12 Competencies: Which ones should your people have?
7. Training, Mentoring and Delegating
These competencies should be required of supervisors and managers as well. They involve the ability to develop people under them to attain higher levels of excellence. The skills could consist of coaching, advising, transferring of knowledge and skills, and teaching and pinpointing employees where tasks can be transferred with trust and confidence.
8. Evaluating Employees and Performance
The ability to undertake a constructive performance evaluation involving joint assessment of past performance, agreement on future expectations are managerial and supervisory competencies. The skills would consist of ability to develop parameters of evaluation, benchmarking and face to face confrontation with the employees being evaluated without any bias and hesitation.
9. Advising and Disciplining
The ability to advise and counsel as well impose discipline in a positive manner are competencies required of managerial and supervisory positions that handle large number of employees. This is to restore, within the acceptable range of standards, the employees’ performance while maintaining respect and trust. It also involves the ability to impose penalties and sanctions with firmness and resolve in appropriate cases.
10. Problem Identification and Solution
Problem identification and arriving at solutions cut across organizational functions and job positions. It is about the ability to identify barriers that prevent achieving goals and standards. It also involves the application of systematic sets of procedures to eliminate and reduce the problem origins and causes. It requires skills like distinguishing between problems, symptoms and indicators, inputs and outcomes, gathering and assessing evidence relating to causes, and plotting a decision matrix and eventually choosing and recommending the best options. This competency should be required to positions that engage in evaluation, whether in managerial, supervisory, or technical job levels.
11. Assessing Risks and Decision-Making
Assessing risks and decision-making are competencies required of higher managerial positions where decision-making can involve commitment of company resources and processes that could have company-wide implications. Like problem identification and solution competencies, assessing risks and decision-making involve the ability to construct a decision matrix that aids to identify and evaluate alternatives and options, identify limits, desirables, and risks to be considered, assign weights to each option and choose the best option to achieve the desired goals and standards.
12. Thinking Clearly and Analytically
The ability to apply clear and logical thinking is a competency required for both supervisory and managerial positions. The competencies include skills as determining valid premises arriving at logical conclusions from them, separating fact from hearsays, unwarranted assumption and false inferences, applying inductive and deductive logic appropriately, culling of logical fallacies, invalid premises and conclusions based on insufficient information.
As a basic process in determining competencies during job analysis, writing of job specifications and developing performance assessment instruments, one can easily be guided by plotting jobs against the 12 major competencies previously mentioned. Choosing which competencies and the mix should follow, with the most important competency taking precedence over the others. The degree and level of competencies that will be required will vary according to scope of responsibilities, authorities, people involvement, and decision-making powers. Putting them in a matrix could provide a visual guide that would make the tasks easier and convenient.
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