Your company already has the competencies it needs. You just don’t know it yet.

A new project comes in. During the meeting, the manager pauses for a second and says, “Give it to Jana.” Someone asks whether Peter could take it instead; he has more time right now. “No, Jana is a better fit.”

No one asks any more questions. The meeting moves on, the project has an owner, and everyone is satisfied. This decision is made a thousand times a year in your company. Now let’s replay that meeting in slow motion.

In a single second, the manager compares two people. They determine that Jana can handle clients under pressure and stays steady when the brief changes halfway through a project. Peter is stronger analytically, but he needs a clear brief and uninterrupted time to work. The manager weighs the nature of the project, the risk, and the makeup of the team. Then they decide.

It was fast, accurate, and built on years of observation. A competency assessment of two people had just taken place. Although no one called it that.

And because no one did, no one thought there should be a record of it. Everything the manager knows about Jana and Peter stays in their mind. The next person facing a similar question will have to guess or ask that manager.

Your company knows the answer to the question of what its people can do. It just knows it in a form it cannot use.

Your company already has a competency map. No one has drawn it yet

The usual diagnosis is that the company lacks a competency model. That is only partly true.

Companies use the word “competency” in all sorts of ways. For most people, it means authority, because the only sentence in which they ever use it is, “That’s outside my scope.” Those more familiar with the concept think of skills and close the subject with, “We have a skills matrix in the system.” But a competency includes everything a role requires: skills, knowledge, abilities, and patterns of behavior. A skills matrix captures only one of those four layers.

Notice which layer our manager used to make the choice. Jana got the project because she can handle pressure and is not thrown off when the brief changes halfway through, even though Peter may have a higher level of skill. A pattern of behavior made the difference — the very layer a skills matrix has nowhere to record. The company does not even have a name for it, and what has no name cannot be shared or managed.

The model, a definition of what someone in a role should be able to do, may indeed be missing. But the competency map, a record of what people can actually do and how they behave, already exists. It lives in managers’ intuition, in unwritten selection rules, and in the company’s collective sense of “we know who to ask.” That intuition was built through perhaps years of observation and dozens or hundreds of situations that revealed who could handle change.

The data is simply stored in one person’s mind.

Two weaknesses of storing knowledge in one mind

One person’s memory has two weaknesses as a storage system. Sooner or later, both become a problem.

The first appears when a manager leaves. The company loses more than the manager: it also loses the competency map of their entire team, years of observation, and every unwritten “I know who to ask.” The successor receives an organizational chart, a list of positions, and job descriptions — everything the company can see — and then spends a year discovering what it could not. Who handles pressure, who needs quiet to work, who can be trusted with a client relationship in crisis. Someone has already spent that year once. They simply took the result with them, so the company pays for it again.

The second shows up sooner. In response to market changes, leadership rewrites the strategy so that a significant share of future revenue must come from something the company has never done before. At the next meeting, someone asks, “Who do we have for this?” and expects an answer by the end of the week. The answer already exists inside the company, scattered across managers’ minds. Each holds one piece, and no one has a reason to put the pieces together. HR can easily end up posting a job for someone who may already be sitting in your company.

The harshest version of this weakness has played out over the past two years in companies that publicly announced AI would take over part of the work, only to hire for the same work again. The problem was not that they were wrong about AI. They didn’t know what else those employees were responsible for beyond the routine being replaced, because no one had ever written it down. They discovered it only when things stopped working.

Try answering one question: how much of what your best manager knows about their people exists anywhere outside their mind?

You don’t need to create any of this from scratch

Competencies sit within roles, roles within processes, and processes within strategy. The previous issue followed that chain from the top down: from strategy to the question of what people in each role need to be able to do. That tells you what your company needs to be capable of, but not what it is capable of today.

You do not need to create the other half, because it is already taking shape inside the company. Every time a manager says, “Give it to Jana,” an assessment takes place. It happens a thousand times a year. Only one thing is missing: no one writes those assessments down.

So the next time you hear it, ask the manager why. Ask with genuine curiosity, because a question that feels like an audit will make the manager close up on the first attempt, and you may not get a second. Write down the answer exactly as they give it, including the person they did not choose. “She can handle the assignment or the client even if the brief changes halfway through” contains a layer you would flatten into “communication: level four” by translating it into your own category.

Do not build a new system for this or assign someone to own it. Write it wherever you already keep notes about people. The only thing that has changed is that a sentence that lived in one person’s mind now also lives outside of it.

After a year of asking this question, you will have a competency map you did not build from scratch. You simply mapped competencies that were already in the company.

Somewhere around the middle of that year, the process starts to reverse. The first entry is slow because the manager is searching for words they have never had. By the twentieth, they no longer need to search. A few things have started to repeat, and suddenly the manager has something against which to compare their people. The questions stop creating extra work and start saving time, because answers come more easily when both sides know what is being asked. That recurring set of terms is your competency model. The company did not buy or copy it. It emerged from decisions it would have made anyway.

And when the next project arrives and someone again says, “Give it to Jana,” no one will have to guess or chase down the one person who knows why. When that person leaves, what they knew about their people will remain.