Measuring Leadership Competencies

Zak

Hello, and welcome to People Performance Radio, sponsored by SuccessFactors, the global leader in performance and talent management software solutions. Without further ado, please allow me to introduce Dr Steve and Jim "The Mad Dog" Matheson!

Jim

Welcome back to People Performance Radio, you're here with Jim Matheson …

Steve

… and Steve Hunt.

Jim

Steve, are you happy to be down here in the Bay Area?

Steve

I am, for those of you in the listening audience who can't see it, Jim and I are actually in the same room at the same time. Normally we do this in a virtual teaming, environment but this time I get to see Jim's charming face instead of staring out the window at my neighbor's house.

Jim

All right, so Steve, in case we have some new listeners today, what's this show all about?

Steve

Today we are going to be doing another one of our interviews from Success Connect. This with a company called Lominger, or LominGer, that's one of the things I learnt in the interview, that it's actually pronounced Lominger. It's a company that really is a pioneer in the use of competencies, it really is a world expert in using competencies for more effective talent development and does some really innovative things. Are you familiar with Lominger, Jim?

Jim

Just a little bit, obviously I was there when you conducted the interview but that's about it, I don't know too much about them.

Steve

So do you know what a competency is?

Jim

I don't know, what's a competency?

Steve

What do you think it is? It's really a concept actually, a trick question because it's not well defined. It's one of these things that, really the term came into being probably 15 years ago I think in a book by Ulrich, David Ulrich from the University of Michigan initially, but it's the idea that there are different dimensions of performance, there's no such thing as, you're not just good or bad at a job, you're good or bad at different things, and it's important, when you're looking at jobs to define what are the different things that make or break success in that job?—so you might be great at analytic thinking, but you might be lousy at building relationships, or you might be really good at thinking creatively, but you're really bad at planning and organizing, and you need to look at all these different dimensions and understand what makes somebody successful in a job, but there's some interesting characteristics and this is caught in the Lominger interview.

 The term competencies has gotten used a lot now, people kind of use it for everything to the point that it's losing its meaning. I really think the most effective meaning between focus on competencies has been how you apply your knowledge to jobs, so when you look at what influences success in a job, there are a lot of things, but two of the big ones are what you know, which is things like that skills and past experiencesand qualifications and how you use it, and the competences reflect the how you use it, so skills sort of enable you to get the job to begin with, but competencies determine whether or not you succeed in it.

Jim

Can you give me an example, like in terms of the differences between the two?

Steve

I could give the example of computer programming, you might have someone who knows C++, knows it really, really well—that doesn't mean they're going to work effectively in a team programming environment that requires working with others in a collaborative manner. So the working with others is the behavioral component of how they use their knowledge, that's more of what competency is getting to define, and usually what happens in most jobs is, companies are fairly good at evaluating whether or not people have the hard skills to hold the job, they can tell, "Do you know what we need you to know?”, but it's much hard to evaluate, "Are you going to apply that knowledge in a way that's going to fit our team dynamics or work environment or values or philosophy?”, and studies of job performance say the reason most people fail in jobs actually is competencies, because again you never get the job if you don't have the skills. Companies usually say you either don't apply at all or it becomes painfully obvious in the interview process that you don't know the basic things you need to know to perform the technical aspects of the job. It's much harder, though, to evaluate to say how you're going to use this knowledge, is it going to mesh well with the team, customers, co-workers et cetera.

Jim

Right yeah, that's definitely the hardest part I've found just in terms of interviewing folks, and that's where you have to get, there's some guesswork and obviously you talk to references and things like that when you're bringing somebody on board, but I think it's much easier once the person's on board, assessing it, developing that, using 360s to get that feedback, but definitely initially, it seems like it would be really hard.

Steve

It is, and developing competencies and assessing competencies is much different from how you develop and assess skills. They're both important, it's important – when people talk about a labor shortage, we're really talking about skills shortage. When we talk about performance challenges, it's usually around competencies, and you need both, and if anyone's interested, a shameless plug, I have a book called "Hiring Success"that actually talks a lot about this very issue, what's the difference between a skill and competency and how do you evaluate them, but I don't focus so much on what Lominger really talks a lot about, and their work is how you develop competencies, because you can't really go to school to learn how to be good at building relationships. It really is more about getting yourself in the right environment that will challenge you, and getting the right experiences and then most importantly learning from those experiences to develop your competencies, so there's a lot more about this in the interview I think, and a lot of other things as well that are quite interesting, in terms of how to correctly pronounce their name, and I think we're going to learn this in the interview.

Jim

If you're interested and you have any questions or feedback, all the contact information for that is available at the end of the show, and hope you enjoy this interview with Zoe Hruby from Lominger.

Steve

So Zoe, very briefly tell us a little bit about what you do with Lominger, and what Lominger does.

Zoe

Sure, well my role with Lominger, is I'm Director for Strategic Alliances and Licensing, so I manage our relationships with SuccessFactors and other organizations like Center for Creative Leadership and things like that, and I also run our licensing division so we license our content to our client, our intellectual property, so they can utilize it can and imbed it within their organizations and match it and change it to fit their cultures.

Our two founders actually met at the Center for Creative Leadership, which is a phenomenal non-profit agency based out of Greensboro, North Carolina, and they actually did some joint research there and this is where they founded our competency model. It's based on years of longitudinal research to understand what makes certain people successful while others fail, and what leads to success and what type of experiences and things do people go through.

Steve

Very briefly, what is a competency?

Zoe

A competency—well we do behavioral competencies, so they're not technical competencies where you think of things like, does the person have the ability to write in Java, or something like that.

Steve

That's what I'd call a skill.

Zoe

Exactly, although a lot of people nowadays are using them as a term as well, so these are behavioral competencies, so these are attributes that you see in individuals in terms of how they interact and do their job on a day-to-day basis.

Steve

So can you give me an example of a couple of competencies?

Zoe

Absolutely, it's thinks like action-oriented, it's things like boss relationships, peer relationships, strategic agility and listening, all sorts of things like that, and our library encompasses all of them, and they're not just competencies for leaders or executives, they actually describe all behaviors, and then you pick and choose what's appropriate depending on the job and the level within your organization. So you'll see, as somebody transforms through their career, that the profile and the competencies that they tend to be very good at as an individual contributor will grow and morph as they move up through an organization, through the manager levels, all the way up to an executive.

Steve

So you provide tools to understand what those competencies, and are and how to make them more tangible, as opposed to saying this person's good, you define what "good"means?

Zoe

Exactly, so we define them in a couple of different ways, so you have like a skilled description—what does this look like if this is something you're good at? What does it look like if you're not good at it or unskilled, and one of the things that's a little more unique to Lominger is providing an overuse definition, and what happens there is often time somebody that has a strength will push it so far into overdrive, especially in times of stress or they're being pushed too hard or something, that it actually starts to become detrimental to them and they can actually get derailed or fired because of overusing their strengths.

Steve

That's interesting, I used to do executive assessments, and I learnt in that that there is no strength I cannot turn into a weakness.

Zoe

Exactly, absolutely.

Steve

It gives you a different view of humanity, I think a little bit. So when you look at Lominger, it's been around for quite a while.

Zoe

Yeah, about 17 years.

Steve

What are some of the real innovations in the last few years in terms of how people are using it, what's the next evolution, competencies have been around now, where are people going with this?

Zoe

You know, competencies have kind of gone through a very interesting cycle over the years. They were hot a few years ago, and then just generally in the business world, people cooled off a bit around them, they weren't really sure how to introduce them or utilize them throughout their organizations. There's been a resurgence obviously in the last few years again as people start to look down the barrel of the talent pipeline shortages, and trying to get their hands around how to deal with the talent issues, how do they start to align talent within their organization against their strategies? How are they going to manage that pipeline as a lot of their workforce starts to retire, and how are they going to make sure that the talent they have either stays, stays engaged, and develop them in time for the positions they're going to, they want them to move into.

These movements are happening at a much more rapid pace; typically used to see when people were doing talent management a few years ago, you would have people go through developmental experiences, they put them in a job assignment, and the first time you put them through, it was for them to learn and develop. The second time would be so that the company would get something back from the organization, you would start to see some results. Well, because of the speed at which people need to move through these experiences now, you don't have that luxury, you're having to push people through these experiences, your high potentials are having to through these first-time experiences in much shorter series of succession than you were before.

Steve

There's no more shallow end of the pool, you just throw them right in at the deep end—so how do you keep people from drowning?

Zoe

You want to be looking carefully at assessing your employees when you're looking at putting them into these experiences, you want to be sure that you're actually looking at a high potential, somebody that has this concept that we have called learning agility, so you're able to take these first-time experiences that you have in certain situations, create some rules of thumb and understand how would you apply it in a different situation or setting, and somebody that's able to do that typically is far more successful in the first-time setting so they take those lessons and can easily apply it into a very, very different situation, and figure out what they need to do to be successful.

Steve

Is learning agility something you just have or don't have, or is it something that you can develop?

Zoe

There is definitely a level of it occurring naturally within an individual, but you can develop it, you can start to grow it. Obviously, it's not as easy as somebody that naturally has it, but you can do things to help move the bar on that.

Steve

And how do you evaluate learning agility?

Zoe

There are different tools, and we obviously have a validated tool that we have that is an assessment. You can use it for a couple of different ways, you can use it for succession planning, or you can use it for development, depending on what you're trying to achieve within your organization.

Steve

What's that called? What is the tool called?

Zoe

It's called "Choices”.

Steve

OK, is it a test?

Zoe

It's an 80-item survey that you fill out on an individual. If you're doing it for succession, you're typically looking at the boss, the boss's boss and maybe HR filling it out on an individual.

Steve

So it's kind of like a 360 survey?

Zoe

It can be, you'd use that more for development purposes, so if you want the individual to understand and know, and then you're going to go through some developing and coaching them on the other end of it, absolutely, you'd have the individual, you'd do the full 360.

Steve

So it's like a structured performance rating that's focused on a very specific competency?

Zoe

It's not really around performance. What you're really looking at there is that you're looking at behaviors and indicators to show what underlies this concept of learning agility, so you're trying to find out what are some of the habits this individual has.

Steve

It's a behavioral assessment.

Zoe

Exactly.

Steve

OK, interesting, and what advice would you give to a company that says, "We're going to get serious about telling management,"especially I think where this happens a lot is with the mid-market companies, where they've sort of gone along informally, they get to a certain size and all of a sudden, "We can't shoot from the hip the way we have before, we have to start putting in some real structured processes and really thinking about what are the competencies, how are we going to assess them?"- what advice would you give to that mid-market company that's trying to make that leap, or even a really small company?

Zoe

Obviously first do your research, there's obviously a great desire in some organizations to create something from scratch, do something that's home-grown or home-belt, and if you have a lot of time and a lot of money that's a great idea, but I guess my advice would be, if you're looking at a competency model, go and find one that's research-based. Find somebody that's already done the hard work for you, that's gone out done the studies, done the longitudinal work and things like that, so you don't have to start from scratch, because the greenfield settings and things that you'd have to do to create a really comprehensive competency model, it's a large amount of work and costs a lot of money.

So do your research, there's a couple of different ways you can go at it depending on how solidified your strategy is: one way that we work with a lot of our clients is, we'll start with their strategy – "What are you trying to do over the next five years? What do you intend your business to be?”, and then taking that line of sight into their strategy and transferring it and translating it into a competency model, and understanding how that fits and then aligns into your talent, so that you can take a look and assess at your talent within your organization—do you have the executives on your team to execute the strategy you're looking for?

Steve

Do you think someone can do that on their own? Does that required, I mean, they need the content, but do you think that's something the company can do without consulting, or is it something they can do on their own if they just get the content from you?

Zoe

Well, we work with clients in a variety of different ways. We will do the consulting for you if you want, but we also are very much that knowledge transfer we talked about, where we can teach you the best practices behind this, and depending on the resources in your organization ,if you have the right people within your HR group or if you have an HR department with OD, et cetera, then you may very well be able to do this on your own. Often times when you're starting to look though, at doing a mapping like that between your strategy, your talent, and you're wanting to assess your talent at the top of the house, there's a sensitivity about doing that with somebody from the inside.

Steve

It's interesting, as you're talking it sounds to me almost like, as companies grow, if you compared it to the information technology, when you started the company, people who had computers, they would hook them together on their own, but you get to a certain size and you actually have to have a real information technology infrastructure with different materials and it's sort of, don't try to cobble together by going to Best-Buy and buying stuff, there's people that specialize in that, and I think Lominger is an example that specializes that with people in the same way.

Zoe

That's a great analogy, yeah.

Steve

It is a science, and you might be able to fake your way through it to some degree, but it'll hurt you in the long run.

Any other sort of last thoughts or things that you think, I guess I'll put it this way, to say, the next great area in talent management—what's the next big thing that either has been an innovation, or is a challenge that is really going to define over the next few years that companies have to get on board and have to start dealing with?

Zoe

Honestly, it's probably a couple of things. I mean obviously in terms of organizations being able to execute the strategies and staying afloat, as we start to deal with the workforce changes, with the baby boomers retiring and the different struggles that we're having and opportunities that are open to some of the younger generations and their desire to move more quickly through an organization, you're going to have to be very clear about aligning your talent to your strategy and then looking at your succession plan—how are you going to deal with these changes? Do you have the talent you need? Do you need to buy it or bring it in from the outside? If you do have it, how are you going to develop it in a rapid enough way and make sure that those people have those experiences that they need to actually be successful, because if you're not paying attention to that, you're going to put people into jobs for the first time at a very young age comparatively to what they're used to, and they're going to fail,and it's going to cost your organization greatly. So I think there's a very strong cascading effect.

Steve

We have to do more with less, and it increases the risk of making what I like to call "catastrophically bad talent management decisions”.

Zoe

Absolutely.

Steve

Yes, I think there's some banks in France that are probably thinking about that right about now.

Zoe

I think there might be one or two!

Steve

You said there was a second one, what was the second?

Zoe

Well, it's looking at your strategy, aligning your succession and then obviously making sure that you're putting in place really good development within your organization, and making sure there's those failsafes for people who are going through those big first-time assignments, assessing them, putting them through a 360; not just thinking about it in terms of performance, but from a purely developmental experience, to help them understand exactly who they are as an individual, what gaps do they face, how are they perceived, so that then when they're going into a structural assignment, or a brand new type of a role, they're not going in blind and they're aware of some of the things they're going to have to deal with in terms of who they are as a person, and how they're going to be seen as a leader.

Steve

Yeah, I think that's interesting, something a manager told me years ago was talking about making decisions about people, and he said, "The problem with companies is, we'll spend weeks talking about whether to buy a $15—20,000 computer server, and then we'll spend days deciding whether or not we're going to hire the person who's actually going to run it and looking at the people”, so we just don't put the amount of time in realizing that people or employees are your greatest asset, but they're also your biggest liability if you get the wrong one in the wrong role.

Zoe

Absolutely.

Steve

Anything else you'd like to share about Lominger before we wrap up? I know you have lots of stuff to go and do.

Zoe

We're a talent management organization and we, our founders, didn't get into this game to get rich, they got into the game because they're very passionate about the industry and wanting to make sure that organizations and companies knew how to deal with their talent, and help make the human resources practice and business function in a much better and cleaner way.

Steve

The getting rich part probably wasn't bad for them either.

Zoe

It was a nice side effect!

Steve

Well, thank you very much.

Jim

Yeah thanks, we've been chatting with Zoe Hruby from Lominger. I assume that your website is at www.lominger.com if people want to take a look?

Zoe

Absolutely.

Jim

And thanks for sharing the afternoon with us.

Steve

Thanks.

Speaker

If you would like to be a guest on the show, or sponsor, please drop us a line at podcast@successfactors.com, or you can leave us a message at 650-425-7474. This podcast is copywritten by SuccessFactors. The views expressed are the individual’s own, and do not necessarily represent those of SuccessFactors, SuccessFactors’ partners or customers. See you next week.