Stephen Billing’s Blog

The competencies required for leadership (if there is such a thing as competencies and leadership) are not to be found in the standard competency frameworks. If you are using a competency framework, it is likely to be wrong, therefore don’t give it much priority. 

The idea of competencies is that you will be able to identify necessary skills and define the steps required to acquire those skills. So, an important step in developing leaders is then to be smart enough to analyse the work of a manager or leader, or make use of the work of those who are smart enough to research and precook a set of skills for you. These skills are separated from the context in which the skills are used. Hence, strategic agility is said to be something that people can acquire by using strategic buzzwords, doing five year projections even though five year plans don’t happen as projected, or regularly reading strategy gurus and Harvard Business Review. These remedies are among those recommended in Lominger’s book FYI For Your Improvement, Fourth Edition, pp 344 – 348.

I have been saying that as leaders and managers you need to be paying more attention to the quality of your own experience and relationships with those around you, and noticing the impacts of the conversations you and others are having. This requires a reflective development of self knowledge, and taking your own experience seriously.

These skills are difficult to develop and difficult to sustain. And these competencies do not usually figure in the skill sets devised for managers. The following are all part of what I am coming to think are required:

• Self-reflection
• Noticing what is going on
• Owning one’s own part in what is happening
• Facilitating free-flowing conversations
• Articulating what is emerging in conversations 

These skills are not included, or else are quite different when they are expressed in competency frameworks.

For example, the nearest Lominger competency to "self reflection" is probably number 55 "self knowledge," which is essentially seeing yourself as others see you. Consistent with this, the remedies prescribed in order to develop self knowledge are all about getting feedback about how others see you. It is not seen as important to reflect with others on what is going on, what you and others have done together. The emphasis in Lominger is about getting feedback from others so that you can change your behaviour and be more effective. This is not the same as reflecting with others on the events that are taking place around you, and your part in them.

The competency frameworks such as Lominger have been developed based on the assumption that organisations are systems, that people are parts of the system that comprises the organisation, and that the skills of human beings are parts of the people that make up the system that in turn comprises the organisation.

The skills I have listed above are only intended as examples to show how a different way of thinking about organisations leads to a different set of skills with an orientation that is quite different as shown in my example of the difference between self knowledge and self reflection.

The standard competency approach assumes (without explicitly saying so) that humans are autonomous individuals with the ability to think ahead, plan and then bring about that which they desire in organisations, by developing the requisite competencies and then applying them effectively.

I think that humans are interdependent beings who, through interaction with each other in the context of changeable power differentials, generate population-wide patterns No one is in control of those patterns and no one can influence the patterns except through their own interaction with others, in which changing power differentials play an important part.

The competencies in competency frameworks do not acknowledge the interdependence of human beings and the importance of context. If you are using competency frameworks, it is likely then that you are using the wrong competencies and you should therefore limit the importance you place on such competency frameworks. 

Acknowledgement: This post was stimulated by the thinking of Ralph Stacey in his book Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics.