If you haven’t re-examined your talent strategy within the last three years, chances are that it’s out of alignment with your business realities.

Today’s organizations face challenges that were unimaginable even a few years ago.

If approached from a strategic perspective, you have an opportunity to make talent management an integral part of the way your organization prepares for its next biggest challenge. Ask yourself:

• Do my employees have the skills needed to achieve the organization’s key objectives?
• Is there a plan in place to identify and address workforce vulnerabilities?
• Are there strategies in place to help employees at all levels navigate complexity?
• Does our organization support and recognize innovation?

If you answered no to any of these questions, now is a good time to learn how using a competency-based approach to talent management can help you achieve business success. Let’s take a look at how incorporating some simple competency-based tactics can help address each of these issues.

Alignment of employee skills
Let’s say your organization operates in an industry where new, disruptive technologies are released on a regular basis, forcing your organization to respond quickly to remain competitive.

From a talent perspective, this means that you will need your employees to be highly adaptable in order to respond quickly to shifting opportunities and risks, and modify their behavior to perform effectively amidst continuous change.

This is an example of how a specific competency, in this case Adaptability, could be given higher importance when looking at the kind of skills to hire for or to develop. Incorporating this competency as a Core Competency is a simple, yet effective way to communicate its importance across the organization.

Addressing workforce vulnerabilities
There are many situations that can put your workforce in a vulnerable position. An example of this is the rapidly changing demographics facing many North American organizations.

With the aging leadership cohort, baby-boomers are retiring, leaving big gaps in many organization’s leader cadre. Without proper systems in place to identify leadership potential among the younger generation, or identify specific skills sets that may be close to exiting the organization, companies are putting themselves at increased risk.

Incorporating competency-based assessments is an effective way to identify the employees that possess the key behaviors that will make them successful leaders, or possess those at-risk skills.

Navigating complexity
Today’s business environment can be a complicated and sometimes confusing space. Making sure that your employees have the competencies needed to navigate complex situations, like Strategic Thinking or Resilience, can not only mitigate risk for the organization, but reduce stress for the employees.

Make sure that these competencies are reflected on each employees’ competency profiles and that all employees have access to their profile so they understand the importance of embodying those behaviors.

Nurturing Innovation
Proving your employees with a work environment that in conducive to being innovative often is driven from a strong leadership team that empowers employees at all levels to think outside the box.

Making sure that all leaders within the organization understand the importance of encouraging their teams to think beyond the conventional, and promoting a culture of innovation can be done through giving prominence to a competency like Nurturing Innovation on your leadership profiles.

As you can see, there are some fairly easy ways you can effect real change within your organization by using competencies. What can be difficult is communicating this to your employees and making sure that everyone is aware of what is expected of them and how embodying these behaviors will impact the overall success of your business.

If you’re looking to lead your business towards a new age of success, contact us today!