Competent Managers Key to Business Success
Case Study – Business will only succeed if we have competent managers and employees.
The performance management system will fall down if we do not have competent managers and employees. It is essential that the organisation develops the position specification, based on the organisation strategic objectives, before we consider the employees or applicants. If not the organisation could just be reinforcing the past behaviours and practices.
Understanding both the Position first then the Employee
A quantitative performance management system, when integrated into an outcome-based competency approach, is certainly a means of identifying competency shortfalls of employees at all levels including managers, CEO and Board. It is the organisations that are prepared to address these shortfalls that will develop and grow. We have recently been commissioned to undertake the assessment of senior managers in a medium sized organisation one of its subsidiaries.
The commission was to design 17 ideal positions based on the organisations strategic direction for the next 3 years.
Assessing the Competence of the Incumbents against the Ideal Position
The next step was to assess the 19 incumbents against the ideal competency profiles using an outcome based competency approach. The findings were frightening (see the graph below):
1. 17 of the 19 assessments failed to reach the required level i.e. only 2 incumbents were fully competent against the positions they held and were being paid to do.
2. Five (5) incumbents were more than 10% under the required competency level and the most incompetent was 18% under capacity.
3. The average gap was 8.6% i.e. the organisation had managers that were on average 8.6% “under power” but some managers nearly 20% under power/under competent.
4. Performance of the functional areas broadly reflected the competence of [...]