Making Professional Skills for Government (PSG) and competencies more meaningful
The Professional Skills for Government (PSG) competency framework is a structured way of thinking about jobs and careers, for Civil Service staff at all grades. It sets out the skills you need to do Civil Service jobs well no matter what grade the grade is, or where the post is.
It represents a significant step forward in the Government’s efforts to further professionalise the Civil Service, and make it ever more accountable for the work that it does.
Mendas has worked with the PSG framework with a number of Government Departments and Agencies, and a common question posed runs along the lines of: ‘this PSG framework is all very well, but what does it actually mean for us; the language used by the framework doesn’t quite capture what we would define as high performance, and what we value as organisation’.
This is a criticism levied at many competency frameworks designed to be used organisationally-wide - the language can become so generic and bland that work is needed to translate it into what it actually means for a particular department or operating unit. Only then can people clearly formulate in their own minds what their organisation is looking for, in a particular role or job level.
Addressing the challenge
This is precisely the challenge we were faced with when working with a Central Government Department earlier this year i.e. how to make the PSG framework more meaningful to better reflect their particular needs.
In seeking to make the PSG framework more meaningful for the client, our starting point was interviewing a representative group of senior stakeholders, to understand how the PSG competencies manifest themselves at Senior Civil Service Pay Band 1. We gained particular insights by asking these stakeholders to describe ‘critical incidents’, of when they have observed particularly effective or ineffective behaviours. The beauty of this technique is that its bottom-up approach helps to translate competencies into something real, into behaviours that have actually been observed from, rather than as abstract statements. It is a means of getting ‘beneath the skin’ of competency labels.
We then took these initial findings to a wider audience via an on-line survey, to check out to what extent the qualities and behaviours identified hold true, across levels and across departments within the organisation.
We submitted the results of the survey to a statistical technique, known as Factor Analysis. Factor Analysis essentially maps out how respondents see their respective world, clustering individual questions into more meaningful dimensions. The technique is often used for the development of personality questionnaires. As a second stage analysis, we were also able to identify the relative importance of these dimensions in predicting high performance.
The resulting dimensions that emerged were as follows:
• Demonstrating insight and understanding of people and situations
• Making the most of available resources
• Putting values to the fore
• Outcome focused
• Well-connected and credible
• Demonstrating financial credibility
• Striving for excellence
Even the labels themselves provide a different flavour to more traditional competency labels, which reinforces this notion of behaviours being brought to life, and aligning themselves with what truly matters to an organisation.
Did we meet the challenge?
The acid test of whether this framework is doing its job to play it back to the organisation. If the framework makes sense then members of the organisation should be able to recognise through the language used, individuals working effectively at this particular level. This proved to be the case; the language was embraced and utilised in the later design of the assessment process for SCS Pay Band 1. Leadership was thus conveyed as more of a mindset than as a group of discrete of behaviours.
What about leadership?
A further finding of interest is the fact that rather than emerging as a separate construct, leadership proved to be a common thread running through all of the dimensions, reflecting the level at which somebody is operating across the board, rather than as a set of separate behaviours that stands in isolation to them.
What next?
We feel this approach has tremendous potential for use with other organisations and other competency frameworks. The research was intentionally light in touch, making it viable for widespread use. The approach also provided added value in helping to create buy-in for the emerging framework, and for the assessment process more generally. As people could relate better to the language being used, so they could see more clearly what the organisation was looking for, from its Senior Civil Service.
Used more widely, this technique has the potential for making any competency framework more meaningful for the people it is targeted at. In communicating something more meaningful about what high performers actually look like in an organisation, so this approach should in turn help the design of an assessment process that is both credible and better able to identify talent.
Article written by Dr Simon Draycott and Dirk Palm
