Competency mapping: where most pharmaceutical organizations get it wrong

Most pharmaceutical organizations have a competency framework. Rather fewer can describe a decision it changed.

Three failure patterns

Frameworks fail in fairly predictable ways, and usually in one of three.

• Written in adjectives. “Strategic thinker”, “results-oriented”, “strong communicator”. These cannot be observed, so they cannot be assessed consistently, so assessment becomes an opinion with a form attached to it.
• Borrowed wholesale. A framework imported from another industry, or a global template applied unchanged to a local market, describes a role nobody in the organization actually performs. People recognize this immediately and quietly disregard it.
• Built and shelved. The framework exists, is technically sound, and is connected to no consequential decision. It therefore has no authority, and within two years nobody can find the current version.

What a usable competency looks like

A competency is usable when two trained observers watching the same person would score it the same way. That is a demanding test and it rules out most of what gets written.

Meeting it requires behavioural description at the level of what someone actually does. “Strong communicator” fails. “Checks understanding before moving to the next point, and adapts the explanation when the customer signals confusion” passes. The second is longer, less elegant, and far more useful, because it can be observed, coached and evidenced.

A good working discipline is to ask, for every competency written: what would I see or hear that tells me this is present? If the answer is vague, the competency is not finished.

Map the role that exists, not the role described

Competency mapping should start with observation of high performers in your organization, in your therapeutic areas, under your commercial conditions. It should not start with a list of desirable attributes generated in a workshop.

The purpose is to describe the difference between good and excellent performance as it occurs here. That difference is frequently not what the job description says, and is often surprising: the distinguishing behaviour turns out to be preparation quality, or willingness to ask an uncomfortable question, rather than any of the qualities the organization believed it was selecting for.

This is also what makes a framework credible internally. When people recognize their own best colleagues in the descriptions, the framework carries authority. When they do not, it reads as head-office theory.

Keep it small enough to use

A framework with twenty competencies, each with five proficiency levels, is a research instrument rather than a management tool. Nobody can hold it in mind during a field visit, so nobody uses it during one.

Six to eight competencies with three levels is usually sufficient to differentiate performance and simple enough that a manager can actually apply it without a document open. If a competency has never once been the deciding factor in an assessment, it is decoration and should be removed.

Building one that survives

A framework that lasts tends to be built in a particular order, and the order matters more than the technique.

• Start with performance data, not opinion. Identify who is genuinely performing well over a sustained period, rather than who is currently visible.
• Observe them working. Field visits, call recordings where available, business reviews. The aim is to see what they do differently, which is often not what they say they do.
• Interview for contrast. Compare high and average performers on the same situations. Differences that appear consistently are competencies; differences that appear once are personality.
• Write behaviourally and test for agreement. Two people should score the same evidence the same way. If they cannot, the wording is not finished.
• Pilot on a real decision before publishing. Use it for one round of interviews or one readiness assessment, then revise it.

This takes weeks rather than days, which is why many organizations buy a framework instead. A purchased framework is faster and describes somebody else. The difference becomes apparent the first time a manager tries to use it to justify a decision to the person affected by it.

Connect it to a decision

A framework earns its keep when it is wired into something consequential: structured interviews, readiness assessment before promotion, or the development plan that follows a performance review.

Until it changes a decision, it is documentation. The test is simple, and worth applying annually: ask when the framework last caused a different outcome than would otherwise have occurred. If nobody present can answer, the framework is not being used, whatever its technical quality.

The organizations that get value from competency work are rarely the ones with the most sophisticated framework. They are the ones whose framework is small, behavioural, recognizable, and attached to decisions that people care about.

One further discipline is worth adopting: review the framework annually against actual promotion and hiring outcomes. If the people it identified as strong have gone on to perform, it is working. If they have not, the framework is describing something other than performance in your organization, and no amount of refinement to the wording will correct that. The evidence for whether a competency model is right sits in the careers of the people it was used on, and it takes a year or two to arrive.