ing and development programs focus on competency models to the exclusion of the bigger picture. Workers want to develop the skills to be better at their job but ultimately they’re looking for relevance to their own personal career goals. Combine all these factors and it’s a fair to ask: Is the traditional competency model still relevant in an era of shrinking career tenure and ever-evolving skills?
Making Competencies Work For Your Company When creating competency models, companies’ often look elsewhere to determine the right topics and find out what’s working for others. This leads some to develop competency models ill suited to their needs. Competencies are often not specific enough to a particular company’s needs, said Steve Hrop, vice president of organizational development services at Caliper Corp., a provider of employee assessments and talent management services. “When it’s really tied to the needs of the organization and where it is in growing and implementing its strategy, then business leaders do see the value in these models and recognize how important they can be around talent management,” he said. Hrop said the best way to implement a competency model is to identify the organization’s objectives, create core competencies from those objectives and leadership competencies from the core competencies. For example, if an organization’s objective is to provide best-in-class customer service, Hrop said the organization should create core competencies that align with that objective and leadership competencies such as negotiation, conflict resolution and active listening. When companies don’t follow these steps, Hrop says there can be serious consequences. Business leaders and others throughout the 36 Chief Learning Officer • November 2017 • www.CLOmedia.com
organization fail to see the value. “They dismiss it because they don’t see the direct connection,” Hrop said. “They think it’s HR speak and sometimes it comes across that way.” Lynn Williams, head of global leadership and management development at pharmaceutical company Sanofi, said creating her company’s core competencies and understanding their values were part of the same initiative. Competencies are how those values are translated into actions and behaviors.
“Nobody becomes an expert just through courses. We build skills by stitching together learning experiences over time.” — Todd Tauber, vice president of marketing, Degreed Sanofi conducted assessments with the leadership development steering committee to determine what was needed to drive the business, what the company should look like in the future and the key initiatives to get there. “There was nothing to say, ‘Here are the values and here’s your training program on the values,’ ” Williams said. “It was really much more focused on how do you have a dialogue on our purpose, our ambition and values.” Rather than focus on training specific skills, Sanofi instead developed DEEP Conversations, a program aimed at driving the company’s core values of courage, respect, integrity and teamwork through behaviors that are DEEP, which stands for direct, empathetic, earnest and productive. “If you’re having a DEEP conversation and you’re direct you’re going to be candid, you’ll be decisive, you take a courageous position, you use straight talk and that aligns with our value of courage,” Williams said. “Under empathetic, you will be emotionally intelligent, you’ll be persuasive, you’ll be able to engage others, you’ll be expressive, you’ll bring your ideas into that, and that focuses on our value of respect,” she added. “E for earnest really focuses on creating trust, on being very deliberate and thoughtful with our conversations in empowering others, and that ties