Creating Competencies
The Problem
Employees were hungry for a promotion, frequently requesting one without a solid understanding of how their current performance compared to the role they were striving for. The current system relied entirely on verbal/written coaching, but the big picture roadmap wasn’t outlined and the nuances differentiating roles wasn’t written down. As a result, employees felt that the reason they weren’t receiving a promotion was subjective.
My Approach
I researched the concept of competencies and behavioral indicators as a potential solution to this problem and decided it would be a useful tool to provide clarity for all of the roles in our department. Although it wasn’t a requirement of my role, I endeavored to outline relevant competencies and behavioral indicators for all of our roles in my free time.
The Solution
I finished defining our competencies and behavioral indicators around the same time that the company decided that competencies and behavioral indicators would be used company-wide for performance management. My documentation was actually shared as an example of how it should be done and influenced how other departments at the company outlined and defined their own competencies.
Evolution
After acquiring additional teams with overlapping skill sets, our competencies had to be re-defined alongside the unification and evolution of the job roles and tiers. I did the analysis of each team’s existing roles and competencies, charted similarities, and made recommendations for a new competencies. Once those were reviewed and approved by our Team Leads, I worked together with our Director of Paid Social Creative to outline new behavioral indicators across 6 different tiers for 19 competencies for both Graphic Designer & Multimedia roles.
Overview of The New Competency Structure
Before implementing the competencies, I gave a presentation to our people leadership team to make sure that all of the team leads were bought into the new proposed structure. If you want to do a deep dive, you can see the slides for the presentation I gave them here. Everyone came away from the meeting feeling confident with the plan.
Leaders were particularly excited about the idea of graduating competencies. Graduating competencies was a term I used to describe competencies that I felt to have overlapping behavioral indicators that graduated in complexity and application as the role advanced in seniority. Embedded in the idea of using graduating competencies was the idea that once you had mastered the basics they would be encompassed and evolved in the graduating competency. Doing this allowed us to hold people accountable to the basics without repeating all of them for higher level roles. You can see a simple representation of this concept represented in the chart above.
Bree’s ability and dedication to work through tiers and competencies amazes me. She’s taken the initiative to dive in and and define how creative roles will evolve to support the near and big picture vision.
— VP of Creative