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.