Character strengths and competencies

M. FATHAN RAMADHAN
ADITYO DARMAWAN
Most people are deeply bored by the competency industry now reaching its
senility phase. For over twenty years, HR people have sought to design
competency frameworks and architecture that supposedly form a bridge
between silos and the organizational DNA, and are the uniting force behind
everything, from selection to training.
Often, to the outsider, this pompous talk is really little more than a list of
human characteristics that the organization says it wants (nay requires) in its
employees. There are four clearly observable facts about organiza- tional
competencies.
First, they are almost identical for every organization. They all make a song and
dance about theirs being unique to the organization and its mission, history, brand
(blah, blah), but they are nearly always identical.
Second, they nearly always have some HR gobbledegook from a past age. So crucial
competencies include “helicopter view”, and “think outside- the-box” – never
strategic perspective or divergent thinking.
Third, it is assumed that these competencies can be observed relatively easily for
selection. This must be the case, because it is these competencies that seamlessly
knit together recruitment, selection and training and … well, everything. But some
of these concepts seem very difficult to define behaviorally and therefore to
observe.
• Fourth, with a charming, evidence-free naïvety, it is assumed that each
and every one of these competencies is happily trainable. So you can send
someone on an innovations or teamwork or customer responsive- ness
course and they will return willing, able and fired-up to fulfill their
competency.
• Competency thinking persists because nothing has yet really replaced it.
But look no further than the blossoming field of positive psychology. The
positive psychologists, whose mission is to understand the essence of
well-being, meaning at work and the like, have attempted a taxonomy of
what they call character strengths and virtues.
• You will recall that we have strengths and …? “Developmental oppor-
tunities”, of course. The W-word has been airbrushed out of the lexicon.
One fundamental message of the positive psychology movement is that
you get more value out of HR by exploring and exploiting your strengths
rather than your weaknesses. Weaknesses are more difficult to correct or
eradicate than strengths are to use.