Collaborate with employees to make your competency-based systems stronger

With a significant increase in the use of competencies to help organizations manage their human resources, it is important to ask the questions: Are competency-based systems working as well as they could? What could organizations do differently with these systems to help reach the goal of improving competency levels faster and more efficiently? The use of competencies to help manage human resources is increasing dramatically. Typically, consultants identify competencies by studying highly successful performers, and looking for the underlying characteristics, knowledge, skills, and abilities required to differentiate them as "superior." Some of the most widely used competencies are impact and influence, achievement/results orientation, initiative, customer-service orientation, interpersonal understanding, and organizational awareness. Competencies may be significantly different from organization to organization based on the organization's culture of a division's or facility's mission. Collaborating with employees to make competency-based systems stronger and more effective simply makes sense.