Identifying skill development areas like potential skills, core skills, target skills are all central to performance management

As an individual, I want to improve my own performance. As a leader, I want my teams to uncover then fulfill their potential. To me, this seems to be at the heart of performance management.

Recently Claude Werder shared some of his ideas on the future of performance management. See his article Reinventing Performance Management in Training Magazine. After looking at the shortcomings of current approaches to performance management, he sets out the goals for an approach that will actually impact business goals.

In Claude’s words, “the transformation of performance management depends on managers’ abilities to:

• Coach their employees.

• Provide helpful in-the-moment feedback.

• Set performance goals that benefit both the employee and the business.

• Give frequent performance-based recognition for good work.

• Offer learning and development opportunities related to performance goals.”

Skill insights are central to this transformation. To effectively coach people one needs to understand what skills they have and how they are applying them to their work. One needs to go beyond this and understand the person’s core skills (the skills that are central to their work) and their target skills (the skills they want to develop. Here are my core skills.

And here are my target skills.

The people I work with can go to my skill profile and see these at any time. They will soon be able to recommend learning resources and professional development experiences for me. And we are planning to enable conversations and communities of practice around specific skills.

Real performance management is not primarily about manager-reportee relationships. In today’s team-based work environment, it is the people we work with who have the most insight into our own skills. We encourage this by inviting people to suggest skills to their colleagues and then participate in rating their skills. This happens in the context of jobs and project teams so that skills and rankings are connected to actual work and not just picked from an abstract list outside of the context of work.

Sometimes organizations need to put more structure around the performance management process. This is one place that competency models come in. A competency model is a structured description of how Jobs, Roles, Behaviors, Skills and even Values are connected. People can use competency models to match their current skills to what the organization expects, look for the skill gaps, and then use various learning resources to close the gaps. A competency model can also help people understand what roles they are suited for, or what new skills they need to add to move into the roles they aspire to. Competency models combine with skill profiles to enable real performance management.

Claude concludes his article with “Time is running out. The time to act is now. In the next decade, work will be transformed. Employees will need to acquire skills and competencies for job roles that don’t even exist now. While that will involve a lot of learning and training, the transformation of competencies and skills tied to business goals will require a close partnership between managers and employees. They must work together through agile goal setting, mutual feedback, and coaching and mentoring to learn and adapt to the fast-evolving needs of the business.”

The most powerful use of competency models is not really to describe skills and performance in the present state. It is to provide a guide to the future. In work that we did last year on emergent skills in pricing, we were able to detect the first signs of a new role in pricing. The pricing designer. We are now including this in both the Open Competency Model for Pricing Expertise and in custom competency models we are developing with our customers.