High Potentials Focus Within Full Competency Implementation

 

Case Includes:

Profiling Critical Positions	Distributed Implementation
High Potential Feedback	Intellectual Property License and Derivatives
Organization Capabilities

Situation:

HRBPs determined that the Lominger competency framework would be their choice to bring in and begin aligning the HR programs and practices.

We brought the Organization Capabilities experience to their senior staff. The staff were underwhelmed with the results (some felt they were not as honest as they should have been) but they did sanction the use of the general leadership competency model to be used. They specified the most important critical position to be profiled for success and then wanted the profile to be “used” with the incumbents who were considered the organization’s high potentials. The HR VP would keep them informed of the plan’s progress.

HR staff organized the plan for full competency integration by specialty areas, sequenced by year and foresaw the value of including field practitioners’ involvement, involving them early as stakeholders. The priority work streams became: job profiling, performance management, development by competency needs/ using the LMS and high potential development
They determined that an Intellectual Property license was needed to customize definitions and development remedies for the face validity needed by those who would be impacted by this unprecedented organizational change.

Action:

Great care was taken to identify stakeholder groups who should have attention and make contributions, in other words, those likely to ignore such change. That subset of each stakeholder group was invited to participate on action teams, along with those predictable early adopters. We did approximately one dozen “101” interactive, hands on sessions and the HRBPs—the project manager team— thought these early sessions were the reasons they did not experience rejection at eventual roll-outs.

The HRBPs (at headquarters) however, wanted deep immersion into the scope and depth of the competency framework in order to lead their respective functional teams in how integration of competencies and learning agility would occur.

I was invited to stay closely involved with the high potentials and facilitate how the competency framework and learning agility could be integrated with their on-going services for this talent pool. A separate project plan was created and roles specified.

We did extensive key position profiling for the job senior staff specified, and broadened it to include the pipeline of 3 positions that that fed into it.

The staff became creative in the position profiling, inviting (beyond high performing incumbents) focus groups of their managers, their direct reports, their internal peers and even a cadre of external “supply chain” individuals. They were confident that the resulting profiles was complete from promotion through long service incumbent.

The high potentials were oriented into the competency framework and first asked to predict what competencies they were strong in and which they thought they were not strong in. Next, we created an exercise for them to wade through, which included them defining their “experience history profile”. We debriefed them to connect strengths to the experiences which would have permitted them to learn the competency from these experiences; and, find missing experiences that contributed to their not having these competencies as strengths. And just when they thought it was safe to go back into the water—we asked them to discuss in small groups the “Career Stallers & Stoppers” (aka derailers) for the eye opening phenomenon of others perceiving such negative behavior when in fact such portrayal was far from what they intended.

They were now extremely well prepared to invite raters to give them unfettered 360 feedback. We used the Voices 360.

The HR staff, again, wanted deep understanding of the survey to begin facilitating the feedback and coaching development planning. Voices certification requires the participant to use the 360 process themselves and receive their own feedback session and begin a development plan.

We collaboratively gave feedback to the high potentials, who began a preliminary competency based IDP. However, closely tied to their development planning we oriented the hipo’s to learning agility and they objectively self rated. The results were: they could finalize their competency development plan integrating learning agility actions into the practicing of the new competency behavior they chose to develop.

They achieved a completely separate accomplishment of integrating developmental assignments, customized for their industry and integrated into their LMS.

Surprises:

Everyone was surprised to see how quickly the high potentials grasped and translated competency & learning agility into their background of successes and failures; enriching how they committed to developing leadership competence.

Also, they were ready and willing to “coach upward” and “down” what they had learned.

Conclusion to Share:

The HR staff who will be owners of the upgraded programs such as Employment & Recruiting (plus interviewing); Performance Management; Learning & Development; etc. will be more successful if they request and invest time to learn much more than the bare requirement of the Leadership Architect 101.