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Assessment

'Kiddy's competency design work and talent management consulting really impressed me. Kiddy was first and foremost a business consultancy - but one with significant HR expertise.'

Noel Hadden
Global Head of Learning and Development, Deutsche Bank

Competency Design

Our approach to designing competency frameworks is unique in two ways. Firstly, we believe that defining only the required behaviours is inadequate and that defining the necessary deliverables is essential in today’s business world. Secondly, anything that appears generic will be largely ignored by busy senior people. Consequently, we do not pick competencies from a library of existing ones. Every competency, and its descriptors, are specific to your organisation.
 

Our competencies and their definitions

  1. User-friendly - short, concise and easy to understand
  2. Client-specific - not generic; captures the essence of the client as distinct from other organisations and even other parts of that organisation
  3. Differentiates - clearly delineates between levels for each competency
  4. Objective - balances behaviours and deliverables so that using it to rate and measure people is less difficult and subjective
  5. Future-looking - describes the skill set necessary for success now but also in the future
  6. Stretching - challenging at each level
  7. Comprehensive - covers all the key behaviours and deliverables necessary for success
  8. Independent - limited overlap between competencies so they can be used to rate people
  9. Intuitive - indicators reflect their competency headings/labels; seem to ‘make sense’

 

Visa

We worked with Visa Europe to develop a competency framework for its top 50 people. Focusing on the challenges and demands that the organisation is likely to face in the future, we conducted one-to-one interviews at all management levels. This allowed us to develop a comprehensive understanding of the outputs, behaviours and competencies that the organisation will need to achieve its strategy.

Following a detailed analysis of the results from this phase of the project, we developed a competency framework that was intuitive, comprehensive, discriminated between the different leadership levels as objectively as possible, and was specific to Visa Europe. Following this, we were asked to develop competency frameworks for every level across Visa Europe. These frameworks are now being used for selection, performance management and development.

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