Measuring Competencies in Performance

Evaluation
One of the core driving factors of any organization is the competency level of its various team
members. Each individual manager has a team of individuals that combine their knowledge and
skills to produce the work required to achieve their assigned goals and targets.

It is important to point out that competencies are distinct from goals. Goals are concerned with
what has been accomplished; competencies are concerned with how it was accomplished. If
you only focus your monitoring on the what element only you will be missing the other half of
good performance, the how.

Deciding what competencies each individual needs to develop is relatively easy and often forms
part of the annual appraisal process. But being able to keep track of how each persons
development is progressing is entirely different and often seems impossible to achieve with
everything else you need to get done.
Frequently this area is omitted from a manager formal training. For many managers all they can
do is refer to a personnel manual or base their behavior on their own appraisal experiences.
Understanding how to assess an individuals competencies from the behaviors they exhibit is a
key part of our free Developing Competencies downloadable eBook.

Measuring Competencies
Firstly, you need to understand how competencies are measured and then you can set processes
in place to capture the relevant information. The most effective way to do this is in terms of the
behaviors that define a specific competency.
Behaviors are made up of three aspects; a persons Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes, their
K.S.A.s. These aspects break down the measurement of behaviors into practical chunks that you
can monitor, observe and record.

Observations of exhibited behaviors

Secondly you need to make sure that you skills of observations are objective and well
documented. It is through your observations that you will witness the actual knowledge, skill and
attitude an individual has towards their job.

The manner in which they interact with other team members and third parties will provide you
with the evidence to assess developmental progress. The recording of such observations is
essential and is best done at the time of the event to ensure details are accurate and objective.
This also gives you the opportunity to ask other parties for their feedback on the individuals
behavior.

Our free Competency Observation template provides you with an easy to use format to record
what the event was, what behaviors you witnessed. It also enables you to decide whether what
you saw was positive or not when compared to what is expected of someone performing that
role.

Significance of an Incident
Thirdly, you need to be conscious of significant incidents that the person is part of, or the cause
of. These instances are significant because the deviation from what type of behavior or
performance can be expected of someone in that role was substantial. The outcome of such
instances can be positive or negative.

If you use our free Significant Incident template you will be able to record the comparison
with role expectations and the individuals own performance. This will indicate the importance
and significance of the deviation from the role norm. This template also allows you to record
the level of impact this event had on team performance.

This method of recording these observations and incidents provides you with evidence-based
instances you can use to illustrate an individuals development progress. This enables you to
provide each team member with constructive feedback. You can also use this to benchmark the
required behaviors so that you can mentor and encourage that person to alter their behavior if
they want to develop professionally.

By incorporating such practical ways into your regular management activities you will be able to
easily measure competency development against role requirements within in your team. You will
be able to identify those team members who may be lagging behind and coach them to improve
their competency, so that they are performing at a level closer to that of the roles.

You cannot afford to be out of touch with how your team members are developing, otherwise
you will be unable to judge what they are, and arent, capable of. Each organization has its own
competency framework. You must be familiar with it so that you are able to facilitate your
teams professional development.
For your teams competencies to steadily improve over time you must commit sufficient time
and effort into tracking each persons competency development. This will enable you to collect a
wide variety of forms of the right type of data. To understand more on how to Evaluate Team
Performance you can download our free eBook. Knowing how to measure competencies and
their associated behaviors is crucial to your success in this area.