, adapt, relate, and regulate emotions to succeed.

Your Professional Activities: How You Apply Capabilities to?Work

Capabilities aren’t just abstract traits?—?they come to life in professional activities. These include:

• Executing (delivering results, following through
• Organizing & planning (structuring work, managing time)
• Engaging people (communicating, collaborating)
• Creating solutions (solving problems, innovating)
• Strategizing (prioritizing, making trade-offs)

These activities are universal to all roles, but how they are applied varies. A sales executive and a software engineer both engage people and create solutions, but in vastly different ways. A competency framework should reflect this adaptability rather than impose rigid, context-blind criteria.

Your Expertise: Domain-Specific Knowledge and Decision-Making

Finally, professional excellence requires expertise in a given domain. It is this domain that gives meaning to professional activities. This expertise includes:

• Understanding what matters in a field (e.g., a financial analyst knowing market indicators)
• Deciding what results to pursue (e.g., a marketing director choosing campaign priorities)
• Knowing how to act in context (e.g., a surgeon making split-second surgical decisions)

Expertise isn’t just about knowledge?—?it’s about applying knowledge in context to make sense of complexity and drive decisions.

Why This Approach Works?Better

Shifting from traditional competency frameworks to this capability-based model offers three key advantages:

1. It aligns with how professionals actually develop. People don’t learn skills in isolation; they develop capabilities through experience and adaptation to real work situations.?
2. It is more intuitive and useful for employees. Instead of being forced into an arbitrary competency list, employees can focus on how they perform and grow in their actual work.
3. It is more flexible for future work trends. As industries evolve and job roles shift, a capability-based approach allows for adaptability, unlike rigid competency models that can quickly become outdated.

Rethinking Competency Frameworks for the?Future

It’s time to move beyond overly prescriptive, HR-centric competency models and adopt a capability-based approach that truly empowers employees.

Instead of treating work as a disconnected set of competencies, organizations can focus on framing how people actually pursue and achieve results:

• Human capabilities?—?mastery of self (how employees think, relate, and regulate emotions)
• Professional activities?—?mastery of activities (how they apply those capabilities in real work)
• Domain expertise?—?contextual mastery of professional body of knowedge (how they make sense of complex domain-specific information and make decisions)

Competency frameworks should help employees diagnose and respond to their personal needs for growth and performance. If we want to build truly high-performing organizations, we need to stop focusing on categorizing and wordsmithing extensive lists of competencies and start enabling human capabilities.

The question we should be asking is not “Do employees have this competency at this level or that competency at that level?” but rather, “Do they have the capabilities to succeed in their work?”

That is the shift organizations need to make.

This article challenges traditional competency frameworks and proposes a practical, human-centric alternative. I would love to hear your thoughts?.?Does your organization have competency frameworks? What has your experience been with competency frameworks??