Nielsen Advisors

I've counseled, worked with, or coached managers in handling probably more than 100 cases of performance problems. I would bet that in 90% of those cases, one of the main causes of the problem was a lack of understanding or agreement on what behaviors were expected for good performance -- probably 99% of those cases also had communication problems.

So how can you solve this issue?

One way I've found to do this is with a competency-based performance framework. What exactly do I mean by that?

There are two things people need to understand to be able to deliver desired performance:

1. What are the expected outcomes.
2. What are the expected behaviors that will achieve those outcomes.

Too often we see job descriptions that list a bunch of duties, but aren't clear on the expected outcomes.

Then, there are times when organizations do a good job focusing goals (maybe even tying them to the business's objectives), but they don't identify the critical behaviors required to achieve the goals. I can recall a number of conversations with managers when evaluating performance which included comments like "they achieved their goals, but they offended (or 'walked on') a lot of people along the way."

Here are two examples of what I mean. I recently worked with a non-profit organization to help them hire an Executive Director. Here are the two versions (made anonymous) of the documents:

• The original job description
• The competency-based job description

The original job description is well done -- it meets the criteria of identifying the essential job duties and position requirements.

The value of the competency-based approach is that it ties those duties to an expected outcome, as well as identifies competency categories (which link to the hiring guide, candidate evaluation form, performance evaluation form, and position agreement).

If you think your organization would benefit from something like this, please check out our Competency-Based Framework Pilot program where we will develop for you, at no charge, a C-B Framework for your organization. You must meet our criteria to participate, and the baseline framework is limited, but I'm confident you'll be pleased with the outcome. Learn more about the pilot here.

I recently had the chance to do some quick work with a local non-profit organization looking for an Executive Director. I put together a hiring guide to help them out. As part of that guide, I included some information on competencies, which I think people don't use enough, and they end up hiring talented people who may actually be incompetent. We've got to balance these two: talent & competence.

This process got me thinking, I don't have a good collection of competence related materials, so I figured I'd develop it.

First, let's agree on what I mean by competency. The simple definition of competence is having the necessary skill, knowledge, capacity, or qualification for something. Every position has a number of competencies required, some more important than others (that will be a future discussion).

My first step is defining the competency groups. In doing a little research, I found many categorizations of required competencies. I've ended up with seven competency groups: