Leadership Competencies Are Not Behaviors

Organizations have standardized on the use of competencies as a means of identifying the skills needed for success in various job positions. These competencies are defined, described, and used as a guide for hiring or developing talent. Competencies are also used to define and describe the leadership skills that an organization believes will be most successful. However, there is a tendency to mistakenly equate competency with behavior. As such, human resource professionals stop at the point of identifying required competencies and skills, but don’t get down to the granular level of describing desired daily behavior.

The resulting fuzziness about what it takes to “do” leadership successfully leads to poor execution in organizations. Leaders may know “what” competencies are important, but are not given much clarity on “how” to accomplish them. By clarifying what a competency is (and isn’t), and by connecting the dots between competency and behavior, it is possible to close this gap in misunderstanding, and help organizations implement improved leadership at all levels.

Let’s start by examining the misunderstanding. According to a 2008 website post, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) defines leadership competencies as follows:

“Leadership competencies are leadership skills and behaviors that contribute to superior performance. ”

Herein lies the problem: read the above definition again. You will note that the word “competency” is being simultaneously equated with both skills and behaviors. This slight, but profound error is a good example of how leadership is generally not well understood, monitored, and managed in organizations. The purpose of this article is to clarify one simple position: a skill is NOT the same thing as a behavior.

Let’s look at some general definitions (taken from my trusty Mac dictionary)

You can quickly see that ‘competencies’ are essentially ‘skills’, but neither of them is equivalent to behaviors. A behavior is what a person actually does or says. A behavior is measurable, observable, and verifiable. As such, competencies and skills should be described as a ‘collection of behaviors’, not equated to them. In short, a leadership skill or competency is achieved by the implementation of several distinct behaviors.

The point I hope to convey here is that identifying competencies should be seen as a first step in the process of defining what makes a leader successful, not the final deliverable. Competencies are not behaviors! After competencies are defined, there is one additional level of analysis required to produce a list of successful leadership behaviors, and this is an area of work that is usually left undone, in part because of the general misunderstanding described herein. If human resource professionals and consultants can invest the additional time to clarify one more level down—from competencies to behaviors—there will be a greater opportunity to improve leadership performance in organizations.