December 01, 2009
The first guideline is that the team should include all the potential stakeholders. This means that groups such as HR, organizational development, strategic planning, training, information technology, legal, management development, clients, suppliers, and the targeted workgroups may need to be represented.
There are also a number of additional skills that should be represented, some of which currently many not be available in the organization. (The first application of competency concepts is the selection of the development team.) The team must be able to perform job analysis, create assessment instruments and tests, design and automate processes and set up assessment processes etc.
This is a good point to discuss the issue of using professionals versus "talented amateurs." Many organizations make the mistake of assuming that teams can substitute for lack of knowledge or skills. For example, a team might be assembled to build a customer survey. But when none of the members have a professional background in survey design, question writing, or statistical analysis, the resulting survey may have problems with response dimensions, questions, and ultimate reliability.
As one development team member put it, "No matter how many of my neighbours I get together, I still can't build a space ship." Numbers are not equivalent to knowledge. One nuclear physicist is more valuable than a block's worth of neighbours. Similarly, would patients rather have a team of business people perform brain surgeries, or just one neurosurgeon?
The analogy holds for competency development projects. Bringing stakeholders together does not guarantee that the development team will have the competencies it needs for the project. The team needs qualified professionals in competency-related development. These can be developed internally, hired, or contracted for with consultants or outsourcers.
RECOMMENDATIONS
An early development team activity is to take a realistic look at its own internal competencies, then model the requirements needed for the development project. Team members must make a candid assessment of their capabilities as either professionals or talented amateurs. Gaps must then be filled either through development activities or through additional help from inside or outside resources.
TIPS AND TECHNIQUES
The job is diminishing as the unit of work. We all know that traditional job descriptions are a joke in many organizations. They just are not flexible enough for the constantly changing world. New strategies, memberships on multiple teams, customer requirements, and competitive manoeuvres all demand constant change in what an individual is responsible for. We need processes and languages that allow this flexibility. Competency-based approaches are the answer here. Competencies can and should be organized into menus that people and teams can draw from to describe and do their work.