Every second or third capability plan I am shown is, on inspection, a training calendar with a preface. It lists programmes, dates, audience sizes and a budget. It is signed off, launched with an email from the chief executive, and then quietly stops being used about eighteen months later, usually when the person who commissioned it moves on.
I once watched a well-built leadership pipeline dissolve in four months. The HR head who built it had left for a larger company. The framework sat on the intranet, fully documented, with behavioural anchors at four levels. Nobody had written it into the appraisal form, the promotion criteria or the budget line, because at the time those things belonged to other departments and the conversation was easier to avoid. When the sponsor left, the plan had no owner, no cost centre and no consequence. It was a document, not a system.
The three-I approach is a way of testing whether a plan will survive that moment. Identify, invest, institutionalise. The first two are what most organisations do. The third is what makes the difference, and it is the one that gets skipped.
Identify: capability in observable terms
Identifying a capability is not the same as listing competencies. A list of eleven noble nouns, from “strategic thinking” to “customer centricity”, identifies nothing that two managers could agree on. Identification means describing eight to twelve capabilities in terms of what a person actually does, at each level that matters, with enough specificity that two trained raters looking at the same person reach the same conclusion.
The test is simple. Take one capability and one employee. Ask two managers who know the employee to place them on the scale independently. If their answers differ by more than one level, the description is not yet usable, however elegant the wording. This is the discipline that makes competency mapping worth doing; a framework that cannot be rated is a poster.
The descriptions also have to be short enough to be remembered. An anchor sentence that runs to four lines will be paraphrased differently by every manager who uses it, and the framework quietly becomes a matter of opinion again.
It also has to connect to something the business already worries about. A capability called “managing change” will not survive a budget review. A capability described as “runs a shift handover that the next shift can act on without calling anyone” will, because the plant head can see what breaks when it is missing.
Invest: money where the gap is, not where the enthusiasm is
Investment decisions are usually made on enthusiasm. A senior leader has read something, or attended a programme, and the budget follows. The three-I version starts from assessed gaps and works outwards.
- Assess before you buy. Measure the target population against the anchors first. Without that baseline, nobody can say afterwards whether the spend achieved anything.
- Spend heavily on the few. Ten to fifteen people in a critical role usually justify coaching and stretch assignments. Two hundred people justify a well-designed programme, not individual coaching.
- Protect the time, not just the fee. The fee is visible and the time is not, which is why programmes fail on attendance rather than content.
- Fund the follow-up separately. If the follow-up has to come out of the same line as delivery, it is the first thing cut when the quarter tightens.
Institutionalise: attach it to what outlives you
This is the part that decides whether the plan survives a change of leadership. Institutionalising means making the capability part of the machinery that runs whether or not anyone is enthusiastic about it.
| What you attach it to | What it looks like | Who can undo it |
|---|---|---|
| Appraisal form | Two capability ratings per cycle, with evidence | HR head, unilaterally |
| Promotion criteria | Level 3 evidence required before promotion to manager | Promotion committee |
| Budget | Named line item, three-year horizon | Finance head at annual plan |
| Succession | Named successors assessed against the anchors | Chief executive |
| Induction | New managers taught the anchors in week one | L&D manager |
The row that matters most in practice is promotion. If people are promoted without evidence against the anchors, everyone learns within one cycle that the framework is decorative, and no amount of communication will undo that lesson. If promotion genuinely requires it, the framework teaches itself.
A capability plan that depends on the person who commissioned it is not a plan. It is a preference.
The change-of-leadership test
Before signing off any capability plan, run this test on paper. Imagine the sponsor leaves on Friday and the replacement arrives in six weeks with a different background and no attachment to the work. Then answer three questions.
- What will the new person be required to do by a process that already exists?
- What will they be measured on that cannot be met without the framework?
- What will they find in their first week that tells them this is how things are done here?
If the answers are “nothing”, “nothing” and “a document on the intranet”, the plan is one resignation away from being abandoned. That is uncomfortable to hear in a steering committee, and much cheaper to hear then than eighteen months later.
The one-page version
Write the plan on one page with three columns: the capability, the current assessed level for the target group, and the artefact that will hold it. Then add two names per row, one from HR and one from the business, plus the date of the first promotion decision that will use the anchors. Anything that cannot fit on that page is not yet a plan.
We use this structure when designing capability frameworks with clients, mainly because the one-page constraint forces the institutionalisation conversation early, while it is still cheap. The same logic sits behind competency mapping in practice, which is worth reading before the framework is written rather than after.