How many people have you interacted with today and thought - there's a person right on top of the game and pleasant to boot?
How many 'moments of truth' have failed on expectation?
Has service come up to scratch? Has the last colleague or internal department interaction been good, perhaps even exceptional?
What about competency? Look around how many work colleagues do you know who you would describe as very competent at what they do? If you're unsure try the acid test. Say you were setting up your own business - would you offer them a job or a directorship or neither? Where would others judge you?..............
Yes - the answer may surprise us. As much as we talk about talent - the real issue for many on the front-line is competency. Day in and day out.
What would say on average 20% of people, 50%, 80%?
How many managers have the threshold competency to manage people. Reading the press you'd be forgiven for thinking that they only exist on Mars........But how many really? 10%, 20% more?
Given all the training, the focus on induction, the selection and psychometric testing, the training, oh and the coaching, and more coaching, even more coaching, mentoring, more coaching, even some more coaching - why don't we find more job/role competency in greater numbers, particularly at management level.
As a professional in HCM (HR) I'm asking myself what have we been doing in HR for the last 20+ years?
Sure we've majored on work-life balance, equalities, diversity, more equalities and diversity, bit of CSR, lots of functional restructuring, lots of navel gazing, lots of cover-arse.........
What happened to ensuring the right person at the right time with the right skillset with the 'right' performance? Where, as they say, did it all go wrong?
And why do organisations constantly reward average performance or worse? Why do unions never come out and say we've got some crap-performing people in our ranks that need sorting?
Yes - why indeed?
Just what is the problem?
And finally, why do HR professionals polarise between those that are enthused and energised (not necessarily cause based) versus those that well, shall we say, seemed to have missed the party long ago?
Give me some competency management anyday.................(it's a must-have) whereas talent management is in comparison a 'nice-to-have'. Let's not confuse the two..............
