WHY DO I HATE COMPETENCY FRAMEWORKS?

“There is a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it. You can know a lot and not really understand anything.” Charles Kettering.

The subject of HR competency models surfaced again recently. Why do I have a negative visceral reaction to competency models? I think the basic idea is sound. Writing down the technical tool kit as the foundation of an important company function shouldn’t be offensive. It might even be helpful! So why am I filled with dread when someone starts talking about documenting the 20-30-50-200 competencies required for an HR (or any corporate) function?

COMPETENCY FRAMEWORKS

It may be worth starting this blog with a quick explanation of what a competency framework is. The basic idea is that one takes a organisation function like HR (or technical discipline like engineering) and break down the jobs into buckets of knowledge, skills, and behaviours. Breaking a function down this way allows a company (or indeed educational institution) to build a curriculum to help individuals learn what is needed to become ‘competent.’ The two most obvious drivers therefore are: (1) providing a roadmap for individuals wishing to development a career in HR and (2) establishing a benchmark for companies to test their capabilities against (these are most often used in my experience as job selection or promotion criteria as well as developmental roadmaps). 

FIGURE 1 - GENERIC COMPETENCY FRAMEWORK

AN HR COMPETENCY EXAMPLE

If we apply this concept to HR, most models show the technical skill sets broken down into two large buckets:

1 – Specialist skills like reward, recruiting, or systems.

2 – Generalist skills, like business partners who work with parts of a business to help them solve problems.

At this high level I think there is a general consensus about what technical skills exist in traditional HR functions. However, competency models typically get much more granular and detailed. What emerges is a model like the one below:

FIGURE 2 - CIPD HR COMPETENCE FRAMEWORK

Personally, I think the (above) CIPD model for HR is complicated.  The intent of this model is to show a general career progression for an aspiring HR professional. First, they should master the ten professional areas. Then they should develop leading people, before linking what they know to business strategy. All of this is supported by a series of behavioural building blocks. 

BLACK HOLE OF OVER-ENGINEERING

In my experience, competency frameworks seem to bring out the worst over-engineering tendencies in EVERY organisation. Like the picture in Figure 3, competence frameworks just seem to be taken captive by overzealous advocates, who either: (a) believe they are on a pseudo religious quest to find a deep truth in organisational capability, or (b) embrace the idea that something complex and dynamic can be reduced to a series of excel worksheets. 

FIGURE 3 - I JUST WANTED A KNIFE

I have written previously about the difference between complicated and complex problems. I think some organisations’ competency framework custodians make this same mistake. While at a general level of abstraction, some articulation of technical knowledge is helpful. If you get too carried away in the belief you can prescriptively define competencies to the enth degree…. well you just get madness. 

EXAMPLE ONE – FRAMEWORK AS A FOLLY

Back in 2010, when I was studying competency frameworks across the major oil patch, I came across the extraordinary factoid that one major European oil major had created a database of 80,000 competencies. You might say, but David a large oil company probably has 80,000 employees so is it such a surprise that they could map a similar number of competencies?

Well, yes…. I’m not surprised…. sadly.

Here are a few other factoids about this same company and its competency framework. The exercise to map these competencies had taken three years and significant consulting time. There was a team of 5 people focused on maintaining the database. At the time I reviewed the work, my observation was that more work was being undertaken to maintain the framework than utility received by the business who owned it. 

EXAMPLE TWO – COMPETENCY AS A SCIENCE

In another business, coincidentally also a large energy firm, I witnessed a concerted effort to measure employees against a rigorous 40-point competency model. During an 18-month period, 2,000 employees undertook technical and behavioural assessments. They were scored against a 5 points scale (awareness to mastery).

The outcome? Fifty percent of the function left the business. The function also became so consumed by its own ‘excellence’ that it lost the confidence of the business. 

EXAMPLE THREE – COMPETENCE MEANS EXPERTISE

While I could go on, my final example is of the consequence of focusing too much on insular technical expertise rather than of more holistic business problem solving. This fits into the category of be careful what you wish for. Competency frameworks do two things:

1 – Develop deeply technically competent people within an existing model (let’s say the Ulrich HR model for example).

2 – They also train people to look and think through challenges based on existing thinking and practices (i.e. consistency at the cost of parochial perspectives).

The problem with this is that when a business faces disruption or crisis, the resulting ‘competent’ functional expertise is slow to come to terms with new ways of working. The default is to use existing tools and methods. In my view, this handicaps (particularly HR) functions by anchoring them in old paradigms and provides almost a blindness to what might be coming next.

ANSWERING THE QUESTION

So have I explained and justified why I don’t like competence frameworks? I think I’ve just seen too many occasions where they have become unwieldly and detached from business purpose. The strange thing is I’ve never seen them done superficially. It seems when it comes to competence maps, there is a vortex which sucks people down into a ‘zone of over-engineering’ or ‘a field of Tayloristic ecstasy!”

When someone in an organisation says, “We need a corporate competence framework!” I tend to have two reactions. First, I look for a way to see if I can get out of the room. I have found myself thinking through whether exiting via a window would be preferable to staying for what comes next. 

If I can overcome the flight reflex, then I try to understand why a company thinks it needs one. My firm belief is that when it comes to competence frameworks, less is more. In very specific cases, for a limited number of roles, where technical excellence is essential, they may have utility. For almost all other situations, at least in my experience, they are highly counter-productive.

COMPETENCE MODELS AND PRAGMATISM 

The CIPD HR model shown earlier as an example, like many such models, attempts to map the totality of an organisation’s HR function. Consequently, it is inevitably complex and somewhat idealistic.  In practice, few people can or need to ‘master’ all disciplines of HR before moving into leadership. A common debate among reasonable people (I’ll let you judge if I am one of these) as to the value of competence frameworks is how to use them but not become a captive of them. Josh Bersin’s recent article The Full-Stack HR Professional does a good job of discussing this and sharing the sensible conclusion that a “T” shaped career seems to emerge as the winning formula.

At its heart, the “T” shaped model assumes a divide between being a deep specialist in a specific field (reward for example in HR) versus being more a generalist (think management consultant or HR business partner). If you have been a generalist your entire career, the corresponding key stroke might be a “—” where for someone who has only been a specialist it would be an “I.” 

FIGURE 4 - "T" CAREER MODEL

I think this “T” model is fairly intuitive. It reinforces the importance of some core field of expertise but underlines it is not practical or realistic to be an expert in every field. However, my problem even with this more pragmatic view of competence, is that it is a narrow way to think about HR addressing a business need. “T” careers may help individuals navigate career planning choices (although as I’ve written previously I think long range career planning is complex) but they still aren’t adequate to explain the totality of business leadership challenges in 2019.

CONFUSING NAVIGATING CHALLENGES WITH TECHNICAL COMPETENCE

My conclusion here is that when we talk about competence frameworks, we start to confuse descriptions of technical expertise required to help a business make wise decisions, with the decisions themselves. What I mean by this is that to lead a business you must possess some entrepreneurial vision. To lead a function which supports an entrepreneur, you must be skilled at positioning that function to help achieve the business strategy. What I’m not convinced about is whether the best way to develop this skill is by growing up through a domain specific competence framework. Let me try to illustrate this here in Figure 5 below: 

FIGURE 5 - COMPETENCE PARADOX?

On the left of this illustration I’ve shown the typical competence framework as a set of technical skills and behaviours, supplemented by strategy and executive influence experience. This is a talent centric view in so far as it attempts to describe how an individual would navigate up the path toward the top. 

On the right, I’ve shown my view of what any organisation really needs in terms of leadership of any of its key support functions including HR. Here we have a business outcome as the desired result. We also have some problems and opportunities which probably mean the business does not have all the capabilities it needs to guarantee success. In this depiction, the leader of this function needs to hold a tension between current and desired capabilities. Equally, the leader needs to help steer a course through the minefield of challenges and grab the opportunities.

The question this leaves me with is that if you were a CEO facing the challenges shown on the right, who would you want to help you navigate the path? Someone who has deep technical expertise born from years studying through a marathon type competence model, or someone who has shown their resilience, agility, and adaptability to rise to multiple challenges, in different domains, potentially in different cultural contexts?

EPILOGUE

I don’t like competency models because they are just too constraining and attempt to make a complex question ‘like what capabilities do we need?’ fit into an excel spreadsheet. I’ve also seen them terribly over-engineered and very costly to maintain. But moreover, I’ve never really seen them work in a business setting.

Where I have seen them work is in a University curriculum setting. Fundamentally, college classes are a competence based derivative where knowledge is parceled and students have to demonstrate some comprehension to obtain certification.

I wonder, however, if you have a different view. Let me know. I’d be interested in your view.

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