“What competences should we expect from a given employee?” A simple inquiry such as this, to our mind, is a good place to start understanding many aspects related with the approach we take to the work we do, of developing Competence Models for roles in organisations. Now, why should that be of interest to the reader? The way we see it is that the challenges involved in developing such Models are universal (what they are meant to do is a separate subject – we have dealt with that question in other posts). We hope the reader will see value in understanding how we have created a path for ourselves to deal with some of those challenges. Other posts in the blog will throw more light on specific terms used here – competence, knowledge, skill.
“Definition”: Making Finite
A quick survey of various online resources will convince any reader that there has not been enough alignment developed over time as to what words such as competence, knowledge and skill mean. Let’s just take one of the words – ‘Skill’. The World Economic Forum a few years back put out a list of the ‘Top 10 Skills in 2015’ and another of the ‘Top 10 Skills in 2020’. Would you call ‘Complex Problem Solving’ a skill? People Management? Quality Control? Service Orientation? Creativity? Emotional Intelligence? Cognitive Flexibility? In a recent McKinsey Insights piece can be found the following sentence: “to emerge successfully from the current crisis, organizations will need to nurture their employees’ digital, cognitive, social and emotional, and adaptability and resilience skill sets.” Do all these look like skills?
Not to us, at least. Perhaps we had a certain application of the word in mind. One way or the other, we had to define criteria for ourselves.
We chose to separate attitudes and urges from our list of skills. From the above list, this disqualifies Service Orientation.
We also removed umbrella categories, and also abilities that are continuously applied. This rule disqualifies People Management, Creativity, Emotional Intelligence, Cognitive Flexibility, Cognitive, Social and Emotional, and Adaptability and Resilience.
These rules leave only Complex Problem Solving and Quality Control from the above list as skills. They can be, but they need not be – if the Complex Problem Solving entails working on the problem over several weeks or months and / or entails coordinating with others, then it cannot be called a skill in our world. Similarly, the act of checking conformance to criteria in one lot of items could be called a skill, but controlling quality of a production line on a continuous basis, entailing setting up systems, hiring and training people, etc., is not a skill in our framing of the word.
There are other rules as well … Perhaps going further into this territory is not of interest to most readers, so we stop here. The story is similar for the other two words as well.
Our Focus: the Middle
Now, what might be bothering the reader is that we just ruled out many useful categories in the quest to have some kind of homogeneity in our definitions.
Perhaps we need to articulate some core views and perspectives to explain why we did so, and how this choice of ours, far from leading to trivial lists, actually leads to richer frameworks.
Our core observation: there has been tremendous (and unacknowledged) laziness in the world of Management in defining managerial tasks and their related skills.
For skilled ‘trades’, such as Electrician, Fitter, Mason, Carpenter, Automotive Mechanic, Nurse, X-Ray Technician, Driver, etc., fairly elaborate descriptions of tasks and skills can be found in the world. As a quick sampler, the reader is encouraged to browse through the documents for over 200 trades to be found at the website of the NSDC (it is heartening to see some crisply articulated documents on skills!).
The same goes for ‘leadership’. There is a vast variety of roles that fit that notion. Sports team captains, leaders of small work groups (these typically come in two different types – leader of a team of electricians, and leader of a team of Finance professionals, and we will delve on the difference in a blog post later), Department Heads, Business Heads, MD’s and Chairmen, social leaders, political leaders, heads of government departments – all these roles and several others are described by that one word. Typically, fairly detailed descriptions of what leaders need to do and what skills they therefore need are to be found by the interested reader. Of course, the descriptions are relatively better or more elaborate for some of the roles, e.g., sports captainship, small work group leader, and Managing Director of a company.
However, in any typical hierarchy of complexity of tasks in an organisation, there is a large middle in between those trades and the leadership roles. This is where most employees with what are called professional qualifications, spend the first ten-odd years of their career. Design Engineer, Sales Executive, Service Officer, Operations Executive, and so on are the typical names of those jobs. Literature on what people in such roles do and what skills they need is far thinner. Even the descriptions of leadership roles such as Design Manager, Manager – Accounts, and Sales Manager are patchy (for good reason, Sales Manager descriptions are to be found much more than the other two). We even come across organisations virtually without job descriptions at these middle levels (often there are dozens of employees that are seen to be working in a given role, but there is no well-accepted description of what it is that they are supposed to do – and therefore of what they should be capable of!).
And yet, in our eyes, these layers of organisations are the most crucial. For organisations in any kind of retail business, it is these layers who have, as goals, the actual selling, producing, procuring, etc. Although senior leaders’ goal sheets also typically have these criteria, their roles are largely restricted to enabling – getting these middle layers to achieve their targets. In institutional business (“B2B”) contexts, although the responsibilities sometimes sit at higher levels, the execution of jobs that fulfill them are again performed by the middle layers. Across all types of organisations, these are the layers that design and modify work systems and processes (they develop the design and modification proposals, and they implement what is sanctioned – the sanctioning is typically done by leaders). They are the ones who use the provided / available tools to get the jobs done that actually form the mission of the business. The coveted notions of Organisational Excellence are all about getting practices widely implemented by these layers. That implementation is the difference between good organisations and the not-so-good ones – presentations by senior leaders on goals and strategies tend to look the same across all sorts of organisations.
In any typical hierarchy of complexity of tasks in an organisation, there is a large middle in between those trades and the leadership roles. This is where most employees with what are called professional qualifications, spend the first ten-odd years of their career. Design Engineer, Sales Executive, Service Officer, Operations Executive, and so on. Literature on what people in such roles do and what skills they need is far thinner.
Therefore, our definitions are designed to make it convenient to define the tasks and skills of these middle layers more sharply.
Is the Set Complete?
We are not contending that our lists of skills needed in such jobs are comprehensive, that is, nothing beyond those skills are needed for sustained effective performance. Depending on perspective, one can formulate several sets of “good qualities” that underpin sustained performance in any context. What we are saying is that these largely universal good qualities already have been articulated more than thoroughly (“beaten to death” was the expression that first sprang in the mind while writing this). Here is an arbitrary list of lists as a sample of what we mean:
- The EU formulation known as DeSeCo (and an earlier work called the European Values Study)
- Richard Boyatzis’ competencies as formulated in his book, The Competent Manager
- The Lominger compilation of Leadership Competencies
- Lawrence Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development
- Robert Kegan’s Constructive Development Theory
- Clare Graves’ Emergent Cyclical Theory (that developed into Spiral Dynamics and Wilber’s Integral Theory)
(the last three are different in their nature compared to the earlier ones, but end up creating a similar type of notion of “good” human qualities).
Also, every civilisation has its own vast literature on the ideal human being.
Each of the above lists, taxonomies and literatures is a great read – we heartily recommend each of them to the reader.
In addition, corporations also tend to have a defined set of espoused values.
We do not for a moment contend that this body of literature is irrelevant. We also do not hope to improve upon what has already been stated in them. At a more practical level, these lists have significant overlaps, while none of them contain all the categories involved. While reasonably non-overlapping, comprehensive lists possibly can be built, but there is perhaps no value in us supplying such lists. These sorts of lists need to be culturally adopted by the organisation – the eye putting it together should be the culture and the unique perspective of the organisation. Therefore, we believe they are best built by organisations themselves (outsiders can help – we ourselves work with organisations to help define them).
Having said above what we have, we would like to say that the way our skill dictionaries have been formulated, they call for (without stating) many of these desirable qualities. A little reflection will hopefully lead to the conclusion that many of these deeper qualities are in fact sine qua non for those skills to be displayed consistently.
In other write-ups in this series, you will find outlines of the composition and structuring of our knowledge-skill dictionaries.
Related Readings :
Hancock, Brian, Rahilly, Lucia, Schaninger, Bill, “Today’s skills, tomorrow’s jobs: How will your team fare in the future of work?”, McKinsey & Co., Oct 2020
US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, JDX JobSchema+ for Pilot Testing, 2019
