Newsletter Vol. 1.

0 / July 2010 Specialization Empowers

Human Resource Development

Knowledge Sharing Note

Competency Mapping
And Organization Performance
A Human Resource Strategy Execution Methodology

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Catalyst
Catalyst, through its learning solutions, develops fact-based strategic insights for human
resource professional around core human resource functions & its practices in public and
private sector organizations. This docket is a part of an ongoing commitment by Catalyst to
provide best practices, methodologies, tools & practical subject knowledge, viewpoints that
help professionals to realize business value of human resource. You may contact the
authors or send an e-mail to grc@cat.ind.in for more information about the specialization
programs offer by Catalyst or any additional information that helps us to make you a more
informed Human Resource Leader.

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In top-performing HR organizations,
modern toolsets are replacing intuition based execution and alignment tactics more practical
way to answer questions about how to align HR activities in a better way with what
business departments requires, how to align employee job functions to accelerate business
growth, where to spend available HR budgets, and how to identify where and how
employee functions can be made more efficient in response to changing market demands.
Yet, as much as HR business leaders are eager to capture the benefits of new intelligence,
they need to take a 360 degree view of employee’s skills, competencies, business demand
from them, job functions, and evaluation techniques with new perspective. Competency
Based HR strategies and execution plans are making it possible to operational HR –
Business alignment decisions and optimize business performance across the enterprise.
Organizations today have an entirely new way to compete: They learn what’s coming at them from myriad directions. They
Competency based strategic execution tactics. On playing fields in have insight into employee desires, strengths and shortcomings.
every industry, competency mapping activity is allowing human They can better anticipate supply chain competency constraints.
resource organizations to successfully break away from Like winning athlete, they gain solid distance by moving out of
competitors and align themselves more closely with the business the slipstream and pushing to the forefront. They can quickly
needs. decide whether to use a tail wind or to brave resistance at the
head of the pack.
Behind rising expectations for dazzling employee performance is
a flood of information that has created an entirely new set of
We strongly believe most of human resource professional’s are
assets just waiting to be applied. Nourished by actual business aware that they were operating with blind spots, not because of
needs, goals, targets, organizations soak up goals as avidly as tap skills but because of the mere support nature of HR department.
roots seek water. HR Business leaders need to know, for During our informal discussions most of the HR executives told
example, the precise whereabouts of critical employee us they frequently lacked direction, respect, acceptance and
competency supplies & gaps within the organization. They want importance from business functions. Because most of the HR
deeper insights on the competency behaviors of their employees. teams have no access to business function data and information
They seek better understanding of their employee activities and required to do their jobs, or close information gaps to reach
performance issues affecting operations and the financial health business objectives.
of their business functions.
To overcome these information barriers it’s the need of the hour
Driven by intelligence rather than intuition, HR organizations that each HR professional adopts a toolset, methodologies and
can gain speed, agility and timing to execute winning maneuvers. tactics to align their activities with that of business.

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The role of Competency Mapping System in
breakaway
What role does analytics play in top-performing, or breakaway,
organizations? To start with, it eliminates the communication
barrier that exists between business departments and human
resource organization by making sense of the strength, knowledge
and skills of the employees and its utilization for the enterprise.
With the right questions – and the right capabilities for addressing
the business needs ad justified business goals – this fact based
methodology moves hr organizations forward instead of holding
them back.
A pharmaceutical company, for example, might come out with
a new life saving drug but its success depends upon the medical
representative’s competencies to sell it in the network of
pharmacies and doctors. Similarly, new drugs success also
depends upon the collective competencies of supply chain
team, delivery, production and off course of research and
development team.
A hospital could improve the survival rate of premature babies
by enhancing the competencies of doctors in the area of critical
care, advance prognosis techniques. By collecting detailed
competency data hr leaders can also send warning signals to
departments regarding the health of employee activities is
concern.
A consumer goods company or a call centre could boost its brand
and sales by focusing on competency based strategy.
Decisions resulting from competency
analysis bear fruit only when the entire
organization gets behind them and makes
changes required for breakaway.
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By bridging the analytical skills gaps tanker brokers can give
shipping options to select routes – meet the company objectives
and customer service targets.
Competency based analysis helps hr leaders find patterns,
identify new possibilities, create scenarios, make predictions
and prescribe actions. But the decisions resulting from those
insights bear fruit only when the entire organization gets
behind them and makes the changes required to “make the
break.” Of course, it doesn’t happen all at once. As its an
journey which gets evolve over the two lifecycles.
Ultimately, an hr organization would aim to reach the
“Breakaway” level, the highest point of competency maturity,
where quarterly data, competency pattern-based strategies merge
with situational context. This level of transformation requires a
succession of changes in how the enterprise manages employees,
their skills and how employee applies that competency to achieve
organizational goals (see Figure 1).
On the other side of the coin is employee optimization, a process
that entails analyzing individual employee’s opportunities and
constraints, and then driving decisions about them deep into their
career development plans. Using competency assessment analysis,
for example, a retail bank may find competency patterns that
result in new decisions about account mobilization strategy and
operations. It may decide to implement new benchmarked skills
that can put group of employees, team of employees at the
winning queue without restructuring the unit. It can drive every
employee to make the greatest possible contribution toward
achieving organizational goals keeping his or her selfish growth in
mind.
 Business Level Breakaway
Competency Prescriptive, real-time,
Layers Mapping pattern-based strategies
with situational context
Business operations
How the business
Competency
applies competencies mapping and
to achieve its goals characteristics
• Policies maps
• Business processes
• Organization

Competencies and assessments

How the business manages information and learns from it
perform
Figure 1: The competency mapping system maturity model
depicts a succession of changes related to how employee
competencies is managed and applied for org success.

Characteristics of the Organization Competencies

Performing layer helps hr leaders to troubleshoot the hr
In our secondary study, we found a cluster of characteristics
organizations. These competencies based characteristics supports
that defined the environment needed to support the best use of
the intelligent enterprise strategies and become a methodology to
competency based strategy. We find that every organization
make hr organization more effective and:
has these characteristics and are fundamental prerequisites, for
their existence.
• Aware. Able to use and attract competencies from inside and
Competency basics: outside the enterprise
• Precise. Able to sort through and extract the most relevant
Our comparison of competency characteristics contrasted two
groups: “organizational comp characteristics” & “employee comp aspects of competencies
characteristics” – correlation of two groups is highly important • Linked. Able to align human resource department with
for high -performing organizations and its important to ensure business objectives and across functions.
that there is an absolute match between these two separated
layers. In between these there exist four other characteristics layer
performing at different level between the organizations and
identification of top performing characteristic layer and low

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Organizations that possess these basics are aware of the full scope • Challenging. Able to disrupt the status quo in their
of competency coursing through their operations and how to use organization, creating an environment more receptive to
it precisely. They actively collect, monitor and use competency innovation and bolder in its adaptability of new insights and
maps that come from employee supply chain components, for intelligence.
example. Among the many other techniques to identify behavior
• Anticipating. Able to predict and prepare in advance of
competencies they use psychometric models, surveys, direct and
anticipated events by evaluating business outcomes and trade-
indirect interview methods. Another basic characteristic of
offs proactively to optimize their organizations in pursuit of
competency based organization is their adaptability to market
new objectives.
dynamics.
• Empowering. Able to give employees authority to use
information, make decisions and act on their insights to drive
Breakaway characteristics: Beyond the basics change.
As necessary as the basics are, they are not sufficient for
breakaway. Top-performing competency based organizations
excelled at several key characteristics at much higher rates than
lower performing ones (see Figure 2). Top performers employees
display three differentiating characteristics compare with
traditional techniques:

Challenging
Disrupt the status quo to improve the
business and create new opportunities

Anticipating

Predict and prepare for the future by

evaluating trade-offs proactively

Empowered Top performers

Enable employees to analyze, Lower performers
decide and act

Figure 2: Three breakaway characteristics can be exhibited at the highest level much more often in top-performing organizations.
Combined, these three competency drivers constitute a
fundamental openness and readiness for change. They lead to
new ways of working, and new approaches to innovation of
product sets, operations and human resource operational models.
Using Competency Analysis Productively
Achieving the benefits of competency analysis requires a vision
about the strategic use of this activity. To keep comp map activity
implementation on track, hr organizations need to establish a
governance layer of enterprise competency and organizational
discipline to make sure the collection of data from employees,
groups and teams is trustworthy and relevant. Even beyond job
function master data and other aspects of data governance,
operationalizing competency mapping become a serious effort
that may demand co working of state of the art toolsets and
processes to understand, share and analyze competencies for new
intelligence and insight.
Competency Mapping: Companies do
differently
Like rules of debate, competency provides a common
competency mapping centered organizations
Traditional organizations
Sophisticated
Figure 3: Above graph is just an representation which shows three ways in which competency mapping activity benefits the HR –
business alignment.
language that makes it possible to understand and act on
information across competency layers, business functions and
lines of business. When, for example, various groups define
“customer” differently, it’s impossible to have a meaningful
conversation. The finance people may be talking about groups
with current contracts. Marketing may be talking about anyone
they’ve ever done business with and operations only about
prospects with proposals pending. When meaning is unclear,
results cannot be achieved- for example every part of the
organization should understand the right meaning of customer to
deliver higher customer satisfaction during their interactions with
customers, else resulting in many versions of customers and
business objectives suffer. Strong competency based culture
discipline can help employees move faster and collaborate more
easily both within the enterprise and with partners.
Competitive Rudimentary
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At the same time, for competency based activities, hr strategy,
performance appraisals; compensation and benefits, budgeting,
project management you have to do mammoth activity. But to
stay at the head of the curve, the embedding new things in the
existing human resource culture is worth.
Why competency mapping approach matter
Given the nature of change, it takes longer to become a productive
than it does to declare new business goals. However, the right
toolsets can accelerate that growth. If we ask HR leaders to
evaluate the benefit of use of various hr methodologies in their
organizations – that is, how they may response (see Figure 4).

%
Psychometric tools
%

%
Ranking and rating

SOX

Business direction
Trusted methodologies
Balance scorecard

Budgeting
Tools

Top adoption
MBO
Lower adoption

Figure 4: Different human resource methodologies adopted at HR departments.

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About the Catalyst
Catalyst is among the growing organizations focused on
researching, designing and delivering short term skills
development programs and certification courses for executives
working in the field of Human Resources. These educational series
are designed and delivered to improve subject knowledge, best
practices, planning, working and execution skills of individuals,
which directly increases their potential in Industry. Short terms
certified programs and hands on workshops are generally
conducted for target groups with duration ranging from two to five
days. The programs and workshops are facilitated by industry
experts with relevant senior level management experience in the
domain of Human Resources.
The right partner for a change
At Catalyst we collaborate with our clients, bringing together
business insight, advanced research and technology to give them
a distinct advantage in today’s rapidly changing environment.
Through our integrated approach to program design and
execution, we help turn strategies into action. We can help
clients anticipate change and profit from new opportunities.
Specialization Programs Offered by Catalyst
Start Date Program Name
Aug ‘10 Specialist Program in Competency Mapping &
Benchmarking.
Aug’10 Specialist Program in Performance Management &
Appraisal.

Sep ’10 Specialist Program in Human Resource

As we grow we intend to become most trusted external career Diagnostics.
advisor and training institution for human resources professionals
from all over the world.

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© Copyright Catalyst 2010

Catalyst
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Dinshaw Vacha Road, Churchgate
Mumbai – 400020 (India)

July 2010

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