How to align competencies with goals

Written By Steven Forth

Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

Competencies are often aligned to jobs and roles, or sometimes to tasks and activities. Aligning with jobs and roles makes sense when the competency model is meant to align with a job architecture or to support a career map and career paths. The connection to tasks and activities can be helpful when the competency model is intended to support team building and project based work.

There is another way to align competencies with the organization and even with individual aspirations. That is to align skills and competencies with goals. Ask, what skills and competencies are needed to achieve goals and then find the gaps and plan ways to address them.

Think about one of your goals for 2022.

What skills do you need to have in order to achieve that goal?

Do you need to have all of the skills, or can you surround yourself with people that can complement you?

Are there any skill gaps? If so, how will you cover them?

Skills for a personal goal

I could give a business example here, but skill management is also relevant on a personal level. One of my goals for 2022 is to ride the Whistler Gran Fondo in under six hours. This is a group ride from Vancouver to Whistler, across Lions Gate Bridge, through Squamish and up, up , up to Whistler. Total elevation gain is 1,900 vertical meters, distance is 122 kilometers. I have done this before in 2018 and 2019, in both cases at about seven hours.

What skills will I need to do this? (In this post, skill names are italicized.)

Obvious basic cycling skills, I have those.

Group riding skills. I am out of practice on this, so will do several group rides starting in spring.

Climbing. I like climbing but am slow. I plan to ride up the local mountains ten or so times in spring and summer and work on uphill speed and stamina.

Nutrition and hydration (getting enough fluids) are important and I need to improve here. I have a nutritionist who is herself a high performance cyclist and she will give me coaching.

Bike maintenance. The bike (I use a titanium road bike) needs to be tuned, my bike shop will do that for me.

Weight management. I am only going to make my time goal if I lose some weight. My nutritionist is helping me with this, as is my wife and the Baritastic app.

I will probably ride with a small group (in the past this has been my adult children) so I will need some skills around motivating other people (who will in turn help to motivate me).

I have a lot of skill gaps. Some, like hill climbing and group riding, I will cover through my own training.

Others, like bike maintenance, I will outsource to my bike shop.

The hard ones are around nutrition and weight management, where I have built a little team to guide and support me.

Skill management for business goals

When connecting a personal goal to skills, it makes sense to go directly from goal to skills. When more than one person is involved, as with a team sport, a theatre production, or a business, roles play an important mediating role.

What is a role?

Roles are a critical part of the Ibbaka Skill Management Platform, almost as important as skills.

A role can be a role in a job (we see jobs as bundles of roles), on a team or project, or an ad-hoc or standalone role (‘I am doing this off the side of my desk.’). We are even considering adding a formal representation of community roles, recognizing that important skills come from roles we play outside of work.

When designing a goal-centric competency model, we find the best approach is to cycle back and forth between roles and skills. For each goal, ask what roles support achieving the goal. Then ask what skills those roles need. Then start again with skills. What skills are needed for the goal. Some of these may not have an obvious association with a role. When this happens there are three design choices, (i) have freestanding skills that are connected directly to the role, (ii) create a new role for these stray skills or (iii) add them to all the roles. My approach is generally to connect the skills directly to the role (I sometimes do the same when designing Jobs - not all skills needed for a job can be captured into a role).

Let’s use the example of growing revenue. What roles are involved?

We will put aside for the moment developing an offer or solution that someone wants to buy. Let’s assume that here.

Some of the key roles and their skills are …

Demand Generation

Sales begins with demand. One needs to connect a awareness of need with awareness of solution, in the same mind at the same time. Doing this leads to the buying process stage of ‘consideration.’ The skills needed include

  • Value Communication

  • Content Marketing

  • Content Authoring

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

  • Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

  • Data Analysis

  • Marketing Automation Systems

Sales Management

Sales at any scale require sales management. This is its own role, quite different from the sales role itself.

  • Team Leadership

  • Team Motivation

  • Value Communication

  • Conflict Management

  • Sales Strategy

  • Sales Methodologies

  • Sales Process Design

  • Sales Process Management

  • Lead Qualification

  • CRM

  • Data Analysis

Sales

Most sales require interactions between a customer and a sales person. Yes, frictionless sales, in the buyer completes the buying process without being touched by a salesperson is becoming more common, and is the goal of product led growth models, but for most business there is a human involved, and personally I enjoy buying from a skilled salesperson.

  • Value Communication

  • Persuasion

  • Negotiation

  • Offer Knowledge

  • Customer Knowledge

  • Industry Knowledge

  • CRM

  • A sales methodology

Delivery

The sale does not really end when the sale is closed. In most cases it goes on across the delivery process and on through repurchase, recommendation or renewal. For this to happen, the value promised in the marketing and sales process (value communication) needs to be delivered and documented.

  • Value Communication

  • Value Delivery

  • Value Documentation

  • Project Management

  • Solution Knowledge

  • Customer Knowledge

  • Customer Journey Management

Depending on how the business is set up, the people engaged in delivery may also need some sales and negotiation skills as well.

Note that some skills appear across roles, such as value communication. These are complementary skills that help people in different roles work together. When designing roles you want to include complementary skills that are used across more than one role. The Platonic ideal of purely orthogonal roles is an anti-pattern.

Behaviors can be as important as skills to goal attainment

A simple goal-based competency model can be kept to roles and skills (or to just skills if only one person is involved), but in many cases behaviors are as important as skills.

Skills are what we are able to do, but our behaviors are what we actually do.

On a long bike ride, I may know that I need to drink small amounts often, and never get thirsty. Knowing this is one thing. Actually doing it is another. Defining the behaviors needed to achieve a goal can be an important part of competency model design. Going back to the Grand Fondo, some of the behaviors I will need are …

  • Training regularly

  • Managing diet

  • Communicating with team

During the ride …

  • Drinking regularly

  • Paying attention to the people around me

  • Riding a clean and predictable line

  • Conserving energy

  • Managing body temperature

  • Communicating with team

In November and December, a lot of organizations will be working on their strategic plans for 2022. As you work through your goal setting, try developing a competency model to support this. Ask

  1. What roles are engaged in achieving each goal?

  2. What skills are needed for these roles?

  3. Ae there skill gaps?

  4. How will we close any skill gaps?

  5. What behaviors will support execution?

Skill management and competency model design are about a lot more than jobs. Connecting to goals can make skill management relevant to the business as a business.

 

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