Post 7:
The company is not yet able to identify the required competencies.
There it is – the assignment to find new, creative and innovative employees. So far, the personnel department always had an internal reference: “Someone like Mr. or Ms. X, if you please”. And now this: no role model in sight! How can you now recognize the required skills? A first approach would be to look at other companies. But then you don’t really want to clone staff, and apart from that, processes and corporate cultures differ.
This is really a difficult situation. So one advertises a position that requires new skills and one receives applications from candidates who claim to possess these skills. In the job interview they then give examples of how they have used these skills successfully. But how can you tell whether they’ve got the skills in the form needed by the company? And if you then employ this new key member of the staff – how can you help the organization to not consider these new skills inappropriate or disruptive and to not block the new employee?
Is a creative mind a troublemaker or someone who can really help the company to get ahead? What are the limits? Is it the responsibility of the new employee or the old employees or even the superiors to combine the new skills with the old?
This issue can often be observed when converting an HR department from an operational to a strategic orientation. Suddenly the HR staff has ideas, gets involved in departmental discussions and talks back. If the basic idea of a business partner is not fully recognized, the entrepreneurial spirit (the required expertise) will then be interpreted as arrogance, presumptuousness, obstructionism. This is where it would be useful to first work with interim solutions, so that the company can get used to these new competences. Also, this will give a company the opportunity to find out which dimension of competency is the right one for it.
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