Besides Balanced Score Cards and KPI’s that becomes an instant hot items on discussion on almost every organizations, there comes another issue that also need to be acknowledge by all professionals.
If KPI and/or Balanced Score Cards attentions are more to the performance shown by employee, now also comes what so called, “Talent Management”. What is Talent Management? Talent Managements is a method used to identify high performance employee within the company that believes will give a significant contributions to the company futures development. By applying Talent Management, the company should be able to maintain the high performance people and develop them to be ready as the future leaders for the company. By applying this method, it is believed that company should have more strong because the leaders has a strong bound to the company and also cheaper at cost.
Talent Management works by identifying the High Performance / High Achievers to match them to certain area of work / business. This element are called competency.
A competency is defined as a behavior or set of behaviors that describes excellent performance in a particular work context. A competency model is a set of success factors, often called competencies that include the key behaviors required for excellent performance in a particular role.
"A core competency is an area of specialized expertise that is the result of harmonizing complex streams of technology and work activity." – C.K.Prahalad
There are three groups of competencies we all need to explore in our career planning. The three groups are:
Functional/Technical Competencies. These areas identifies as function-specific technical competencies required on a given career path (e.g., finance, engineering or computer systems). Development for these competencies are assigning or conducting training that usually ready and available. Undergraduate major or trade school gives us a basic foundation of competence in the specialty we choose. When we are moving ahead, knowledge is also developed very rapidly in many of these specialties (e.g., physics, psychology or automotive mechanics) we usually have to keep ourselves up-to-date through ongoing reading, graduate studies, or periodic participation in specialized courses offered by local schools or professional societies. Often our work organizations offer a variety of in-house training to keep employees up to date in the specialized technical competencies required for their work.
Core Non-Technical Competencies. Overlooked, underestimated and ill-defined competency group, yet lately becomes hot discussions among executives or professionals who don’t aspire to managerial positions. In current flatter and less hierarchical work environments anyone who wants to get his/her ideas heard and implemented will require a set of core competencies (e.g., communication, influence, planning, organizing and customer responsiveness) that in past, more hierarchical organizations have often been associated primarily with managerial positions. The experts identify these as cores because they are not technical or function-specific. Those who want or need others to listen to, fund, act on, or support their ideas will require these core competencies no matter what technical/functional career specialty they pursue – and whether or not they ever aspire to formal managerial positions.
Leadership Competencies. In addition to the core competencies, the research shows there are some further supplementary competencies required for success by those who aspire to positions involving leadership of other people. Like the core competencies these are generic across all career specialties. These leadership competencies are important in both formal managerial positions and in informal non-managerial leadership positions. For instance, in today’s organizations people often serve as team or project leaders directing the technical work of others who do not administratively report to them. The people whose work they lead report administratively to other managers and move in and out of their groups depending on when various projects need their expertise. While the core competencies are required by everyone at all organizational levels, the supplemental leadership competencies evolve and change depending on the level of leadership involved.
Combining all three competency groups believes will produce people who are heard and provides more impact to the business and / or the company.
Functional/technical competencies varied, of course, depending on the specific business or technologies different organizations were pursuing. They were absolutely essential, but most organizations thought they were at least competing on a level playing field in these. They could define what was required and usually had ready access to training resources equal to those their competitors were using.
DEPTH TO LEADERSHIP AND LEADERSHIP COMPETENCIES
However, the core and leadership competency requirements presented a different story. Most felt these were harder to identify and define than the functional/technical competencies and that the universities and trade schools were doing very little to identify, define, or teach them. Because most organizations were having difficulty identifying and defining these competencies in any coherent and focused fashion, it was also difficult to learn much by tracking or benchmarking what other organizations did. Interestingly, most also felt these were the competencies most likely to give their organizations a competitive edge – or keep them alive if organization survival was an issue.
Core and leadership competencies were seen as critical catalysts. These provided the rare spark that was typically required to ignite innovation and new technology. These provided the energizing motivation that could steer innovation through the many roadblocks and tedious details required for successful implementation. Because the core and leadership competencies are often fuzzy and ill defined, those organizations that can identify and focus on teaching them to their people will have a performance edge that can tilt otherwise level global playing fields in their favor.
But what makes the critical difference in the core and leadership areas?
KEY LEARNING
Functional/technical competencies differed significantly depending on the type of organization and specific career specialties involved. However, it is needed further own methods to identify those for the specific career field that interests you. First, lets focus on 12 core and a small number of supplemental leadership competencies that have emerged as most important for success across most career fields and organizations.
- Personal Values
1. Continues Learning
The Continues Learning Competencies will be able to observe when the candidate performs these behaviors:
- - Proactively defines and pursues personal goals ( ie. identifies and addresses development needs, negotiates growth assignments, etc )
- - Uses lessons from previous positives and negatives experiences to improve performance and effectiveness.
- - Continually looks and/ non-traditional ideas and approaches to improve personal and team effectiveness
- - Identifies appropriate role models and adopts the effective adopt the effective behaviors and techniques they exhibit
- - Seeks and apply new information and concepts quickly
2. Initiative and Risk Taking
Consistently shown personal ability to perform:
- - Identifies and takes steps to prevent potential situations that could result in unpleasant confrontations.
- - Manages and resolves conflicts and disagreements in a positive and constructive manner to minimize negative impact.
3. Honesty and Integrity
Consistently shown personal ability to perform:
- - instills mutual trusts and confidence
- - creates a culture that fosters a high standards of ethics
- - behaves in a fair and ethical manner toward others
- - Demonstrates a sense of corporate responsibility and commitment to public service.
- - Assures that effective controls are developed and maintained to ensure the integrity of the organization.
- - Holds self and others accountable for rules and responsibilities.
- - Can be relied upon to ensure that projects within areas of specific responsibility are completed in a timely manner and within budget.
- - Monitors and evaluates plans; focuses on results and measuring attainment of outcomes.
4. Flexibility
Consistently shown personal ability to perform:
- - open minded and express readiness to change when receiving a new way of work or information
- - adapts behaviors and work methods in respond to new information, changing conditions or un-expected obstacles
- - adjust rapidly to new situations warranting attentions and resolution
5. Self Confidence
Consistently shown personal ability to perform:
- - deals effectively with pressure;
- - maintains focus and intensity and remains optimistic and persistent, even under adversity.
- - recovers quickly from setbacks.
- - effectively balances personal life and work.
Team Player Values
6. Judgment and Problem Solving
Consistently shown personal ability to perform:
- - identifies and analyzes problems;
- - distinguishes between relevant and irrelevant information to make logical decisions;
- - provides solutions to individual and organizational problems.
- - exercises good judgment by making sound and well-informed decisions;
- - perceives the impact and implications of decisions;
- - makes effective and timely decisions, even when data is limited or solutions produce unpleasant consequences;
- - proactive and achievement oriented.
7. Teamwork
Consistently shown personal ability to perform:
- - inspires, motivates, and guides others toward goal accomplishments.
- - consistently develops and sustains cooperative working relationships.
- - encourages and facilitates cooperation within the organization and with customer groups;
- - fosters commitment, team spirit, pride, trust. Develops leadership in others through coaching, mentoring, rewarding, and guiding employees.
8. Creativity / Innovation / Change
The Candidates perform his/her ability to:
- - develop new insights into situations and applies innovative solutions to make organizational improvements;
- - creates a new work environment that encourages creative thinking and innovations;
- design and new or cutting-edge programs/process
9. Communication and Influence
From all of the literatures I read to have full understanding regarding the Talent Management Concept points that Communication and Influence Competency are often become the barrier of most candidates to succeed. The key element of Communicational and Influence Competency when the candidates able to perform:
- - Actively solicits inputs from others to clarify issues and potential actions before acting
- - Takes action to help insure that key strategies, goals and plans are understood by all team members
- - Able to provides important information quickly and accurately to internal and external customers
- - Acknowledges and addresses problems and issues in an honest, up-front, non-judgemental manner
- - understands and responds appropriately to the underlying (often unexpressed) motivations, values and concerns of others
- Operational Values
10. Responsiveness to Internal/External Customer
Consistently shown personal ability to perform:
- - Considers and responds appropriately to the needs, feelings, and capabilities of different people in different situations;
- - is tactful, compassionate and sensitive, and treats others with respect.
- - Identifies the internal and external politics that impact the work of the organization.
- - Approaches each problem situation with a clear perception of organizational and political reality;
- - Recognizes the impact of alternative courses of action.
11. Planning and Organizing
Consistently shown personal ability to perform:
- - Identifies and analyzes problems;
- - distinguishes between relevant and irrelevant information to make logical decisions;
- - provides solutions to individual and organizational problems.
12. Quality Result Orientation
Consistently shown personal ability to perform:
- - formulates effective strategies consistent with the business and competitive strategy of the organization
- - examines policy issues and strategic planning with a long-term perspective.
- - determines objectives and sets priorities; anticipates potential threats or opportunities
- - takes a long-term view and acts as a catalyst for organizational change;
- - builds a shared vision with others.
- - influences others to translate vision into action.
None of those mentioned above are mysterious psychological traits. These are simple actions anyone can consciously choose to perform or not perform. Should you able to rate yourself – or others rate you – as low on some of these behaviors that doesn’t mean you’re defective. It simply means you are not remembering or choosing to do them. The simple solution is to start doing them. You always have that option if you want to improve things. Practice can bring significantly increased skill in exercising each of the behaviors.
On the surface, many of these behaviors may seem obvious. When they are spelled out this clearly, most people would agree these are things we should be doing.
When less successful people read through the key behaviors for the competencies they usually agree these behaviors are important, but typically they don’t really do them and their excuse is they don’t have time. Successful people acknowledge the importance of the behaviors and agree it’s difficult to find time to do them, and they force themselves to take the time because they’ve learned that doing these things saves much more time in the long run. It eliminates much wheel spinning and repetitive false starts which less successful people waste time on because they won’t take time to rise above day-to-day fire fighting and find a way to prevent the fires from starting.
OBSERVES
How to actually learn about these critical competencies? Simply try to:
1. Observing other successful people and copying what they did (i.e., productive behaviors)
2. Observing and learning from the mistakes (i.e., critical behavior omissions and counter productive behaviors) of unsuccessful people
Few of us are intuitive observers. We watch others’ behavior but in the daily rush it isn’t so easy to isolate what specific actions are making others successful – or unsuccessful – in their performance.
For instance, I’m a race car enthusiast that obtains my driving skills actually by observing my seniors or watch the films to learn how to perform a precision maneuver. Although I understand the basics of how to perform such move, I still need to rewind the tape to recognized what must to recognized as mark then to perform the next action. So, make a list, recognize it, and improve it time to time, that’s the key. The checklist can help us learn in real time what works and doesn’t work. It can also be a valuable self-assessment tool. When we succeed or fail at a leadership or communications attempt, we can later sit quietly at our desk and pinpoint what we specifically did or failed to do that influenced the outcome.
Focus and Multiple Uses
Reading through the competencies in the profile can be informative in that it gives you a quick overview and probably some new insight. However, just reading through the competencies is unlikely to have much lasting impact on your personal growth. Believe me, by the time you get to the last competency in just reading a list like this you may not remember much of what you’ve read.
The competencies only come alive when we assess ourselves against them. You can use the self-assessment profile to identify the few behaviors you want to focus on first. Then you can take action to improve your performance in those areas. It is impossible to learn all of it simultaneously.
Again, the key word – and the antidote to being completely overloaded with busyness – is focus. Start it by carrying copy of the profile in your brief case. Use it on a day-to-day basis to identify and maintain focus on precisely where you want to concentrate your personal improvement efforts. It has multiple uses that can help you maximize the limited time you have available for self -development by directing your energy to more highly leveraged areas with the greatest potential payoff.
Having a tool can help those of us who are not always intuitive observers do the same thing.
Diagnosing Problems - When you observe unsuccessful performers failing you can glance at the profile to diagnose what’s causing the problems in real time – or you can go over it later to identify what happened.
Self-Diagnosis – You can better analyze what went wrong in your own performance failures. After a specific incident where you have not been effective, you can sit quietly in your office or at home and use this tool to take a few minutes and identify what you can do better – or avoid doing- to be more effective next time.
Getting and Giving Focused Performance Feedback - The profile provides a tool to solicit feedback from others about your own performance, or to give more objective feedback to others who solicit it.
Identifying Personal Development Needs - With limited time and resources available for personal learning, you can use the profile to determine your most critical competency gaps and seek out and negotiate appropriate training and on-the-job development experiences to fill the gaps.
Many do what has come to be known as a 360-degree feedback. Individuals give copies of the profile to a sampling of their managers, peers, customers, and subordinates (if they have any). These people rate them anonymously on the behaviors and fax an answer sheet to our office. Then the individual being rated gets a confidential (i.e., no one else in his/her organization sees it) computerized profile showing the averages of how various groups (e.g., customers or peers) evaluated each behavior. The feedback report also highlights participants’ top ten behavioral strengths and weaknesses, and identifies those areas where their own self-assessment differs most from the averages of how others rated them.
Leadership Competencies
There are four generic roles that leaders passed through as they moved from team member (i.e., individual contributor) positions to increasingly more demanding levels of ad hoc leadership and/or administrative managerial responsibilities:
- Team Member – (Individual Contributor)
- Team Leader – (Coach)
- Mid-Level Manager – (Multiple Team Integrator)
- Executive – (Strategist)
When you starting aspire to one or more of the leadership roles try to look for Leadership Competency Self-Assessment Form, you can use to assess yourself against those few additional competencies required for each role.
Leadership Competencies Identify by its characteristics roles, that is
Key Identifications of Individuals possessed this characteristic are their ability to perform:
Continual Learning – Grasps the essence of new information; masters new technical and business knowledge; recognizes own strengths and weaknesses; pursues self-development; seeks feedback from others and opportunities to master new knowledge.
Creativity and Innovation – Develops new insights into situations and applies innovative solutions to make organizational improvements; creates a work environment that encourages creative thinking and innovation; designs and implements new or cutting-edge programs/processes.
External Awareness - Identifies and keeps up to date on key national and international policies and economic, political, and social trends that affect the organization. Understands near-term and long-range plans and determines how best to be positioned to achieve a competitive business advantage in a global economy.
Flexibility – Is open to change and new information; adapts behavior and work methods in response to new information, changing conditions, or unexpected obstacles. Easy to adjusts to new situations, warranting attention and resolution.
Resilience – Deals effectively with pressure; maintains focus and intensity and remains optimistic and persistent, even under adversity. Quick recovers from setbacks. Effectively balances personal life and work.
Service Motivation – Creates and sustains an organizational culture which encourages others to provide the quality of service essential to high performance. Enables others to acquire the tools and support they need to perform well. Perform commitment to public service. Influence others toward spirit of service and meaningful contributions to mission accomplishment.
Strategic Thinking – Formulates effective strategies consistent with the business and competitive strategy of the organization in a global economy. Ability examines policy, issue and strategic planning complying to the terms perspectives. Identify key objectives and sets priorities; anticipates potential threats or opportunities.
Vision – Takes a long-term view and acts as a catalyst for organizational change; builds a shared vision with others. Influence others and able to visualized planning into action.
Key Identifications of Individuals possessed this characteristic are their ability to perform:
Conflict Management – Identifies and takes steps to prevent potential situations that could result in unpleasant confrontations. Manages and resolves conflicts and disagreements in a positive and constructive manner to minimize negative impact.
Leveraging Diversity – Recruits, develops, and retains a diverse high quality workforce in an equitable manner. Leads and manages an inclusive workplace that maximizes the talents of each person to achieve sound business results. Respects, understands, values and seeks out individual differences to achieve the vision and mission of the organization. Develops and uses measures and rewards to hold self and others accountable for achieving results that embody the principles of diversity.
Integrity/Honesty – Instills mutual trust and confidence; creates a culture that fosters high standards of ethics; behaves in a fair and ethical manner toward others, and demonstrates a sense of corporate responsibility and commitment to public service.
Team Building – Inspires, motivates, and guides others toward goal accomplishments. Consistently develops and sustains cooperative working relationships. Encourages and facilitates cooperation within the organization and with customer groups; fosters commitment, team spirit, pride, trust. Develops leadership in others trough coaching, mentoring, rewarding, and guiding employees.
Key Identifications of Individuals possessed this characteristic are their ability to perform:
Accountability – Assures that effective controls are developed and maintained to ensure the integrity of the organization. Performs personal accountability by the rules and responsible. Reliable ensuring that projects within areas of specific responsibility completed within the scheduled in-line with the budget being planned. Monitors and evaluates plans; focuses on results and measuring attainment of outcomes.
Customer Service – Balancing interests of a variety of clients; readily readjusts priorities to respond to pressing and changing client demands. Anticipates and meets the need of clients; achieves quality end-products; is committed to continuous improvement of services.
Decisiveness – Exercises good judgment by making sound and well-informed decisions; perceives the impact and implications of decisions; makes effective and timely decisions, even when data is limited or solutions produce unpleasant consequences; is proactive and achievement oriented.
Entrepreneurship – Identifies opportunities to develop and market new products and services within or outside of the organization. Is willing to take risks; initiates actions that involve a deliberate risk to achieve a recognized benefit or advantage.
Problem Solving – Identifies and analyzes problems; distinguishes between relevant and irrelevant information to make logical decisions; provides solutions to individual and organizational problems.
Technical Credibility – Understands and appropriately applies procedures, requirements, regulations, and policies related to specialized expertise. Ability to make sound hiring and capital resource decisions and to address training and development needs. Having depth understandings to linkages between administrative competencies and mission needs.
Key Identifications of Individuals possessed this characteristic are their ability to perform:
Financial Management – Demonstrates broad understanding of principles of financial management and marketing expertise necessary to ensure appropriate funding levels. Prepares, justifies, and/or administers the budget for the program area; uses cost-benefit thinking to set priorities; monitors expenditures in support of programs and policies. Able recognize and execute cost-effective action within the area of working.
Human Resources Management - Assesses current and future staffing needs based on organizational goals and budget realities. Using merit principles, ensures staff are appropriately selected, developed, utilized, appraised, and rewarded; takes corrective action.
Technology Management – Uses efficient and cost-effective approaches to integrate technology into the workplace and improve program effectiveness. Develop strategies using new technology to enhance decision making.
E. Building Coalitions/Communications
Key Identifications of Individuals possessed this characteristic are their ability to perform:
Influencing/Negotiating - Persuades others; builds consensus through give and take; gains cooperation from others to obtain information and accomplish goals; facilitates "win-win" situations.
Interpersonal Skills – Considers and responds appropriately to the needs, feelings, and capabilities of different people in different situations; is tactful, compassionate and sensitive, and treats others with respect.
Oral Communication – Makes clear and convincing oral presentations to individuals or groups; listens effectively and clarifies information as needed; facilitates an open exchange of ideas and fosters an atmosphere of open communication.
Partnering – Develops networks and builds alliances, engages in cross-functional activities; collaborates across boundaries, and finds common ground with a widening range of stakeholders. Utilizes contacts to build and strengthen internal support bases.
Political Savvy – Identifies the internal and external politics that impact the work of the organization. Approaches each problem situation with a clear perception of organizational and political reality; recognizes the impact of alternative courses of action.
Written Communication – Expresses facts and ideas in writing in a clear, convincing and organized manner.
Well… Hope that this article helps you to pursue your career advancement and development.
Andre Sibuea
