3 min read | 23 February, 2021 By Melissa Jones
You wouldn’t be the first small business to wonder what behavioural competencies are and what relevance they could possibly have in your business. But before you dismiss them as HR psychobabble it’s worth taking a closer look at them and how they can impact on your workplace.
In a nutshell, behavioural competencies can be defined as people’s strengths in a business setting. Your staff members will have different behaviours or skills, behavioural strengths if you like, which can be used to predict future workplace success.
You may already be looking at your staff’s behavioural competencies without even realising it. For example, when you recruit someone you normally draw up a list of desirable qualities you would like them to have such as good customer-facing skills or analytical skills. Certain competencies will be more important in some roles than in others. If you have sales consultants, then a great telephone manner might be more important than strong organisational skills, which might be beneficial for someone in a personal assistant role.
As a small business tracking those behavioural competencies can be quite tricky because there is no cast-iron method of measuring them. They are not quite as tangible as targets, for example. However, they play an important role in workforce planning, recruitment, training and development.
Behavioural competencies fall into different categories such as individual competencies, interpersonal competencies, motivational competencies, analytical competencies and managerial competencies.
There is plenty of cross over between the different categories with a number of abilities or skills fitting under more than one.
There are lots of situations where behavioural competencies can prove useful within your business.
The important thing is to not get too tied up in knots about behavioural competencies – chances are you are already considering them in the context of your employees. Just remember to focus on the qualities you need for certain roles and use those as your behavioural competency benchmarks.
23 February, 2021 by Melissa Jones
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