Performance
7
min read
Talent development is critical for growing organizations which see the workforce as their biggest asset. Focus on developing their talent stack not only leads to a pleasant employee experience, it also augments the overall performance and productivity for an organization.
While you may come across many ways to facilitate talent development, leveraging the competency framework can help you move the needle very quickly.
Let's see how.
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5 Stages in talent development
Before moving directly to how you can implement the competency framework, let’s quickly understand the 5 stages of talent development.
1. Planning
The first stage involves planning for your talent needs based on your organizational priorities and creating the position profile based on the skills, attitudes and other competencies.
2. Identifying
Based on the position profile, you need to start attracting talent for the position. You can do so by spreading the word in the right networks, through job portal platforms, etc. The objective is to ensure that you are reaching out to the right network. You can also explore the right candidate for the position internally to considerably save hiring and training costs.
3. Onboarding
Once you have identified the right person, the next stage of talent development is extending the offer to the person after a thorough background check as well as a competency and expectation match. It also requires creating personalized onboarding plans for the first 30-60-90 days of the candidate’s journey within the organization. Read our guide to employee onboarding to learn more about onboarding do’s and don’ts.
4. Developing
The main focus of talent development starts with providing the right development and learning opportunities to your workforce. This can involve upskilling for both technical and soft skills, leadership building or any development intervention based on the need of the role and position.
Read: How to create employee development plan based on performance history
5. Retaining
Finally, talent development involves undertaking initiatives to retain your talent. While learning opportunities are important, facilitating engagement, wellness, motivation, etc. all contribute to employee retention.
What is the competency framework?
If you are wondering how the competency framework aligns with talent development, you need to start by decoding what the framework actually stands for.
Put simply, a competency framework is a set of behaviors, skills, abilities and attributes that an organization considers imperative for creating a high performance culture.
The competency framework can be implemented at all stages of the talent development or the employee lifecycle within an organization. The idea is to ensure that certain core competencies are kept at the heart of the decision making that in any way impact the workforce.
Importance of talent development for employee retention
Competency framework based talent development is very important for employee retention. Talent development practices when undertaken effectively have the potential to encourage team members to stay with the organization for long and at the same time become ambassadors to help attract high quality peers.
Here are the top reasons why competency framework based talent development matters:
- Recruit the right person for the right job
- Provide the right learning and development opportunities
- Be an active participant in professional growth for employees
- Train and develop employees for professional obstacles
- Enable employees to navigate through challenges with mentoring support
- Enable employees to see a clear career growth path within the organization
Implementing the competency framework: Process, steps and ownership
Now that we have covered the basics of talent development and competency framework, let’s understand how leveraging the latter to advance the former can create a far reaching impact for organizations.
Step I: Create a competency framework
The first step is to create a competency framework which involves identifying the key competencies which will be instrumental in guiding all decisions around talent development. Depending on the nature of your organization, there can be categories within the competency framework that you seek to focus on. Your competency framework should focus on behaviors, skills and attributes which are critical for performance and overall success. The following steps can help you create a competency framework for talent development:
1. Identify key competencies
- Establish core competencies that are required to be possessed by everyone in the organization, for instance, teamwork or collaboration
- Highlight the functional competencies that are required for specific roles and positions, for instance, situational awareness and the ability to think on one’s feet for those in business development roles
- Identify competencies that align with your core values and are non negotiable, for instance, if your core value revolves around innovation and experimentation, a key competency will be a risk taking attitude
2. Determine behaviors and attributes
- Define the key parameters for each identified competency i.e. what are the factors that collectively contribute to presence or absence of that competency
- Establish metrics to judge the level of competency alignment across the workforce and identify the gaps
3. Link to organizational goals
- Create a business statement of how the competencies can advance overarching organizational goals
- Focus on the value add they bring along for organizational success
The responsibility of creating the competency framework is collective. It starts with involving the executive leadership to ensure alignment with the vision, people managers to ensure they are ideal for the culture you are trying to build and functional managers to ensure inclusion of right competencies for each role and position. Furthermore, involving those on the ground can be fruitful as they have the best idea of what competencies are critical and others which are good to have.
Step II: Align the competency framework with recruitment
Once the competency framework for talent development is ready, the next step is to align it with your recruitment process to ensure precise and effective hiring. There are a few steps along the way:
- Mention the keywords from the competency framework in your position profile or job description
- Specifically identify 5-7 key competencies for each role important for high level of performance
- Identify behaviors for each competency to look out for during the selection process
- Leverage psychometric assessments customized with your competency framework to test your candidates
- Conduct competency based interviews and assignments for a comprehensive view
- If there is a significant competency match, identify gaps if any for competency based development later
- Document results to align performance management for selected candidates
The onus of implementing the competency framework during selection lies primarily with the HR team and recruiters who assess the candidates with different tests and assessments. Team managers and leaders also play a role in assessing functional competencies and fit.
Step III: Facilitate competency based performance management and development opportunities
Irrespective of whether an employee is onboarded before or after you have implemented the competency framework for recruitment, you need to ensure competency based performance management and development opportunities.
Performance management
- Align OKRs and goals with competencies; focus on behaviors that can help drive the key results. For instance if a key result is expand to 5 new markets, a key competency can be adaptability
- Conduct competency based 360 feedback review; encourage your managers to review performance not just on outcomes but presence or absence of competencies that made the outcomes possible
- Encourage competency based self reflection for employees to assess their performance based on the competency framework
- Identify development areas based on competency needs for particular roles as well as the next career path in the trajectory
- Reward competency based performance and outcomes
- Measure competencies on an ongoing basis and compare results with recruitment analysis
Talent development interventions
- Define competency gaps for each position and identify talent development interventions to bridge the same. For instance, if communication is a key competency for a sales role, learning can be oriented towards better communication skills
- Align developmental interventions with competency based OKRs
- Identify learning objectives for each role and position and determine how they connect with the competency framework
From a talent development perspective, the focus of the competency framework should equally be on developing employees for their next or subsequent role based on the specific competencies for the same.
The onus of aligning performance and development with the competency framework lies with team managers as they are best able to determine the performance gaps. Furthermore, employees with their managers can identify competency gaps for better performance and focus on the right learning and development interventions to bridge the same.
Step IV: Leverage competency framework for succession planning
Finally, the competency framework must also impact the subsequent rungs of talent development where an employee moves up the ladder from one position to the next. Based on the organizational matrix and competencies for each level, you need to identify key attributes that differentiate one level from another and ensure the same is communicated to your employees.
You should:
- Help you employees create a career development plan based on your competency framework to help them understand which competencies will enable them to grow
- Make succession planning a key organizational priority and focus on talent development from that lens
Final Thoughts
In a nutshell, it is quite evident that the competency framework can inform and advance every stage of talent development for fast growing organizations. If you implement such a framework across the employee lifecycle, you will significantly reduce your chances of a wrong hire and will be able to nurture a workforce that aligns on the vision, goals and overall organizational culture.
A clear competency based talent development approach can help you achieve high levels of performance which is observable and measurable.
