Why Your Competency Framework Never Makes It Into Reviews

Speaker A: Foreign. You're listening to the Team Chicken, powered by Team Black. Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Team Check in and with me today. Well, no one else. I'm your host, Emre, and this one is a solo episode. You just me walking through something. The HR leaders and people ops folks we work with ask us constantly. This is a consistent topic of conversation. Look, if you've already built a competency framework and you're frustrated that it isn't producing useful review data, uh, this episode is for you. I'll cover why frameworks get defined and then never used. The steps to actually map competencies to roles, how to build a rating scale managers won't fight you on, and, and of course, what changes once it's in place. And in fact, this is something we've discussed with Anne Mellinger on our Company Values episode. She explained it as, first you set your strong company values, then you define them into competencies, and then those competencies become, you know, those rating scales. The topic we've discussed with so many different experts and this is what we're going over today, why, you know, competency frameworks never actually make it into performance reviews and what happens if they do? But before we get into it, let's actually put up some numbers about the state of performance reviews in this day and age. And it is, it's a weird one because look, Gallup research says that only 2% of chief HR officers actually say that their performance systems are effective. 2%. And only about a quarter of employees at 26% say their reviews are even accurate. There are a lot of reasons a review system underperforms, but one of the quiet recurring ones is a framework that never reaches your review form. As we discussed, you have company values, so those values are defined. And uh, you know, you have your competencies already mapped out, but for some reason they're not making it into the review form. So what does this translate to? Well, this means employees who have been showing those competencies that you defined living by those values that you've implemented. Well, they might ask the question, what was the point? Now, the main term we will be referring to in this episode will be competency mapping. And um, let's set something straight here. Building a competency framework and mapping competencies are, ah, two different jobs. The framework names what the company cares about. Mapping is the work that comes after it takes those name competencies and turns them into the actual structure of your performance review. Good mapping rests on three things being true at the same time. First, role level specificity, the Competencies that apply to a sales manager aren't the same as the ones that apply to an engineer, even when the framework lists the same word like collaboration for both. Second, observable behavioral indicators at each level of proficiency. For the competencies, you've defined what the competency looks like in action when a manager watches someone do the job. And third would be a shared rating scale, where A proficient or a 4 means the same thing across the whole company. Because every manager is scoring against the same anchors. When all three are in place, the competencies on the forum line up with the work each role really does. And our baiting carries the same meaning from one team to the next. But of course, with everything defined, we also need to take a look at what actually is going wrong. Why aren't competencies connecting with performance reviews? To understand that, we'll be looking at three failure patterns. The first would be what we call the abstraction problem. Most frameworks are built at the org level. Strategic thinking, customer focus, ownership. Each one gets a, uh, generic definition and ships to every role in the company and the problem appears. The second manager has to rate someone. Let's take strategic thinking, for instance. For a sales manager, that's reading account signals and reallocating territory coverage. For an engineer, it's anticipating system constraints. Two releases ahead, same words on the form, but completely different framework. So every manager quietly translates the definition into something that fits their team in their own head, never on the page. And no two managers translate it the same way. The data that comes back isn't comparable because nobody was rating against the same definition to begin with. There's a point Marcus Buckingham makes that I think about a lot. In this case, a rating on something abstract like strategic thinking says more about the manager giving it than about the actual employee receiving it. The second failure pattern that we need to look at is the workflow gap. And this one is purely mechanical. The framework lives in one place and the review form lives in another. The framework is a 40 page PDF in a SharePoint that took six months to write, while the review form is in a separate tool, maybe in an HRIS tool, or maybe it's in a completely separate spreadsheet as well. The two systems aren't connected. So to rate someone based on a competency, the manager has to go check out a PDF or wherever the competency framework is sitting. And more often than not, they don't do this because they have to write performance reviews for however many people they are responsible for. So your competency framework doesn't have to just be Accurate with values, competencies and specific behaviors attached. But it also needs to be convenient. And the third pattern that we need to look at is what we call the calibration vacuum. Without behavioral anchors at each rating level meets expectations, means whatever the rating manager privately decided it means. An academic research that SHRM cites states that more than 60% of performance rating can come down to the quirks of the specific manager doing the actual rating. And I honestly think those numbers line up perfectly with what Marcus Buckingham points out. So with the diagnosis in place, with the three failure patterns now clearly established, and what we need to do clear, let's talk about the fix. Step one. You got to start with role families, not individual job titles. The instinct is to open the org chart and map at the title level. Sales manager, senior sales manager, director of sales, each with its own competency set. Don't do that. You'll build something that takes months and is out of date the day it ships. Because every reorg and every new title sends you back to the drawing board map at the role family level. A role family is a group of jobs that share the same core work even when seniority differs all your product. Individual contributors from associate PM to senior PM do roadmap work and customer research and cross functional coordination at different levels of scope. All your people managers do team performance coaching and resource allocation, again at different scopes. The rule of thumb most companies land on is five to eight competencies per role family, with somewhere around 10 to 20 as the absolute ceiling. The nice thing about role families is that proficiency levels do the work that title level mapping was trying to do. A senior PM and an associate PM both get rated on stakeholder management, but the associate is rated at the proficiency level for their stage and the senior at the advanced level. Step two, and this is the one that does most of the work, write behavioral indicators at each proficiency level. As we discussed earlier and as Ann Mellinger pointed out in another episode, values, competencies, behaviors, and that is what you rate in the performance review, right? A, uh, behavioral indicator is a specific action or output a manager can witness. But what actually makes a good behavioral indicator? Well, here's an easy way to test it. If two managers watch the same person do the same work, would they land on the same rating using only the indicator? If the answer is no, then the indicator might be too vague. For example, let's talk about a, uh, product manager. And um, the competency is they take ownership, right? The vague version reads something like takes initiative and drives outcomes, holds themselves and others accountable. So on and so forth. You can't rate that a manager reading it has no way to tell a developing PM from an advanced one because it describes a posture and not an action. So here's the same competency written with real proficiency levels. At the developing level we say owns delivery on assigned features, flags risks to their manager when timelines shift, and updates stakeholders on progress without being asked. So at a proficient level it might be owns the roadmap for a defined product area, negotiates scope and timeline directly with engineering and design and surfaces cross team dependencies before they turn into blockers. So you can already tell the difference. Right. And um, at an advanced level it could ohms outcomes across several product areas, resolves cross functional conflicts without escalating them, and reframes priorities when the underlying assumptions change. So right now we can see that, okay, these are actions we can track. So a few rules when you're drafting these actions or behavioral indicators. Right? Lead every indicator with a verb, owns surfaces, negotiates resolves. Because verbs force specificity in a way adjectives never will. Cut anything that describes how a person feels or what kind of a person they are and drop relative language more effectively than others is not something you can anchor to resolves conflicts without escalation is if you're starting from a blank page. The method to use is the critical incident technique. Pull the people who know each role best and ask them to describe specific moments when someone did the competency exceptionally well or badly. Then group those stories and turn them into your behavioral statements. Step three, Connect each competency to an actual section in the performance review. And this is where most competency frameworks actually dissolve. And the way to fix it is more structural. You can actually devote one specific section to role related competencies and have all your competency related review questions on that section. And um, that would have you know all the competencies about the role just line down one after the other. Or you could devote a section to each specific competency. So you would have the competency itself as the title of that section and then you would have the questions under it related to that specific competency. It all depends on how deep and granular and detailed you want to get. Now the real problem here is if you're conducting your performance reviews through PDFs or Excel spreadsheets, then it's going to be very difficult to customize it and um, adapt it to, to have all your competencies competency related questions in the actual review. And this is where Team Flect comes in. Because as an all in one performance management platform built right into Microsoft Teams. Team Flex has all of these features. Team Flect has competency frameworks built into the app as well as performance reviews. And when you're conducting a performance review inside Team Flect, you always have the option to include the competencies in said review. This way, the performance review template that you're using automatically pulls that individual's role related competencies and adds it inside the performance review. So you don't have to run around tweaking spreadsheets and templates for each specific role, the competencies associated with an individual show up in their reviews. Done. So if you want to learn more about the highest rated performance review software in the Microsoft ecosystem, T inflect, you can always click the link in the description. Now, before we wrap this one up, I want to focus a bit on the rating scales, because even teams that get the role mapping and competency frameworks right might sync the whole thing with a bad rating scale. The Default in most HIS systems is a 1 to 5 numeric scale with labels like below expectations, meets expectations, exceed expectations, so on and so forth. It's the path of least resistance, but it might be the wrong tool for rating competencies. Other reasons the 1 to 5 might be wrong for competencies is the central tendency. Managers cluster everyone around the middle to avoid extremes. So 70 to 80% of your people land on the meets expectations, which carries almost no value or information. The second is that without behavioral anchors, a 4 out of 5 means whatever each manager privately decides it means. And the third is that having a simple number invites comparison that data can't support because every one of those managers calibrated privately. The fix has been around since 1963 when two researchers named Smith and Kendall published it. It's called behaviorally Anchored rating scales or bars, and the idea is to tie each point on the scale to a specific observable behavior. So what happens when you do competency mapping? Right? What does all of this get you? Well, when it's done right, the effect shows up across the entire talent cycle. So when competencies are connected to performance reviews themselves, the managers actually know what to look for, know what to evaluate, and recognition is easier for them. For employees, the framework itself becomes legible. The competency definitions and the proficiency anchors live in the same place as their goals and their reviews, so they can see it at any time, and they can see what those competencies actually mean. And for hr, well, they're finally getting some proper data that supports their strategic decisions. In compensation reviews, they actually have ratings comparable across different teams and in talent reviews, they can now spot high performance and high potential employees much easier. So if you take one thing from this episode, let it be this. Almost every company I talk to already has a competency framework. The framework is the easy part, the actual difficult part, but the part that actually does the most benefit to employees, HR and managers alike is mapping it across different rating scales and actually mapping it across the performance review. All you need are role families, behavioral anchors, a section for competencies in performance reviews, and the rating scale that is simple enough to hold in your head. Get those in place and your next review cycle produces the data that you can actually use in your strategy. Well, that about wraps it up for this episode. If you're listening to us on itunes, Spotify, wherever you find podcasts, leave us a like subscribe. It really helps the show out. And once again, if you want to try the highest rated performance review software in the Microsoft ecosystem, Team Flick for absolutely free, you can always click the link in the description. This has been the team check in and I've been your host. Emre Bye bye.