Building a Foundation

Situation:

XYZ, A large, extremely successful company recognized worldwide. Innovative and customer-focused. Ambitious and growing. Aware that their ability to manage people and to give them the tools to manage themselves effectively can spell the difference in their future. And yet, not in possession of a clear roadmap of what their people needed to succeed.

A company like XYZ may have all the latest, state-of-the-art people management practices and programs, but without a clear understanding of the critical ingredients for success, none of these programs will be successful. And, as the pace and demands for deliverables continue to escalate, being focused on the critical 20% with 80% of the impact becomes ever more important.

XYZ had a program in place for identifying critical competencies, but it wasn’t working well at all. Supervisors had been trained to do this, but there were many problems:

• Some identified only 1-4 critical competencies, other identified close to 100
• The quality of the output was extremely variable
• Competencies were not linked back to the job or deliverables so their criticality (and legal defensibility) were unclear
• Selected competencies were not prioritized
• Each supervisor used unique terminology, so there was it was impossible to see which jobs required similar skills and which were totally different. There was no way to identify job families or logical progressions
• Those charged with putting together the profiles were struggling, complaining about the time involved with the task, failing to see value, and not getting them done on schedule.

Solution:

XYZ decided that a better approach was needed, and after investigation of the alternatives, chose to use focus. However, the I.S. department was backed up with a variety of software installations and indicated it would not be able to get involved for a minimum of three months. Therefore, XYZ chose the ASP option that allowed them to use focus over the Internet and to be up and running in a few days.

The steps to complete the job profiling were literally 1-2-3:

1. They did some minor customization of the research-based library of more than 500 critical core competencies and technical skills that is provided with focus software.
2. Next, they trained a small group of people to be facilitators of the competency/technical skill profiling process.
3. Small groups of subject matter experts were assembled for the most critical jobs with the most job incumbents, and the profiling proceeded efficiently.

The outcomes of the process addressed all the problems XYZ had previously experienced. The results were high quality (the right competencies and skills, prioritized correctly, tied back to deliverables, and with uniform language showing linkage between jobs), on schedule completion with much less time required by participants, and very satisfied participants who felt the process, experience, and outcomes were outstanding.