What is a capability framework?
A capability framework captures the behaviours required to bring a strategic plan to life. They are also driven by the culture and values and are the collective skills, expertise, and alignment of the people in an organisation.
Often people in an organisation may be very clear on their values, but not so sure about the relevant behaviours that would evidence that value.
By creating a Capability Framework, there will be a greater opportunity to embed the strategy as your teams will be clearer on those specific behaviours.
Why use a capability framework?
Capability Frameworks are critical to organisations for many purposes;
As a tool for populating Position Descriptions with appropriate skills and behaviours strategically relevant to your organisation
As a tool for performance and development planning by selecting the skills/behaviours relevant to your performance, and then agreeing with your manager on where you will focus your development this year
As a tool for evaluating performance by benchmarking your demonstrated skills/behaviours against your planned performance
As a tool for ensuring that the skills your organisation requires for execution of its strategy are developed today
To provide your employees with role clarity or career progression, and lessen confusion around development opportunities
We can design a Capability Framework specific to your organisation, or you may licence our proprietary framework. Often the best place to start is by conducting a survey to garner the pulse of your organisation. Once complete, you may use it to create a workforce strategy or performance management framework.
By transferring the information to an online competency tool, you are not only capturing essential information but also providing a streamline of your workflow.
Capability or competency?
These terms can be very confusing, and the difference is probably best discussed over a coffee, but here is a simple explanation:
Capabilities are the collective skills, expertise and alignment of the people in an organisation. They are relevant organisation-wide and come from culture, values and strategy.
Competencies are the skills required within a group, department or role. They tend to be more technical in nature, and are usually very specific to their area.
DLPA does not utilise standard frameworks. Instead, we build a customised one for each client based on an extensive library of capabilities and competencies. This is represented in layers, organisation-wide, starting with the strategic capability set. The next layer is the occupation capability set (sometimes called job families) which is where we will start to bring in specific competencies. Finally, there is the functional capability set, which outlines in very fine detail how each role is made up (note that this is only required for organisations where this level of ‘key-stroke’ granularity is necessary). For each capability, there are corresponding proficiency levels, outlining the associated target behaviour by level.
Our methodology is based on best-practice strategic workforce planning.
