How Competencies and Personality Should Drive Employee Performance

95% of managers believe they could have a more effective method of performance management. Rather than going through the standard steps — set goals, review performance, set a plan, repeat — think, instead, about how you frame the process. How are you determining goals? What factors go into the goals you create? Do they take into account the actual skills and personality of the individual?

An important aspect of employee performance management is understanding the core competencies necessary for the role and the way the employee’s competencies match up. Some of these required skills will come naturally to the employee, others will require a bit of nurturing in order to further develop them. When coaching your employees, consider how the critical and supporting competencies factor into their existing skill sets. Take the time to understand how their skillset and work style come together, how that affects the way they work, and then use that information to build your performance plan around responsibilities and competency requirements – rather than task-based coaching. The result is a focused, individualized performance management strategy that evaluates strengths and opportunities and can anticipate obstacles before they’re met.

Analyzing Competencies with Caliper

Caliper Essentials for Coaching breaks down an individual’s competencies into three key areas:

• Natural: These are the competencies where an individual naturally excels.

• Explore: Individuals may need to do additional refining in order to excel in these competencies.

• Requires Focus: These competencies do not come naturally to the individual, and they will need to be specifically developed. It doesn’t mean they cannot achieve them, but they may need to be trained before they can be further honed.

Analyzing an individual’s competencies gives managers an important framework to understand where opportunities lie, what kinds of goals will be realistic, and where to focus on training. And, more specifically, your Caliper report also outlines how all of these competencies align with their role. Managers can clearly see which competencies are important to prioritize, and which are less valuable and can be addressed over a long period of time. A clear view of the required competencies versus the individual’s natural competencies provides an outline for where performance management efforts need to be focused to make the process effective.

Understanding Work Style & Traits

Competencies aren’t the only thing requiring examination.. It’s important to remember that behavior is also a major factor in how an individual performs. Different employees respond to different types of work, management styles, team dynamics, etc. For effective employee performance management, you need to factor the individual’s preferred work and communication styles. Your competency report will outline how your employee prefers to work based on how to best motivate them, how to best communicate with them, what their potential stressors are, how to anticipate their reaction to stressors, and how to mitigate those stressors. These aspects can be specifically applied to:

• Communication
• Interpersonal dynamics
• Problem-solving and decision-making
• Personal organization and time management

Caliper Trait Scores and Work Style

Traits are the foundation of all the work that Caliper does, and they are a valuable tool during performance management. All of your employees will have a Caliper Profile, and the traits paint a picture of who an individual is, what motivates them, how they act on their motivations, and their potential to perform their job. You can use trait scores to help guide behaviors and drive what you want to see in the workplace. By tying their personality traits to their competencies, managers and employees can work together to come up with goals and a performance plan that is ideally suited to their strengths, style, and unique traits.

Putting it Together

Once you have a clear understanding of the individual, the next step is to think about how to implement your coaching on the job. Essentials for Coaching helps managers facilitate development by suggesting thought-provoking, proactive dialogue that uses past experience as context to drive future performance. Your report provides recommendations that are personalized and tailored to their individual needs so you can develop work behaviors that are specific and customized to their strengths and preferences.

Further Learning

Beyond employee performance management, these same components can be used to create a structured development path. Use their strengths and opportunities to explore continued learning to both improve competencies where they may be deficient or prep them for the next phase in their career by empowering them through their natural abilities. Performance management is cyclical, and there will always be room for your employees to continue learning, developing, honing, and improving their competencies.

To learn more about the ways Caliper can help you understand and coach individuals to reach their full potential, reach out to our experts today to get started.