Arnold Consultancy

Competency Development - Define it First!

Competency. How good you are at what you do? Possibly, but in terms of business process management the definition needs to be slightly longer.

Competency is: How good you have to be at what you do in order to satisfy the requirements of the stakeholders for whom you are doing it.

Keeping it brief, three points arise from that definition.

Firstly, it is not the company’s management who put a measure on how good you have to be, nor is it any company who might provide the training and a nice A4 certificate at the end of it, regardless of whether it is framed or not. It is the stakeholder who determines how good you have to be, because it is their expectations which have to be met before an activity can be said to be efficient.

Secondly, each activity – everything that someone does as part of their job – is part of a wider business process, and these processes have their own measures in the minds of the stakeholders. The individual activities within them, for the most part, interest the stakeholders Not At All. When determining the competency required for a single activity, it has to be looked at in the context of the whole process, and the measures which govern how that process must be undertaken. Needless to say, before the competency requirements can be determined and acted upon, the activities themselves need to be defined. And before the activities are defined, the processes need to be developed. Diving straight in to the ‘activity’ level will lead to wasted effort.

Finally, what if the stakeholder doesn’t care how good you are? Not infrequently the competency does not contribute to the performance of an activity which adds value to the business process. Too often companies undertake training without first determining exactly what it will contribute to the achievement of business objectives. That’s fine if you want to develop your staff as people, but you should do so in the knowledge that your actions, while philanthropic, and quite possibly useful in terms of morale, add nothing, directly, to the company’s bottom line.