This is a summary of my work supporting an initiative to apply the Korn Ferry Leadership Architect™ (KFLA) competency framework within my business unit between August 2021 and March 2023.
If you’re not familiar with the concepts of talent management, competencies, and competency modeling, then start with this related post, “Talent management and competency modeling, in a nutshell.”
Background
The goals for this project were to:
- Create competency-based job profiles for 20 unique roles spanning multiple functions and levels within a specific department.
- Incorporate these job profiles into multiple talent management touchpoints.
Phase I: Project setup and organizational research
Between August 2021 and September 2022, our team:
- Selected a competency model and obtained a license to use Korn Ferry intellectual property.
- Established baseline knowledge on the competency model.
- Built the digital tools that we needed to conduct research, analyze data, and report results.
- Produced performance support for the team to reference while working with custom research tools.
- Coordinated with senior sponsors and subject matter experts (SMEs) across the business to execute on the data collection, analysis, and reporting necessary to create a library of job profiles.
Why Korn Ferry?
In the past, our department used an earlier iteration of the KFLA competency framework known as Lominger. KFLA was already a trusted and valued competency framework within our organization, so we sought to adopt the updated Korn Ferry Architect model and its 38 competencies.
Project team enablement
Beyond licensing the competency model itself, we invested in Korn Ferry Leadership Architect™ certification for the project team. This was instrumental in establishing the baseline knowledge to facilitate internal research.
Tool design and development
What we needed to replicate
Traditionally, to define a job profile using the Korn Ferry model, a facilitator gathers a group of 6-10 SMEs in a face-to-face workshop wherein:
- Each SME shuffles a deck of cards (1 card = 1 competency and its description), then sorts those cards into 3 categories (top priority, medium priority, low priority, let’s say), often with a specific distribution across categories to ‘force’ prioritization. KFLA has 38 competencies, so our distribution needed to be 12-14-12 (imagine a bell-shaped curve).
- Each SME then calculates their individual responses on a worksheet and transfers them to a poster of group results.
- The facilitator uses the group results to identify a set of the highest and lowest priority competencies for the job in question.
- The facilitator references a placemat of norm data and compares the group’s high and low priority competencies to data amassed from research that Korn Ferry conducted globally across multiple organizational levels.
- The facilitator tracks the results on an analysis worksheet, identifying opportunities to strengthen the job profile based on certain competencies’ correlations to outcomes such as promotion, high performance, or other factors.
- The facilitator creates another poster to share the results back to the SMEs and engages them in a discussion about recommendations that might strengthen the job profile.
How we adapted it to a virtual setting
We needed digital assets to replace the following:
- Deck of competency cards
- Individual results worksheet
- Group results poster
- KFLA norm data placemats
- Results and recommendations posters
We used several tools to do this:
- MURAL: We built two MURAL templates. One served as each SME’s workspace for sorting competency cards. The other served as each facilitator’s workspace for sharing final results and recommendations back to SMEs and sponsors.
- Smartsheet: We built a Smartsheet form to collect individual results for all competency sorts. The facilitators created Smartsheet views to isolate and display group results for further analysis.
- Microsoft Excel: We created an Excel workbook template for facilitators to use as they analyzed group sort results against KFLA norm data
Due to budgetary constraints, we couldn’t license an all-in-one tool, such as OptimalSort by OptimalWorkshop.
Documentation and support for virtual tools
We built a comprehensive facilitator guide to provide step-by-step instructions to help the project team:
- Engage their co-facilitators and sponsors to identify SMEs and coordinate the virtual competency sort.
- Host their assigned sorts.
- Tabulate, analyze, and document group results.
- Compare group results to KFLA norm data and identify recommendations for stronger profiles.
- Facilitate follow-up sessions with SMEs.
- Document the final job profiles for final publication and further use in a variety of talent development scenarios.
Team execution of job profile competency sorts
Between July and September 2022, we conducted the research, analysis, and follow-up necessary to create 20 job profiles with input from 100+ SMEs across our global organization. We tracked progress, facilitators, stakeholders, participants, and related research output in a Microsoft List.
Phase II: Sharing results and driving adoption
Between October and December 2022, our team:
- Communicated the results of our internal research to the business
- Built and released resources to support individual and team adoption
How we packaged and published the results
As each facilitator closed out their Phase I research, they added their results to a centralized Microsoft List, which detailed the following for each competency:
- Its definition, behavioral descriptors, level of developmental difficulty, substitute competencies, compensator competencies, and correlations.
- A link to the corresponding chapter in Korn Ferry FYI®: For Your Improvement.
- All internal job profiles that cite it as a priority competency, and whether or not it is deemed to be a basic job requirement or a distinguishing skill.
We created List Views to provide a streamlined, card view of the competencies defined as “mission critical” for each job profile. We then embedded these views as web parts on our department’s SharePoint site, with each team’s job profiles isolated in a specific page section.
Resources produced for individual and team adoption
To support individual and team adoption of the job profile results and related Korn Ferry resources, we produced several assets:
- An infographic about the Korn Ferry model and the Korn Ferry FYI®: For Your Improvement guide.
- A video that
- A discussion guide to help employees self-assess their skill level with the mission critical competencies for their role, solicit manager feedback, and plan for their own development
- Five videos:
- An explainer on how to navigate the Korn Ferry FYI®: For Your Improvement guide
- A 4-part series to help leaders incorporate their team’s competencies into recruiting, interviewing, performance management, and professional development planning for their team.
As we released each resource, we executed mini marketing campaigns to bring them to the attention of our department’s leaders and individual contributors.
Results, lessons learned, and celebrations
Phase I and II engagement trends
Six months in, approximately 20% of the organization had engaged with the Korn Ferry FYI®: For Your Improvement guide and the published job profiles, and approximately 12% had engaged with the conversation guide for managers and employees.
While fewer people engaged with these resource than expected, we saw positive outcomes as different teams launched a variety of initiatives that leveraged the job profiles created from competency sort data, such as:
- Peer-to-peer mentorship around specific competencies
- Workshops and communities of practice related to critical competencies
- Updated job descriptions and career progression models
Lessons learned
Three lessons learned from this initiative:
- Critically evaluate which aspects of your organization’s talent management strategy are within and outside of your project team’s control and influence, and set clear and realistic goals accordingly. Define this early in order to identify what data is available to measure your impact and progress from day one. In this case, since several key decision-makers were already familiar with a previous version of our chosen competency framework, there was less emphasis on measurable impact in early project phases, which led to a need for realignment in later project phases.
- Prioritize time for A/B testing when your project includes tool development. There was surely an opportunity to use a different combination of tools to conduct the data collection and analysis, or to set up the tools we developed in a slightly more intuitive way. Each time I conducted a new sort using the tools I had developed, something else popped out as an area for improvement.
- Clarify roles early and revisit them with each project team change. With each addition or departure to a team, it is important to recap and clarify roles and responsibilities across all dimensions of a project.
Celebrations
Three points I’m celebrating as I reflect on this project:
- Our virtual approach to collecting competency sort data enabled many automations. Without these, group sort results analysis would have been manual, time-consuming, and prone to errors.
- I strengthened my consulting muscles on this project. My project team role as an instructional designer was vague at first. I embraced that ambiguity and put on my “performance consulting hat.” This led me to influence some key decisions that impacted the project for the better, such as investment in formal enablement for our project team and development of a data collection tool that preserved some of the tactile appeal of the traditional approach to competency sorts for our SMEs.
- This project helped me build experience working with Microsoft Lists and their integrations within SharePoint sites. This has helped me in other areas of my work.
