Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:07 Hey, today I have something really fun I want to talk about. It's the issue of skills, capabilities, and competencies. I want to help sort that out for everybody. And then I want to introduce you to something we've been working on for about two years here called the HR Global Capability Project, which is really exciting. So first of all, as virtually everybody in HR knows, and a lot of business people, there's been a huge discussion of upskilling, re-skilling and future skilling going on for a decade or more, driven by digital transformation, economic transformation, service economy and so forth. And many, many tools and vendors and content providers have built content and programs around skills. And so the word skills has become a big deal. So when, when you look at it in a big company, of course there's a lot of skills that you need to be successful.
Speaker 1 00:00:56 You need reading, writing, communication. You need collaboration, leadership, teamwork. You need time management. You need industry information and skills about the industry, the products, the pricing, the domain you live in, then work in, I mean, it's just a lot of stuff. And in the old world, going back 20 or more years, we used to build what were called competency models. And a competency model was really kind of framed around the old industrial model of work where a job had a box around it. And you could say, in order to do this job, you have to know these things. And so if your job is to nail nails in the railroad tie, you have to be able to lift the hammer, lift the tie, place it correctly, hammer it, hammer it hard enough to get it all the way down and avoid hurting yourself. So you could build a competency model around nailing railroad ties.
Speaker 1 00:01:48 And that's what happened. And when I got into hr, that's what people were doing. They were building very complex, grandiose competency models around jobs. And every job had a set of KSAs. They were called knowledge, skills, and abilities, which turned into a big, big mess. And we had these competency models and then we had proficiencies within the competencies. And then the learning management systems companies tried to build systems that aligned learning towards all the competencies and what learning creates, what proficiency. And it never really worked. I mean, it sounded good on paper and it was a great thing for consultants, but it was too complex. And the reason it was very brittle, every time we changed a job architecture or job title, we'd have to redo it. There was never exactly a clear definition of what those competencies were. So anyway, the world moved on and companies got engaged in skills.
Speaker 1 00:02:41 So we have this new world, which is almost the opposite, where learning companies and content companies basically have big, big libraries of skills. Uh, if you go to MZ or LinkedIn, there's 30,000 skills in their database. And a skill is everything from how to do the basics of Excel to creating a pivot table to being a financial analyst. So the problem with the word skill is it has no limit. It can be anything from the most simple thing that you learn in high school to something very complex that takes you a decade to learn. So what we've found in all of our research and all of my experience in HR is that the word is a great word, but it's really difficult to apply. And so what's going on in companies now is something that we discovered in the Josh Bur Academy and the domain of hr, which is a somewhat restricted profession.
Speaker 1 00:03:35 You know, we're not talking about it. We're not talking about sales and marketing and everything else, and finance, we're talking about just hr. If you go and look at all of the job titles in hr, which I have done, and you interview hundreds and hundreds of companies, which I have done, and you look at many, many of the academic competency models, most of which are the same, you realize that there actually are some, some repeatable business capabilities needed to be a great HR person. Change management would be an example of one. Change management is a complex business capability. It requires writing, reading, communications, empathy, teamwork, understanding organizational structures requires a whole bunch of smaller things, but, but it is a clearly well-known, well needed business capability. And we went through a lot of work talking to a lot of companies, and we found out that there are roughly 90 of these capabilities and they fall into about 20 categories.
Speaker 1 00:04:36 So what we've done in HR and I, I give you this as an example, both to learn about what we're doing in HR so that you can use it, but also for your own use, is we now know those capabilities apply because we've had more than 5,000 people go through our capability assessment to assess our capabilities against their own personal capabilities and come up with a database of business capabilities in hr. Now, my language for this in our architecture and what we help companies do is we help them define their business capabilities. You're not gonna get 'em out of a box or a piece of software. The capabilities will create a need for skills. And so the skills, tools, and software will be very helpful in defining what granular skills people need for these capabilities. But you have to decide what the business capabilities are at sap.
Speaker 1 00:05:28 Sales capabilities are different than at adp. I mean, I know this cuz actually my son and daughter-in-law work for those two companies and I know how different their jobs are, even though they're both in sales. So, so we have to go through a strategic process of determining what these capabilities are and then use them to select advance progress and develop people using training, mentoring, job assignments, experiences, external rotations, internal rotations, and all sorts of other tool simulations, a stretch assignments and so forth. So that's kind of the high level story. And we have a methodology for doing this. We have helped some of the world's biggest companies go through this. So if this is of interest to you, please contact us and we'll absolutely help you do this for your company. Now let's talk about hr. What we're introducing this week is something we call the Global HR Capability Project.
Speaker 1 00:06:22 And as I've told many of you in the past, I had the experience of going to a lot of HR people with our academy and them saying to me, what's the competency model? And I kind of, you know, hammed and Hodden didn't really have anything and we came up with this. And so what we've basically done is we've developed 90 business capabilities. They will be updated regularly once a year, and a set of tools for you to assess your capabilities as an HR professional, your capabilities as an HR team or HR function, and do a whole bunch of exciting things. You can go through our HR capability assessment, which takes about 15 minutes and immediately get a capability profile of how your capabilities compare to other people in your tenure, role level or company size. You can then use our capability accelerators, which are carefully designed learning journeys that include learning collaborative experiences and job assignments to help you build those capabilities.
Speaker 1 00:07:24 You can join our academy and meet people who, who are mentors and peers to help you with your capabilities. We can do what we call enterprise capability audits. We've done this for about 40 companies where we can go through your HR function and look at the capabilities within and across your HR team. And it tells you some fascinating things. You'll find out that uh, you have wide variations within one given job class and within different geographies and within different business units. And it gives you tremendous insights in how to better manage your HR team and how to better develop and improve your HR team. And then of course, uh, you can benchmark yourself against other companies with the Enterprise Capability Audit because it will show you where your capabilities are or low relative to other companies in your industry or other companies of similar size.
Speaker 1 00:08:14 Now, this is an incredibly powerful thing we've done. It wasn't easy, and I don't think I would've been capable of doing this if I didn't spend the last 25 years as an analyst in hr, but we think it's a groundbreaking solution for the profession. It can be used for many, many things. First obviously for benchmarking and assessment, to see where you're strong in your weak. Second, you can see what emerging capabilities are growing and in demand in your company and invest in them. Third, it will help any one of you as individuals or professionals develop your professional skills and improve your company's capabilities in hr. And finally, as we open it up to more people, which will happen over the next year, it will help you find a job. It will help you find developmental assignments, it will help you find a mentor and all sorts of other exciting things.
Speaker 1 00:09:06 Let me add one more point. We call it the Global HR Capability Project because it is a project and it is a never ending project. Every year we're going to be updating the capability model. Every year we'll be updating the capability assessment. The benchmark data will grow rapidly. I anticipate that by the end of 2021, we should have several hundred thousand people in there, maybe more like half a million. And you'll be able to identify the future needs of you and your company and your HR department. Now we're only doing this in HR and that's big enough for us and we have lots of activity going on to do this, and we have lots of insights and research to help us with the process. The next thing for you, of course, is to do this for your company. Do it for your sales organization. Do it for your product organization, do it for your marketing organization.
Speaker 1 00:10:00 Do it for the most strategic parts of your company, and we'll show you how to do that. And one of the fundamental principles underneath our model is this idea of what we call a full stack HR professional full stack, taken and borrowed from Full Stack engineering where engineers can learn about the hardware, the operating system, the middleware, the application, the front end, the mobile interface, the html, the graphic design from very bottom to top. We have exactly the same thing in hr. There are HR practices to learn. There are business and industry skills to learn. There are leadership and management skills to learn. There are vendors and technologies and data skills to learn. And then there, of course, there are skills in the function and operations and strategic leadership of the HR profession. And what we're doing in our capability model is helping you as an individual and your team develop these entire full stack skills.
Speaker 1 00:11:02 And the reason we need full stack skills is because HR is becoming a highly innovative profession. If there's anything we learned from the pandemic, it's how rapidly changing talent practices and people practices have been. And in order for you to be creative and understand the intersection between the different pieces, you have to be pretty cross-trained and pretty horizontal in your aware awareness and knowledge. Now, we all still have what we call T-shaped careers where we're deep in some areas and horizontal in other areas. And the capability project will help you with both. You can go through capability accelerators in the areas that you're deep and you really wanna specialized. And then you can browse the capability model and other capability development tools in the horizontal adjacent areas where you're weak and you can compare yourself against others in the horizontal adjacent areas and say, see, you know, I need to know more about D E I.
Speaker 1 00:11:59 For example, we did discover, by the way that D E I is one of the lowest rated or capabilities in hr. And that's a big opportunity because right now it's really an issue for everybody in the company at all levels, in every part of hr. And using our model, you can immediately broaden your awareness of D E I and become a specialist if you decide, or at least a, a deep generalist as we call it in that domain, in analytics or whatever area you might be interested in, recruiting, sourcing, whatever that is. A little bit of an overview that is about the general issue of business capabilities and the Josh Buren Academy Global HR Capability project. We are really excited about bringing this to you all. Josh Bur Academy members will automatically have access to the capability model and assessment. If your team or company is interested in doing an enterprise audit, please let us know. We'll do an enterprise audit for you, and we look forward to your input and feedback and continued collaboration. For those of you that are in the academy, there's a whole channel dedicated to this for you to talk about it. And we will be continuously talking about what's coming next and asking for your input. Thank you all very much and look forward to hearing from you on this really exciting, important project.
