WHY COMPETENCY FRAMEWORKS FALTER (AND WHAT CAPABILITY HAS TO DO WITH IT)

Competency frameworks are one of the most familiar tools in modern organizations. They sit inside job descriptions, performance systems, leadership programs, succession plans, and culture initiatives. They are refreshed, rebranded, and reintroduced with reassuring regularity. And yet, quietly, many organizations sense a problem.

Despite the time and effort invested, competency frameworks don’t always deliver proportionate improvements in performance, resilience, or execution. Managers reference them politely. Employees learn the language. HR systems absorb them. But real work often carries on much as before.

The issue is not that competencies are useless. It is that they are routinely asked to do work they were never designed to do.

COMPETENCIES BECAME THE ANSWER TO THE WRONG QUESTION

At their best, competencies describe observable behaviors that contribute to effective performance. They’re meant to help organizations clarify expectations where judgment, discretion, or coordination matter. Over time, however, competencies have drifted from this modest role. They’ve become a proxy for far larger concerns: capability, culture, alignment, even strategy. When organizations struggle to execute, adapt, or scale, the instinctive response is often to “fix the competencies.”

This is where trouble begins.

Competencies describe what comes out of people. Capability depends on systems. When organizations use competency frameworks to compensate for unclear work design, overloaded roles, job architecture, or structural friction, they misdiagnose the problem. The result is predictable: ever-expanding frameworks, increasingly abstract language, and growing distance from how work actually gets done.

THE HIDDEN COST OF OVER-RELIANCE ON COMPETENCIES

Competency frameworks rarely fall short loudly. They do it quietly, through accumulation and drift. Over time, several patterns emerge:

• Framework inflation
  Competency lists grow longer as new priorities, values, and initiatives are absorbed.

  What began as focus becomes clutter.

• Assessment without evidence
  Interviews and self-reports replace observation. Fluency is rewarded over enactment.

  Confidence substitutes for capability.

• Cultural overreach
  Competencies slide from describing performance to prescribing identity.

  “How we behave” becomes “who we are,” and disagreement is reframed as deficiency.

• Symbolic compliance
  Frameworks look impressive, travel well, and satisfy governance rituals, but they explain less and less about real performance.

None of this is driven by bad intent, obviously. It emerges because competencies are easier to design than capability is to confront head-on.

CAPABILITY CHANGES THE CONVERSATION

A capability-first lens forces a different set of questions. Capability is not a belief or an aspiration. It’s an organization’s demonstrable ability to do work reliably, under real conditions, over time. It shows up in execution, coordination, recovery, and adaptation.

When capability becomes the anchor, competencies shift position. They stop being universal solutions and become conditional contributors.

In practical terms, this means:

• Some performance problems are not competency problems at all.

  They’re design problems.

• Some behaviors matter only in specific contexts, not everywhere.

• Some competencies matter early, then fade as systems stabilize.

• Some should never be modeled, no matter how attractive they sound.

This is not anti-competency thinking. It is disciplined use.

WHY A LOT OF COMPETENCY ASSESSMENT DOESN’T HELP

One of the clearest signs that competencies are misused is how they are assessed. Interviews remain the dominant assessment method, despite decades of evidence that they conflate what people know, what they value, and what they have actually done. In effect, interviews assess interviewing competence, not work performance. They can work to a good degree, as part of a wider mix. Self-report struggles too. Once competencies carry moral or cultural weight, people learn quickly how to present alignment. The assessment process becomes performative, not evidentiary.

If competencies are to retain any credibility, assessment must be grounded in work as it unfolds: observation, patterns of decision-making, artifacts of execution, and outcomes under real operating conditions. This is harder, slower, and more politically uncomfortable. But without it, frameworks can drift into symbolism and become little more than an overhead and process to manage.

WHEN COMPETENCIES HELP AND WHEN THEY HARM

A capability-first approach leads to a simple but sometimes unnerving conclusion: there are many situations where building competencies is the wrong move.

Competencies rarely help when:

• Roles are overloaded or poorly defined

• Delegations of authority are confusing or exploited (decision rights)

• Business processes are absent or with fuzzy logic

• Performance standards are ambiguous

In these cases (and more), competency modeling and frameworks shift responsibility onto individuals for problems created by the system.

Competencies can help when:

• Behavior genuinely differentiates performance

• Context is clear (and job and work analysis has been coherent)

• Evidence can be observed

• There's a willingness to revise or retire competencies that no longer explain outcomes

This requires restraint. Something organizations are not often rewarded for.

NOT doing something is difficult to reward!

WHAT BOARDS AND EXECUTIVES ACTUALLY NEED

Interestingly, competencies almost never appear in boardrooms. Capability does, or should. Boards want to know whether the organization can execute strategy, manage risk, and adapt under pressure. They’re interested in confidence, not catalogs.

When competencies are framed as contributors to capability—tested, bounded, and governed—they can support that conversation. When they’re framed as frameworks to be admired, they can’t.

THE REAL CHALLENGE FOR HR AND LEADERS

The challenge isn’t to design better competency frameworks. It’s to make fewer, better decisions about when behavior really matters and when it doesn’t. That shift requires moving from enthusiasm to judgment, from frameworks to evidence, and from symbolic alignment to real capability.

Competencies can still play a role. But only when they know their place. Where might your organization be using competencies to avoid harder capability questions?