I recently completed an exercise with a group of very intelligent leaders, exploring the

opportunity of building a career pathway (multiple promotional levels) for a large tenured team
at a private university. The problem at hand was a perceived lack of professional growth,
stagnation in promotional capacity and skill development. The issue was not one of performance
management, but one of staff engagement.

The organization had been growing at a significant pace - far outpacing the average market
growth compared to competitors. The institution responded with a massive hiring spree, doubling
the size of the team in a few short years. There was little time to celebrate as operational and
logistical challenges also surfaced. Operational processes that worked before were quickly
insufficient to meet the demand. There was a "lets muscle through it" mentality. While this
certainly served its purpose, the thrill of keeping pace as a matter of survival was no longer
enough. Team engagement began decreasing and a change in strategy was needed.

Though leadership structures were put into place to manage the work, a vision for employee
development was needed to set the stage for the future of the team and its contributions to the
organization. Without a link between purpose and organizational strategy, the team was at risk of
falling behind - or worse, significantly delaying the progress of the larger institution. In the book,
The Handbook of Competency Mapping, Sanghi (2007) suggests that "the art of good
management is the ability to make a practical assessment of an organization's suitability to its
task or strategy" (p. 14). This assessment is critical to identifying areas of improvement, gap
areas in individual and team performance, and role alignment.

That's where competency mapping comes in handy. It is not a new concept. In the 1960s David
McClelland was writing about employee selection based on competencies. Douglas Bray (1974)
also contributed in his "Studies of Formative Years in Business," a long-term study at AT&T
which suggested the possibility of predictive success measures based on competency
identification. However, there continues to be new application to various human resource
settings.

In our scenario, I put together a design team with a shared goal of creating a comprehensive,
equitable, and purposeful program based on clearly defined criteria and competency evaluation
as a basis for employee promotion. At a very high level, we began with these seven steps in
mind:

1) Identify key components of employee job descriptions - the critical points

only. Focus on what characteristics and skills are absolutely essential to get the job done.
Remember that job descriptions often serve different purposes when posting a position than is
needed to explain the role's responsibilities.

2) Clarify roles and eliminate superfluous information - narrow the scope

again. Look through your essential words and phrases. Ask yourself whether you have more
words than needed to describe the essential characteristics. Then ask yourself whether the role's
responsibilities are clear. How do they align to the task? the team's mission? the overall
organizational strategy? If they don't, back to the drawing board.
3) Identify required aptitudes, attitudes, skills, and knowledge for roles -
critical components of the competencies are what is beneath the surface of employee behavior.
Like an iceberg, we see only what is above water, but realize the vast majority is underneath.
These values, underlying skills, and approach to work is what you're after. Identify what you
need for a successful employee.

4) Synthesize ideas into central themes and define them - no more than 10
competencies. You will get mired in the assessment and analysis portion if you don't narrow it
down to the critical few. Start researching other similar organizations and the competencies they
require of employees. Look to the K-12 educational sector. There's quite a bit of knowledge
about teacher competencies that will likely align very well with your team.

5) Create a five-scale rubric system - describe what a novice looks like for each
competency. What about your expert? What does performance at each level in between look
like? What are the skills, aptitudes, and knowledge required at the minimum for each level?
Here's where you will want to clearly describe the behaviors exhibited by individuals who
perform at each level on the novice-to-expert scale. Ask others to review your list. Would they
know what is expected to perform at each level? If not, it's back to the drawing board.

6) Build assessments - organize your set of questions aimed at identifying level of

alignment for each of the five scales you've designed. Don't just ask questions that measure
whether someone is an expert. Look for open ended questions such as "describe how you would
do..." or "explain what you did when you were able to accomplish..." Ask your candidates
multiple layered questions. Never, ever, ask a question that can be answered with a "yes or no."
You're looking for depth of answer here so that you can evaluate how well it fits to your rubric.

7) Build logistics for roll-out and on-going measurement cycles - this is the
fun part! You build a list of competencies, defined them, built rubrics to assess level of
competency on a novice-to-expert scale. Now you need to launch your program. Pay attention to
your audience. Are they a group of people with test anxiety? Do they prefer written or oral
assessment? Would they be excited to show where they are at as far as their performance? The
program will lose its luster if you only do it once. Build a plan for continuous assessment - but
don't go crazy with it. Twice a year is probably more than enough. Use the time in between to
build on the gap areas of your team. Make sure they're moving toward the skillset of your
defined expert. However, don't assume everyone will get there. A good rule of thumb is that
you'll have the majority of your team in the middle 60%, with 20% of them on either side of the
novice-to-expert scale.

After numerous (painstaking?) design meetings, we had accomplished what we set out to do. The
end product is a program that is repeatable, specific, and is expected to engage team members in
their own professional development. The next task is to build skill development tools to address
any gap areas identified in the assessments. The work continues!

Should you be interested in doing the same for your team, I would strongly recommend you to
seek the works of those mentioned above. Having a degree in human resources or organizational
development is not essential. Keep it simple. Focus on your goals and the critical elements that
are needed to achieve them. Accept that you will build and rebuild and refine along the way.
Gather your star design team and get to work today! After all, you can't afford to wait until your
own operations are insufficient to meet your demands... Good luck to you, and let me know how
it goes!