How to apply a competency model (a case study)

Posted on March 12, 2023 by Writing
steel frame building in modern style

Updated on December 21, 2023

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.”

Table of Contents

Background

Objectives for this initiative

We set out on this initiative to:

  1. Create competency-based job profiles for 20 unique roles supporting market development, presales, sales, customer success, implementation, and partner success functions related to SAP Concur solutions, as well as managers of teams, managers of managers, and executives.
  2. Leverage these job profiles within aspects of the organization’s talent management strategy that fall within the influence or control of Enablement teams, such as:
    • Providing a behavior-focused basis for employee development and performance management conversations.
    • Reducing potential for bias in recruiting, interviewing, candidate selection, progression/promotion, or performance management practices.
    • Centering new hire enablement on the highest priority competencies for their role in question.

Phases and timeline

The project has spanned three phases:

  1. Project setup and organizational research (August 2021 through September 2022)
  2. Sharing results and driving adoption (October 2022 through December 2022)
  3. Reinforcement campaign (March through December 2023)

Phase I: Project setup and organizational research

Between August 2021 and September 2022, our team:

  1. Selected a competency model and obtained a license to use Korn Ferry intellectual property
  2. Established baseline knowledge
  3. Built the digital tools that we needed to conduct research, analyze data, and report results
  4. Produced performance support for the team to reference while working with custom research tools
  5. 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 organization used an earlier iteration of the KFLA competency framework known as Lominger. KFLA (nee Lominger) 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.

Our license allowed us to:

  1. Distribute an electronic copy of Korn Ferry FYI®: For Your Improvement to the employees in our department
  2. Create our own resources based on Korn Ferry FYI®: For Your Improvement and the Korn Ferry Leadership Architect™ Research Guide and Technical Manual

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 the internal research required in Phase I.

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:

  1. 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). Most often, they are required to apply 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).
  2. Each SME then calculates their individual responses on a worksheet and transfers them to a group results poster.
  3. The facilitator uses the group results poster to identify a set of the highest- and lowest-priority competencies for the job in question.
  4. The facilitator references a placemat of KFLA norm data and compares the group’s high- and low-priority competencies to data amassed from research conducted globally across multiple organizational levels.
  5. 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.
  6. 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

Since we were working in a virtual setting, we needed digital assets to replace the following:

  1. Deck of competency cards
  2. Individual results worksheet
  3. Group results poster
  4. KFLA norm data placemats
  5. Results and recommendations posters

We explored using OptimalSort by OptimalWorkshop as an all-in-one tool, but we weren’t able to obtain licenses. Instead, we built a few different mechanisms using three tools:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Microsoft Excel: We created an Excel workbook template for facilitators to use as they analyzed group sort results against KFLA norm data

Check out the screenshots below for a preview of each. Note that competency names and personal data are masked in these images.

  • This is a screenshot of the MURAL template used to conduct individual competency sorts and access related resources.
  • Screenshot of a Smartsheet form used to capture individual sort results. All competency names are blurred due to Korn Ferry intellectual property attribution.
  • A screenshot of Smartsheet views showing the group results in a grid view, with conditional formatting active to highlight records in yellow if they don't match the defined sort distribution.
  • A screenshot of Smartsheet views showing the group sort results for one competency.
  • Screenshot of Microsoft Excel file used to templatize KFLA sort results analysis
  • Screenshot of MURAL showing the final results for the Operations Expert job profile. All competency titles are blurred due to KFLA intellectual property attributions.

Documentation and support for virtual tools

A comprehensive facilitator guide in Microsoft Word provided step-by-step instructions for project team members to follow as they:

  • Engaged with their co-facilitators and sponsors to identify SMEs and coordinate the virtual competency sort
  • Hosted their assigned sorts
  • Tabulated, analyzed, and documented group results
  • Compared group results to KFLA norm data and identified recommendations for stronger profiles
  • Facilitated follow-up sessions with their SMEs
  • Documented the final job profiles for further use/publication

Here’s a brief, video-only preview of the documentation. No part of this document or video may be reproduced.

Team execution of job profile competency sorts

Between July and September 2022, our project team conducted the research, analysis, and follow-up necessary to create 20 job profiles with input from 100+ SMEs across our global organization.

The project team met biweekly during this time. We tracked each sort’s progress, facilitators, stakeholders, participants, and related artifacts in a Microsoft List.

Phase II: Sharing results and driving adoption

Between October and December 2022, our team:

  1. Communicated the results of our internal research to the business
  2. Built and released resources to support individual and team adoption

How we packaged and published the results

As each facilitator closed out their job profile competency sorts from Phase I, 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.

Here’s a brief, video-only preview of the final product. No part of this video may be reproduced.

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. Some of these, as noted, were developed and released during Phase I.

  1. An infographic that explains the Korn Ferry model and introduces the Korn Ferry FYI®: For Your Improvement guide (developed and released in Phase I)
  2. A video that explains how to navigate the Korn Ferry FYI®: For Your Improvement guide (developed and released in Phase I)
  3. 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 (developed and released in Phase II)
  4. A series of videos for leaders (all developed and released in Phase II):
    • How to incorporate mission critical competencies when discussing employees’ professional development planning
    • How to reference mission critical competencies during performance alignment conversations
    • How to incorporate price of admission and competitive edge competencies into job descriptions
    • How to incorporate price of admission and competitive edge competencies into candidate interviews

As we released each of these resources, we executed mini marketing campaigns to bring them to the attention of our organization’s leaders and individual contributors.

Results, next steps, lessons learned, and celebrations

Phase I and II engagement trends

As of March 2023, only 20-21% of the organization had engaged with the Korn Ferry FYI®: For Your Improvement guide and the published job profiles, and approximately 12% of the organization had engaged with the conversation guide for managers and employees. These results informed the project focus for Phase 3.

Despite the low engagement stats on Phase 1 and Phase 2 deliverables, our project team has noted that different areas of the organization are taking steps to adopt their job profiles in grassroots initiatives, such as:

  • Pairing colleagues for peer mentorship around specific competencies
  • Coordinating team-specific workshops and info exchanges about competencies of broad interest
  • Aligning competencies’ behavioral descriptors to job descriptions and career progression models

What’s coming in Phase III?

With Phases I and II in the rear view, I stepped away from the project team in April 2023. The initiative has continued, with Phase III slated to include:

  1. Reframing project goals with new business unit sponsors and expanded audiences
  2. Reinforcing individual and team adoption of the resources released throughout 2022

Lessons learned

Three lessons learned that I’ll consider for future projects in general, as well as future phases of this initiative:

  1. 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 for measuring 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 has led to a need for realignment in later phases.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Celebrations

Three additional points I’m celebrating as I reflect on this project:

  1. Our virtual approach to data collection enabled many automations. Without these, group sort results analysis would have been more manual, more time-consuming, and more prone to errors, not to mention far less sustainable (as it would have required printed materials and probably travel).
  2. I strengthened my consulting muscles on this project. My project team role as an instructional designer was rather vague. I embraced that ambiguity and served more as a performance consultant than an instructional designer. 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.
  3. This project helped me build experience working with Microsoft Lists and their integrations within SharePoint sites. This has helped me accelerate success in other areas of my work, such as our new hire onboarding program operations.

Tags:

Share