How to establish competency model?

What is the competency model?

Competency model began to appear in 1960s. At first, people found that IQ can distinguish good students from poor students. Subsequent follow-up studies have found that many people with high IQs perform generally at work, while many so-called poor students perform well at work.

So it comes to a conclusion that IQ can not effectively distinguish "good workers" from "poor workers". Then I began to consider the influence of personality on performance, such as introversion or extroversion, but the effect was not significant.

1973, McLelland, a famous psychologist at Harvard University in the United States, published the article "Measuring by Quality instead of Intelligence", which criticized the previous intelligence and sexual orientation tests and advocated using sexual orientation tests to predict a person's future performance. Since then, competency characteristics have aroused the research interest of many scholars in the fields of human resources and organizational behavior.

In practical research, McLelland and others emphasized: "Don't make any assumptions first!" Imagine yourself as a person who knows nothing, go directly to the enterprise to select excellent and ordinary people, and study their workflow and some details, such as how to do it, how to think, how to say it, what to do, how to feel, and so on.

So as to get some "factors" called "quality" or "quality", and then take these factors to another "excellent" group and "general" group for verification. If all the excellent students get high marks, the research will pass.

In other words, the competency model is equivalent to recording the behavior and speech details of employees directly with a video recorder, without any colored glasses, and then summarizing and refining them.

Ability and quality can ultimately be attributed to some kind of behavior. Nowadays, iceberg models are usually used to help people understand quality. From superficial knowledge and skills to the underlying values, self-awareness, personality and motivation, they are all integrated in quality, and the lower the level, the greater the effect on performance.

In fact, enterprises are not very interested in the quality of employees' personality, but are interested in whether you can make outstanding achievements.

02

Competency model highlights enterprise personality

In fact, each company's competency model should be unique, because it is closely related to the company's industry, strategy and values. These factors determine what kind of talents will make the company successful.

Unilever, for example, produces care products and food. When making a brand, the basic idea is to be close to consumers, see what consumers need, and then meet their needs. So the emphasis is on process and cross-departmental cooperation; However, some enterprises emphasize the creation of new concepts and products to drive consumption and personal ability, but do not pay special attention to the process.

Each company's strategy and values determine that they need different corporate behaviors, so the competency model should have corporate personality.

Take team spirit as an example. Chinese is called team, but its meaning is different. Some companies are "team work", while others emphasize "groups". In some areas, such as Vietnam, they uphold the values of "family is long", and everyone values the group more than the individual's high performance. In Huawei's "wolf culture", team spirit is also emphasized, but they may pay more attention to individual high performance and the ability to fight alone.

If each enterprise's competency model is different, how to understand the 18 common quality that is popular in the industry at present?

In fact, 18 general qualities are one of the tools for establishing quality models. For example, after extracting quality models from 100 enterprises, it is found that there are * * * characteristics in the quality models established by these enterprises. By summarizing these * * * characteristics, these general qualities are listed.

A mature quality model should not only have most common quality characteristics, but also have unique quality characteristics, which can well explain and predict the work behavior of successful employees in this enterprise.

A complete competency model should include: model structure, index name, index definition, index dimension and behavior level, while a simple competency model can be described without model structure or behavior level. The following is the structure of Huawei's leadership model and an example of an enterprise capability model:

In addition, the competency model also has some supporting materials, such as brochures and application manuals. According to practical application, competency model has many forms. The accurate competency model will also divide the indicators into three categories according to their importance: high, medium and low. If it is used for talent evaluation, different importance represents different scoring weights, which is often used for internal personnel's ability inventory. The simplified competency model has no hierarchy in behavior description, only the definition of indicators and dimensions. Of course, these are also described in behavioral language, and simplified competency model is often used for external recruitment.

Index refining is helpful for enterprise managers to accurately grasp the meaning of various abilities.

03

What is the use of competency model?

Since this concept was put forward, competency model has been widely used in enterprises all over the world. According to statistics, more than half of the world's top 500 enterprises have applied the competency model. In a survey based on 426 companies around the world, 80% companies began to apply competency model in human resource management practice.

In the short period of more than ten years since it was introduced to China in 1990s, the competency model has been enthusiastically sought after by many enterprises. With the help of professional organizations, they established competency model to guide the selection, use, education and retention of talent management. So for enterprises, what role and value does the competency model have for enterprises?

1. There is a basis for selecting people.

The competency model unifies the talent language of enterprises and measures similar personnel with the same set of standards. Avoid the phenomenon that the evaluation of the same person is "fair and reasonable, and the woman says that the woman is right". When the enterprise has the behavioral talent standard of competency model, it means that people's ability can be measured and evaluated uniformly, accurately and objectively, which provides scientific basis for personnel decision-making such as talent evaluation, personnel use and promotion.

Step 2 cultivate a goal

According to the competency model and the shortage of employees' ability and quality, the company conducts targeted personalized training to provide basis and guidance for training development, improve the efficiency and effect of training, help employees improve their work behavior according to job requirements, and enhance the core competitiveness of enterprises.

3. Efforts have a direction

With the competency model, employees can understand the ability requirements of their posts and point out the direction for personal efforts. At the same time, we can plan the future development channel according to the internal characteristics of employees' personal personality, interest, behavior and way of thinking, combined with organizational environment and other factors. Competency model not only provides various development channels for employees through the establishment of job categories, but also lays the foundation for the reasonable planning of employees' career development and helps employees to realize themselves continuously.

4. Behavior is oriented

Competency model is the behavior embodiment of the company's strategy and values, which internalizes strategy and culture in the heart and externalizes it in the line. Therefore, it has a strong guiding and restraining effect on employees' work behavior, which can guide everyone to work hard towards these behaviors and become the code of conduct for employees.

In short, the greatest value of competency model for enterprises lies in finding out the characteristics of current outstanding talents and the requirements for future talents under the strategic development of enterprises, so as to build a clear and unified talent standard for enterprises, so that enterprises can have a basis for selecting people, a reference for salary setting, a goal for training, and employees can make personal efforts have a direction, thus building a high-performance team, supporting the company's strategy and core values, and finally realizing the * * recognition between enterprises and employees.

04

Criteria for a good model

The establishment of competency model is a process of scale making. Only when the standards are chosen can people be measured. If the ruler itself is not good, there must be something wrong with the result. So, what kind of model is a good standard?

Good standards generally have the following aspects:

First of all, we must have some discrimination.

Employees who meet this standard will be able to achieve excellent performance goals. For example, the college entrance examination questions are well written, and those who get high scores must be excellent.

Second, it should be consistent with the corporate strategy.

If an enterprise has made a rapid development strategy, it is necessary to look for such an enterprise as a benchmark, find out the main reasons for its rapid development, and do it according to this norm.

Third, it should match the corporate culture.

If the cultures don't match, the model and the enterprise will repel each other. For example, the establishment of quality model often refers to the mature practices of foreign companies, but most of the examples in it may be western, which is not easy for employees to accept, so it is necessary to change them into local products according to the characteristics of China culture.

It should also be noted that with the development of enterprises, the content should be constantly updated and adjusted. For example, IBM sold the PC business to Lenovo, from a manufacturing enterprise to a service enterprise. We used to emphasize customers, but now we emphasize customers. Therefore, this difference should be reflected in the specific formulation and appropriate adjustment of quality standards.

05

How to establish competency model

As an important means of talent management, competency model is an important innovation in the field of human resource management. In recent years, domestic enterprises began to build competency models, which set off a modeling craze.

But unfortunately, many enterprises are not very successful in applying competency model. The models that have been painstakingly built at a high price are often shelved and turned into a pile of waste paper, which can only be used as decoration and has not brought real benefits to human resource management.

What is the reason? Some people think that this is because the competency model is not acclimatized, while some enterprises blame the consulting company, thinking that their model is not well built, and even think that they have been "fooled" by the consulting company. In fact, the most important reason is that the competency model has not been built. So, how can we build a competency model? The author believes that we should start from the following aspects in order to achieve results.

Select the appropriate object.

In enterprises, there are employees at different levels and positions, especially in large enterprises. With a large number of internal positions and a large scale of personnel, it is difficult to complete the competency model construction of all positions in one step. At this time, it is necessary to find a suitable modeling object and use it as a starting point to build a competency model. Generally speaking, enterprises should develop competency models for the following types of employees or positions:

People who create the core values of enterprises;

Posts or personnel that have a direct impact on future development;

Posts or personnel that need to be trained by the enterprise itself;

Work or personnel with low degree of substitution;

In other words, not all positions need to build a competency model, but should choose the core positions or talents in the enterprise to model. If there are more core positions, choose positions with more incumbents. For example, many fast-growing enterprises start modeling from middle managers; Some high-tech enterprises start modeling from core technical positions (such as designers, engineers and product managers).

If you want to achieve full coverage, you can model in different levels and in different order. It is not recommended to establish competency model according to each position. Because the same level or sequence is stronger in ability, the difference lies in the requirements for professional knowledge and skills. At the same time, if one model per post leads to too fine granularity, it is very complicated in the application process of the model, which is not conducive to landing.

Choose the right method

The method of modeling must also proceed from the application purpose.

If it is only used for recruitment and selection, the accuracy of the model is not high, and there is no need to have too many enterprise characteristics, then we can start with functional analysis and use a mature model base to model, saving time and effort.

If the model is to be used for talent training and development, then the modeling research must be thorough and meticulous, and the forward-looking requirements of strategic development and corporate culture should be fully considered, which requires a higher degree of refinement of the model.

Induction: "Less, slower, worse and more expensive" has a good effect.

The earliest practice is to "listen to the story of the target group", which is also called behavioral event interview in academic circles. First, determine the standards of excellent performers and ordinary performers, then find out the corresponding employees as samples, and then ask these two groups to tell stories. For example, there are two stories that are the most successful and the least successful.

From these stories, the behavioral characteristics of two groups of people are extracted, and the behavioral characteristics that excellent students have but ordinary students do not have or are weak are found. These behavioral characteristics are competency, and their collection is competency model. Finally, find a group of people to verify and examine the cross-validity of this model. This is induction.

The conclusion thus drawn is tenable, because "practice is the only criterion for testing truth". Therefore, this is also a very effective construction method. But it has the disadvantages of "less, slow, poor and expensive", that is, the sample size is small, it takes several months and millions of dollars, and the process of doing it is very hard. The quality model made in this way can be said to be a luxury, and it can only be made after the enterprise has sufficient strength and corresponding foundation.

Deduction: Victory lies in traction.

Although the induction method is flawed, the effect is guaranteed, and Huawei did the same at that time. But there are two problems with this. First, enterprises should have accumulated and stood the test of "successful experience"; Second, the conditions for the company's success will not change greatly in the near future, and the successful experience can be transferred; For example, in some domestic industries, the market changes rapidly, and the behavior of the original high performers may not guarantee success in the new environment.

So I found a simple method-deductive method, which is gradually deduced from the mission and vision of the company, to the strategy, and finally to the behavior of employees. First, look at what capabilities the organization needs to achieve the strategic goals of the enterprise, then look at what performance the corresponding departments need, and finally look at what tasks employees need to complete and what abilities and qualities they need.

In this way, the competency model is naturally defined. Entry is more based on the * * * characteristics of excellent personnel, which is more suitable for technical and skilled personnel; Deduction method is more based on the company's future development requirements and more suitable for middle and senior managers. Many times, the two are usually combined.

Please click to enter a picture description.

Please click to enter a picture description.

External pole method: both forward-looking and complementary

China is changing rapidly now, and its quality and ability have not been verified. So the deductive thing really has no bottom. How to solve this problem?

At this time, enterprises need to look outward, that is, look for benchmarks from the outside, learn from the practices of well-known foreign enterprises, see what unique qualities their excellent employees have, and combine these qualities with the actual situation of enterprises to make the quality model advanced to some extent.

For example, Huawei once considered IBM and Cisco when selecting external benchmarks, and finally chose IBM, mainly considering that Huawei's employees are a group of "wolves", which are not lacking in momentum and enterprise, but lack stable, standardized elements and steady style, and IBM just fits this feature and complements Huawei; Relatively speaking, Cisco and Huawei are similar, and the benchmarking effect is not obvious.

Card modeling method: simple and effective to be verified

Card modeling method, that is, list all the qualities first, so that you can have your own ability card, including 8 ethnic groups and 75 abilities and qualities. In this process, select outstanding personnel, middle and senior managers and HR to form a discussion group. Under the guidance of consulting experts, participants selected 3-5 cards that they recognized. After intense discussion, they finally screened out several recognized abilities and qualities, and under the guidance of external consultants, they integrated and optimized the model.

Please click to enter a picture description.

At present, there are not many verifications on the effectiveness of agile modeling, but the effectiveness can be controlled from two aspects.

(1) Internal consistency: through the discussion and demonstration of the workshop group, the consistency is finally maintained. This form of expert discussion similar to Delphi method also ensures the effectiveness of the model to some extent. Of course, the so-called "experts" here usually refer to employees in leadership positions or employees with very rich post experience, who have a comprehensive grasp of their positions.

(2) Effectiveness of school standards: After the model is implemented in enterprises, employee standards can be verified through employee performance analysis and work performance. Of course, it will be more convincing in the case of comparison.

Which method is the most suitable?

It should be said that the method itself is not good or bad. The key depends on whether the quality model made by this method can distinguish excellent performance from general performance. In fact, the successful methods now are comprehensive, including induction, deduction and reference to external benchmarks. It is to absorb the advantages of various methods and make up for the possible defects of a single method.

Select experts

The construction of competency model is a technically difficult job, so it is very important to be responsible for specific personnel. If the modeler is unprofessional, can't make strategic and cultural analysis, can't dig out effective behavior events in interviews, or there are deviations in coding and data statistics, it will lead to the failure of modeling. Therefore, in order to ensure the success of model construction, enterprises must choose modelers with high professional level.

Professional modelers should not only have solid knowledge of competency model and talent management, but also master the application skills of competency model building tools (such as behavioral event interviews, brainstorming, coding, data statistics, etc.). ), and also has strong systematic thinking, summary and induction ability, written expression ability, communication and coordination ability and innovation ability.

Of course, even if modeling experts are selected, the participation of internal managers is essential. Many enterprises believe that since they have hired consulting companies, they should hand over the development work to consultants and make their own efforts. Isn't that right?

This view is wrong. In the construction of competency model, enterprise managers and consulting companies have their irreplaceable roles. The link that needs managers' participation most is the refining of ability. Based on the same behavior event, the competency extracted by managers of consulting companies and enterprises may be very different. The reason is that the consultants of the consulting company are not familiar with the background and situation of the enterprise, so there will be some deviations in judgment.

Therefore, the model refining work must be completed by consultants and enterprise managers, and the cooperation methods include seminars and brainstorming. In addition, the real user of competency model is enterprise managers, and personally participating in the index refining work will help enterprise managers accurately grasp the meaning of various competencies.