The Workforce Capability  Framework

One potential deficiency of this structure is the absence of the dimension of time. While frameworks themselves will naturally evolve, the temporal aspects of Capability Frameworks are rarely, if ever, explicitly modeled. Instead, they are interpreted point-in-time. Presumably, however, if time were modeled as a distinct dimension, it would also be possible to establish an organizational plan, set expectations about career paths' timing and track how the Capabilities Framework has morphed over time.

Applications of Capability Frameworks

In most situations, a Capability Framework is simply published as a document for people to read and apply in their work. However, a Capability Framework can be used more systematically, acting as a bridge between business strategy and its execution and improving a range of pre-existing talent management processes.

"The HR lifecycle can harness capabilities to shape jobs, recruit and select individuals, assess their development needs, manage talent and performance, and link attainment of credentials to more refined reward and benefit systems.” - 2

A well-designed Capability Framework has the potential to transform disconnected and potentially conflicting activities into a more cohesive set of functions.

Improved hiring

In simplistic terms, role definitions can be defined as a combination of capabilities. A Capability Framework can simplify the generation of consistent role descriptions. The result is clear explanations of the qualities necessary to succeed and consistent role leveling. Analysis of this data can help refine recruitment activities and promote more specific targeting of candidates by identifying the ingredients of high performers.

Learning and Development (L&D)

A Capability Framework that underpins business strategy can inform learning and development activities, directing them toward business needs. This makes development initiative design, and investment justification more straightforward. Furthermore, the impact of individual initiatives can be measured, helping refine ongoing L&D activities.  

Career planning

A clear view of the capabilities and proficiency levels required for roles helps with career planning. Employees equipped with an accurate understanding of their capabilities can determine suitable career paths and development needs.

Performance Coaching

Measuring performance often involves measuring outcomes, but it is difficult to quantify individual contribution for complex work that involves many people. In this situation, measurement can focus on concrete behaviours. By expressing clear expectations and targets aligned with business success (via capabilities), performance can be tracked and coached.

Collaboration and Mobility

Enabling a shared enterprise view of capabilities makes it relatively easy to see which individuals possess or are developing capabilities that are in demand or short supply elsewhere. In turn, this opens up short-term collaboration and job rotation opportunities.

Succession Planning

Succession plans often identify a successor for key personnel from amongst their direct reports. However, it is also relatively simple to identify potential successors from the broader organization through lateral movement with a Capability Framework that is linked to its people in place.

Risk Management

Identifying the strength of necessary capabilities may unearth risks to organizational strategy. The inclusion of 'capability' as an element of workforce planning can help reveal capability gaps. This allows the deployment of appropriate capability-building controls such as hiring, learning and development, and succession planning.

Organization Design

How resources are arranged in an organization is often influenced by the implied capabilities of people. Whether an organization adopts a flat or more nested hierarchy, or prefers function-based or multi-disciplinary teams, a Capability Framework mapped to individuals provides the necessary data to help design and test such design.

Challenges 

 Despite the potential benefits arising from the adoption of Capability Frameworks, their use is not without their challenges. Analysis of the academic and popular literature, coupled with discussions with practitioners, have highlighted three significant issues, arising from one root cause:

Underlying the main symptomatic issues that arise when adopting Capability Frameworks is their intrinsic complexity, making their development and ongoing maintenance expensive. Furthermore, this complexity has three main value-limiting implications.

1. If there is a lack of alignment between the defined capabilities and business objectives, the framework will fail to deliver beneficial outcomes. The degree of alignment is hard to gauge and be confident of, given their multi-dimensional nature.

2. A complex framework (often developed as a communication aide) hinders its translation into operational activities. The 'air-gap' between the framework and the processes, relying on people to interpret and apply it correctly and consistently can limit its practical value.

3. A lack of measurement means that it is hard to demonstrate their impact or to continue to tailor them based on evidence gathered over time.

Intrinsic Complexity

The first guiding principle is to ensure that the number of capabilities relevant to any individual is no more than a handful. This is because people cannot develop many capabilities simultaneously and need to focus on those most important. This also ensures a sufficient number of data points to make each capability analyzable with a reasonable degree of rigor. The outcome is a reasonably lean Capability Framework that can be communicated across the enterprise with relative ease on a single (albeit large) page.

“If significantly more than twelve competencies need to be defined to cover the range of jobs in an organisation, it is better to develop separate linked frameworks.” - 12

A final benefit of capping the number of capabilities is that they are more likely to be designed in a more generic and durable form - in which the capability descriptions don't need to be modified over time as tasks, processes, and technologies change. 

The second guiding principle is to ensure that capabilities are defined as behaviors rather than as a set of tasks. For example, rather than describing a capability as "Administer PostgreSQL databases," the capability might better be articulated with behaviors directed toward outcomes - "Proactively monitor and tune database systems for performance, resilience, and security." This small change provides more information about what is expected, a basis upon which the level of proficiency can be assessed and coached, and is likely to be relevant irrespective of the database technology used at any point in time - making it more durable.

"We propose a behavior-centric approach to cultivating capabilities in the workforce…Through the lens of behavioral change, we can break capabilities into specific work-oriented behaviors that can be made relevant and coached.” - 3

An extreme attempt to simplify a Capability Framework while recognizing the diversity of roles is to capture all job-specific skills under a single capability such as 'excellence,' leaving the details to the relevant line manager and staff member to work out. An excellent example is in Spotify's 'Steps' model30, in which 'Mastery' is defined as a top level capability in which the behaviours and levels are described generically (e.g. 'Understand the high-level architecture of the stuff they work on - Designs, documents, and implements reliable, testable and elegant solutions to problems - Actively educates the rest of the Technology Organization in their area of knowledge, and so on.). These are behaviors that are likely to be transferable across all Technology roles.

However, this approach can be overly simplistic and lack the degree of detail needed to guide people, and limit the breadth of applications of the framework. For example, it may be suitable for triggering employee and line manager performance and development discussions, but it excludes the opportunity to make job descriptions more consistent, inform workforce planning issues, to improve recruitment practices, to identify organizational risk, or drive capability uplift programs.

Another approach recommended for large organisations is the establishment of specific Capability Academies for specific business domains (such as sales). 

“The Capability Framework can be developed in a strategic way through the use of… Capability Academies. These are groups of people organized together to come to an agreement on what capabilities we need to thrive.”17

This suggestion is a clue to the huge effort involved in what is a complex task, and is an approach that mid or smaller-sized business could not possibly undertake.

Expressing a Capability Framework at a level of detail that is 'fit for purpose' is an art. The work is manual and typically requires document reviews, workshops, interviews, and numerous discussions before drafting. Because this is time-consuming, Capability Frameworks are usually pitched at a higher level, without a lot of detail. Also, the end output is typically a set of documents or intranet pages designed to build awareness and some templates or forms to capture the outcomes of conversations (such as performance and development discussions). Occasionally, this documentation gets translated into software applications that help identify career pathways18, to help build position descriptions28 to expedite recruitment24 and make them more consistent.

If the task of developing Capability Frameworks were simplified with higher levels of automation without losing its bespoke per-organisation requirement, there would be greater opportunity to build in adequate detail without the penalties that this usually entails along with the space to continue to evolve it.

People Alignment

To be of most value, a Capability Framework needs to be more than a static set of documents19. Rather than simply describing and categorizing capabilities, it should also trace them throughout a business and map them to its people (including whether they exist at all). Doing so unlocks the ability to conduct data-driven strategic workforce planning, design capability uplift programs, and enable personalized performance tracking and coaching. However, the process of aligning people with the framework can be arduous. It requires employees to understand the details of the framework, meet with human resource business partners or managers, agree on capabilities and expected levels of proficiency, and record the results in a way that makes the data analyzable (i.e., not in a document somewhere). Because of the effort involved, this process usually happens infrequently and often in fixed annual cycles. However, in practice, people's roles change more often than this, and the capabilities that require emphasis at a given point in time will reflect the changing priorities of the teams they belong to.

To solve this challenge, capability managers need more efficient processes to discover new capabilities as they emerge. Also, employees need a more straightforward way to streamline their identification with the highest priority capabilities for their roles at any point in time. Further, setting new targets should be relatively easy without triggering more burdensome documentation, which discourages making a record of the change. This extra step undermines any chance of having an accurate alignment between people and the Capability Framework. Making it is as simple as holding a discussion means that capabilities, expectations, and goals could flex as needed while having an up-to-date picture of the organization.

Lacking Alignment with Business Objectives

Unclear Purpose

Generally speaking, management frameworks can be nebulous and lack practical application, and Capability Frameworks are no different. A lack of clear intent about what a framework is for can compromise its design and diminish its value.

"The major reason for failure is that competence frameworks are developed and implemented with no clear business purpose in mind. Without a business purpose, there is no objective on which to base design decisions as the framework is built. The resultant design is usually flawed, serving too many masters and is discontinued after a year or two of use." - 19

Integrated with Planning

Another potential cause of a Capability Framework failure is that it may not articulate the necessary capabilities to support business strategy. Decisions to include or exclude a set of capabilities without anchoring them in business planning will likely result in a lack of alignment. In this instance, no matter how well the framework is applied, it is unlikely to help achieve business goals and may unintentionally run counter to them. This makes the wholesale adoption of externally developed frameworks risky, but understandable as many organizations lack clarity about what capabilities they actually need.

“45% (of business leaders) say that they don't have a clear plan of which capabilities need building” - 16

Knowing which capabilities are needed is not a trivial exercise. Integrating capability and business planning aims to narrow the perceived and actual capability requirements gap. Business leaders are often adept at identifying what their business needs to achieve and the macro-level approach to doing so. However, rendering this as a set of workforce capabilities is more complicated, often requiring broad consultation and analysis. Because of the associated time impost and the crowded workday, it is usually more expedient to build capability in an ad-hoc manner. Without an over-arching Capability Framework, recruitment, role transition, and staff development decisions often fall to line managers with separate business cases. This can entrench existing capabilities rather than transform them.

“Agencies (and businesses) should give priority to the integration of people and business planning. Line managers and HR managers need to work together to adopt more creative, innovative and targeted solutions…… so that individual line managers do not continually 're-invent the wheel' or try to 'muddle through.” - 20

This difficulty is reflected in employee perceptions of how well executives can link strategy with capability building.

“Thirty-seven percent of respondents say their executives link learning priorities to business outcomes, while 61 percent say that they should. And 40 percent say that senior leaders create opportunities for employees to apply new skills, versus 58 percent who say that they should.”16

"(Higher performing organisations) align and integrate their learning and development initiatives with corporate and business planning…” - 20

One novel approach to identifying capability needs is mapping capabilities to the services that relatively simple businesses deliver (e.g., products22 or data23). However, for complex enterprises, this may not be so simple. 

More creative and innovative solutions are needed to increase the efficiency of integrated business and capability planning20. Greater efficiency may overcome the cost and time involved in running a cascading series of workshops, interviews, document reviews, and edit processes. For example, using conversational chat channels and machine learning algorithms to help distill and validate opinions can be highly efficient27. As a side benefit of this improvement, capability planning can become continuous rather than a once-off set-and-forget exercise.

Building Confidence

The adoption and use of a Capability Framework depends on the workforce being confident that it represents a fair and accurate recipe for success. Any sense that it is disconnected from reality by being abstract, convoluted, or glossing over necessary detail will create a barrier to adoption.

“For a framework to be successful, not only do managers need to believe that business performance will improve, but employees also need to believe that the framework, especially the measurement of competence, is fair and transparent.” - 19

One way to start building confidence is by leveraging a pre-existing and proven Capability Framework. Other businesses and professional bodies have invested substantial work in their creation. So it makes sense to re-use them and tailor them to an organization's particular context. The downside of this approach is that the patchwork of available Capability Frameworks is dotted with different formats and collections of capabilities described at various depths. This situation makes it hard to 'pick-and-choose' from them, and It is often easier to start with a clean slate.

An alternative starting point is to crowdsource input regarding which capabilities are needed to support the business from subject matter experts and staff more broadly. Inverting the approach so that it is bottom-up enables explicit connections between capability and strategy to be drawn, helping managers and individual workers to see its validity19. However, for this to work, staff must understand the strategy well, and a mechanism to collect and synthesize these opinions efficiently is needed.

Wherever an organization chooses to start, the Capability Framework needs to be understandable to the executive, managers, and individual workers to reach a sufficient level of confidence. Maintaining confidence may require continued iteration based on its use, feedback, and impact.

Operational Translation

Rooted in strategic planning, the identification of a capability gap naturally leads to a discussion about how to fill it.

“much of the capability architecture work will fall into strategic planning. If you identify a massive skills gap… you’ll be asked to consider should we buy, build, or acquire these skills?” - 17

In fact executives see a range of strategies designed to help solve their capability challenges, and COVID-19 has seen businesses increase their emphasis on building them.

“Anticipated actions to close (capability) gaps (by executives) - 53% skills building - contracting only 6% - redeploy 20% - hiring 20%.” - 16

A Capability Framework can generate insight and integrate the full range of people- management processes to help grow capability4. Yet, despite this widespread acknowledgment, exactly how one goes about translating a Capability Framework into operational activities is unclear, with ‘How-to guides’ remaining relatively silent on the subject4,25,26. Further guidance on how to do so is warranted.

Capability Development 

Learning is a vital element of building capability as it provides the raw potential for skills improvement, but by itself, it does not necessarily translate to capability uplift. As a stand-alone activity, learning runs the risk of improving employee resumes without business benefits, only to find that employees have taken a role elsewhere. Attaining new competencies is necessary, but ensuring that investment is directed in a beneficial direction (outlined in the Capability Framework) and embedded in practice at work is essential.

“Building skills and competencies is essential, but the key is helping employees become more capable in their work. Competencies and skills are necessary for employee training, but the real impact and value of training is what the employee does with them.” - 6

“I advise you not to get too excited about the 20,000+ skills that appear when you turn on your LXP or skills-based system. This is essentially a word cloud…The solution to this is to add a ‘capability framework’ on top of your skills” - 17

Currently, there is a learning trend away from 'sheep-dip' training which is often ineffective and forgotten toward 'micro-learning,' where people are delivered bite-sized information in the flow of work to reinforce acquired skills and knowledge. It is a technique designed to help people remember what can be easily forgotten and squeeze extra learning into the day. Conceptually this trend is well aligned with coaching individuals, reminding them of lessons learned, offering opportunities to reflect, and measuring progress. A Capability Framework expressed in a behavior-centric way is inherently coachable, trainable, and measurable. Coupled with opportunities to apply these lessons and continuous measurement with feedback by self, peers, and managers, coaching can transform skills and knowledge into capabilities.

“just ‘developing skills’ does not make your company perform better. It’s how people use these skills that matters.”17 ”And even if they (intelligent learning systems) worked perfectly, all they’d do is recommend the ‘perfect training’ for every employee at a given time. But would they build capabilities?  Likely not. It’s the experience, exposure, coaching, and feedback that help people grow.”21

Capability acquisition

Hiring people with new capabilities can provide an immediate and enduring impact and is seen as the second-highest priority capability-closing gap by executives6. A review of the bench-strength of all capabilities can highlight gaps that need filling, and performance analysis can reveal the combinations of capabilities that make individuals high performers. These insights can encourage more targeted hiring practices. The same concepts apply for contracting, with the difference being whether a capability is needed in an ongoing way or not.

Mobility and Transition

Providing employees with opportunities to develop (with more or new responsibilities) is also crucial in turning learning into capability. Identifying opportunities requires a simultaneous understanding of the potential for people to play a different role, the presence of a suitable capability gap (if any), and whether there is resource capacity for them to do so.

To support this range of capability-building activities, a Capability Framework needs its data to be analyzable in a flexible manner and continuously updated rather than 'locked-up' in documents and spreadsheets and updated infrequently.

Measurement

One element limiting the perceived value of Capability Frameworks is that their impact is not often directly visible. This fact means that they risk being perceived as 'soft' and evaluated on a purely subjective and often preconceived basis. In this situation a fruitful Capability Building program could be abandoned on a whim,.

“There is a lack of supporting management information and performance measures. Where performance indicators do exist they are, in general, measures of activity rather than effectiveness. As a consequence, agencies are not evaluating learning and development strategies, in part because of the lack of appropriate performance targets and data.” - 20

One can evaluate the impact of capability-building activities in several ways. Most suggestions are qualitative in nature and revolve around the aggregation of person-level capabilities, including surveys, self-assessments, manager assessments, 360-degree feedback, and interviews 20. These go beyond the simple measurement of learning activities and work progress by focussing on the change in the level of capability at work. When Capability Frameworks are expressed as observable behaviors, descriptions of those behaviors can provide the basis for such measurement. 

“The framework should consist of 'behavioural' indicators beneath competency headings which should be observable and therefore measurable.” - 4

Re-using them saves work, but more importantly, because they were developed to support the business strategy, their measurement can act as a lead indicator for business success (or at least that portion of success that is within the organization’s control). Data collected continuously from it can provide insight such as:

1. Longitudinal evaluation of capability to determine the usefulness of learning programs

2. Aggregation of capabilities by teams, divisions, locations, or functions to identify relative strengths and weaknesses to inform capability development plans

3. Visualization of the organizational structure and social graph to locate pockets of expertise

4. Identification of hot-spots of capability improvement or degradation and linkages with managers and leaders

5. Impact analysis of structural changes, events, training, new benefits, policy updates, market dynamics, recruitment approaches, or any significant event

6. Personal growth opportunities for workers and progress toward goals leading to increased motivation and engagement

7. Design of personalized development plans and automated recommendation of coaching activities

An occasional survey is unlikely to be an effective way of measuring impact or creating such insight. This is especially the case if the survey is retrospective in nature or seeks feedback directly about the framework itself rather than the observable behaviors it was meant to shape. Instead, new data gathering approaches that intelligently allow instantaneous and personalized feedback from those in the best position to observe behavior will be needed. This kind of measurement will be necessary to measure capability change, and coupled with business performance measurements, the impact of Capability Frameworks and provide the evidence needed to evolve them.

The Capability Challenge

How does an organization achieve alignment between what it is and what it needs to be? From the preceding discussion, the Capability Challenge can be formulated as the challenge of narrowing three inter-dependent gaps (figure 5). For any gap to be fully closed, the others must be simultaneously closed, and therefore any investment in organizational capability needs to be balanced. These gaps are between:

1. the capabilities that an organization actually needs and what it thinks it needs. A large “Focus Gap” can result in a business investing in the wrong capabilities to achieve its goals, as may be the case if it blindly invests in development programs that do not support its corporate strategy. The narrower the focus gap, the better targeted investment in development can be.

2. the capabilities an organization thinks it needs and the capability that it has. This “Development Gap” can mean that a business knows exactly what capabilities it needs but it lacks them, with efforts to build capability failing. The narrower this gap, the more aligned the workforce's skills, knowledge, and experience is with what it is trying to accomplish.

3. the capabilities an organization has and what it actually needs. This “Understanding Gap” is filled with data that links business performance with capability building initiatives, requiring an understanding what capabilities it needs to fulfill its mission and how those capabilities are best built.

The ultimate goal of the Capability Challenge is to reduce each gap in order to shrink the ‘Capability Bermuda Triangle’ until it collapses to a single fully-aligned point. At this theoretical stage there is no difference between what capabilities an organization has and needs. 

Figure 5 The Capability Building Challenge The size of the triangle represents the relative size of the capability challenge faced by organizations. Narrowing capability gaps reduces the overall size of the triangle, with the end goal being its collapse to a single point of alignment .

 Disruption Looms Large

Capability Building is an assortment of processes, practices, guidelines, and technologies. The field of learning has been disrupted with technological advances, and a suite of platforms are available to simplify the distribution and tracking of engaging content in an elegant way. It is, however, a stand-alone activity that is disconnected from other elements of capability building, and at best narrows one of the three types of capability gap. Likewise, technology systems that produce high trust are changing credential management. In contrast, the design and use of Capability Frameworks is essentially a technology-free zone, reliant on manual processes operating within a document publication paradigm. Positive results have been achieved this way, but the cost, complexity, and form have artificially capped the benefits attained. These limitations are most apparent when it comes to shaping and integrating operational activities in the employee lifecycle, such as learning and performance coaching. 

Capability Frameworks have converged to a relatively standard structure and a significant degree of guidance and examples available from the community at large. However, they remain incredibly complex, and can fail to; support business strategy, translate into operational action, or be evidence-based. While a number of the ancillary talent management processes have been transformed, the Capability Framework is yet to be tackled in any significant way, however the issues identified with them are ripe for disruption.