A plant HR head sends across a framework of sixty-one competencies. It is bound, colour coded and prefaced by the managing director. We ask which decision it changed in the previous quarter. He says the appraisal form now has a section for it, then admits that managers fill in that section from memory in the last week of March.
The document is not badly written. The behaviours are sensible and the language is careful. What is missing is the mapping: a stated link between what a role has to produce, the situations it meets every week, and the few behaviours that decide whether those situations go well. Without that link, a framework is a description of a good employee, and every manager already carries one of those around.
Mapping is a join, not a list
Mapping joins three things: the outputs a role is accountable for, the situations it meets repeatedly, and the behaviours that predict a good outcome in those situations. Levels, clusters and weightings exist only to make that join usable when four hundred people are in scope.
Most frameworks are built backwards. Someone starts with a list of values, or a competitor’s competency set, or last year’s engagement survey, and then looks for something in the business to attach it to. Built that way, the framework describes an ideal candidate. Built from the work, it describes the job.
A test costs nothing. Take one competency and ask three strong performers in the role to describe a recent week in which they used it. If they describe three different things, the competency is too abstract to assess, and no workshop on how to use the framework will repair it. If they describe the same moment, you have found an anchor worth writing down.
There is a version of this that is harder to argue with: the borrowed framework. A group lifts a competency set from a larger competitor, or from a sector body, and adopts it wholesale. The behaviours are usually fine in themselves. The problem is that nobody in the room has watched them being done here, so nobody can defend them when a manager asks why this behaviour and not another. The first serious challenge kills the framework, and the challenge always comes.
Building one people will use
- Write the outputs first, with the function head rather than with HR. “Closes the month within four working days” is an output. “Financial acumen” is not.
- Collect situations, not adjectives. Ask for the six or seven moments in the month where a strong performer and a weak one visibly diverge.
- Write the behaviour as something a manager has seen. “Tells the client the date has slipped before the client discovers it” can be observed on a Friday afternoon.
- Test the draft on real people. Eight managers, three employees each, then a discussion of the two cases where they disagree.
- Wire it into two decisions before you publish it. A framework that goes live before it is used anywhere goes live as a document.
| Stage | The question it answers | What you keep |
|---|---|---|
| Role outputs | What must this role produce that someone would pay for? | One page per role family, written with the function head |
| Recurring situations | Which moments in the month decide whether the output lands? | Six to ten situations, in the role’s own language |
| Behaviours | What does a strong performer do differently in those moments? | Four to seven competencies, no more |
| Anchors | How would two managers score the same week? | Three levels, one sentence each, all observable |
| Pilot | Where does it break in a live decision? | A revised one-pager, not a revised binder |
Note what is absent from that sequence: a validation study, a benchmarking exercise and a launch workshop for two hundred employees. Each has a place, and the place is after the framework is in use, not before. Validation of something nobody uses is an expensive way of producing a better document.
Where frameworks die
- The committee. Thirty stakeholders with a veto each produce a framework of everything anyone cares about. Consensus at the drafting stage usually means the framework has stopped choosing.
- The catalogue. Every competency acquires a training course and the framework becomes a shopping list. Development plans then read “attend negotiation skills” instead of “handle the pricing objection in three live renewals”.
- The audit. The framework is used to fill a section of the appraisal form, is never used to hire or promote anyone, and settles into being a compliance artefact.
- The absent owner. Nobody is accountable for it in year two. It is not revised when the business changes, and by year three it describes a company that no longer exists.
A framework earns its place by settling an argument; if it never settles one, it is stationery.
The maintenance point is worth making explicitly, because it is where budgets go wrong. A framework of forty competencies across five levels needs an owner, a review cycle and a set of assessor guides to stay honest. That is a recurring cost, not a one-off project cost. A framework of six competencies with three anchors each can be reviewed by four people in a morning. If you cannot staff the maintenance, build the smaller thing.
The three decisions it has to touch
Selection. Structured interview probes scored against the anchors. The framework gives a panel a shared scale, which is worth more than a personality test and costs less.
Development. This is where most frameworks go soft. A competency framework is only useful for development if the gap produces a plan with a date and a named reviewer. An assessment that ends in a scored profile and a list of courses has produced a catalogue entry, not a plan.
Succession. Readiness judged on evidence across the anchors rather than on a sponsor’s confidence. Where the evidence is missing, the honest output is “not yet, and here is what would count”, which is a more useful sentence than a nine-box placement.
The first-time manager case shows why the join matters. The competencies that define a new manager are not a junior version of a senior leader’s list; they are the behaviours of someone who has just moved from doing the work to getting it done through others, which is a different job with different moments. Programmes built for first-time managers work when the framework names those moments, and drift when it names a leadership ideal.
What to do on Monday
Take the framework you have. Pick one role family. Ask the function head for the three outputs that matter this quarter, and for the moments where strong and weak performers differ. Write six behaviours. Give the draft to four managers who dislike paperwork and ask each of them to place two real people on it.
Then delete, or rewrite, everything they could not place with confidence. That exercise takes an afternoon and tells you more than the last framework review did. If the draft survives, you have the start of something people will use in a real conversation. If it does not survive, you have saved yourself eight months, two consultants and a binder.