Don’t start a competency model with competencies

Ask your leadership team what competencies are for. You’ll probably get a hesitant answer along the lines of, “Well, they’re what people need to be able to do,” followed by silence.

It’s not their fault. In most companies, competencies have never become part of how the business is run. They are pulled out twice a year for performance reviews, then again when training budgets are approved. Leaders do not need them to make any decisions — and if something does not inform a decision, it may as well not exist.

Some companies have tried to fix this with a project. They built a competency model, invested a fair amount of time and money in it, presented it to leadership — and then left it sitting on the intranet, unopened. It is easy to conclude that competencies are an academic exercise. I have heard that conclusion many times and, honestly, I get it. But competencies themselves are not the problem.

They are simply the final link in a chain that starts somewhere else entirely. If that chain is missing, no model, framework or best-in-class tool will help. When the chain holds, competencies stop being an HR exercise and become a practical basis for decision-making.

A score alone won’t make an orchestra

Let’s return to the orchestra from the previous article. The score is your strategy, the musicians are your people, and you are standing on stage as the conductor.

Now give the orchestra the score and walk away. Every musician has the music and knows how to play, yet no concert takes place. No one has decided when the strings should come in, how the sections should work together or who follows whom when the tempo changes. The rules for playing together are missing.

In a company, those rules are its processes. Processes define roles, and only once those roles are clear can you determine what the people in them need to know and be able to do: the knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviours they require. Think of the chain from the introduction as a series of connected links. Strategy shapes processes, processes define roles, and roles determine competencies.

Most competency models lack a real foundation precisely because they were built in reverse. The company created a list of what people should be able to do, but never explained why those particular things matter or what decisions the list should support.

Leadership is not asking whether the company has clearly defined strategic thinking as a competency. It asks different questions. Can we enter a new market? Who should we assign to a critical project? When do we need to hire, and when can we redeploy people internally? A list alone cannot answer them.

Don’t start with the model. Test the chain

Before building a competency model, check that the chain from strategy to an individual’s day-to-day work actually exists. You do not test it at a desk by reviewing documents. You test it with people.

Ask a line manager how their team’s work contributes to the company’s strategy. Then ask a member of the same team how their own work contributes to the team’s results and, through them, to the company’s. If both can answer without preparation or corporate clichés, the chain holds.

If they cannot, the chain is broken somewhere. Perhaps it stops with a manager who can explain what the team does but not why. Or perhaps it reaches the employee, who knows their tasks but not where they lead. That is your blind spot. A competency model will not hide it; it will only make the gap look neatly formatted. You cannot paper over it. You have to close it.

Strategy must reach every employee

When the chain holds, competencies stop being something discussed in two meetings a year and become part of everyday management. Leaders can use them to see whether the company has the people it needs to deliver its strategy. A manager can explain why a particular role requires those specific abilities, skills and areas of knowledge. Employees can see what their work contributes to and why those expectations exist.

This becomes most obvious when strategy changes. A company where people understand the connections does not have to translate every change into hundreds of new instructions. People can work out some of the implications for their own roles. They understand what the company is trying to achieve.

This is where changefulness begins. Not with adaptability training, but when strategy flows through processes and roles all the way to each employee.

That is why a competency model does not start with competencies. It starts by asking what the company wants to achieve and ends by asking whether it has the orchestra to play the score it has written.