The Competence Matrix: Building Better Teams
“A team is only as strong as its weakest player”
As any sports coach knows, “a team is only as strong as its weakest player” and the same is true for teams at the workplace. For this reason, an organizational environment of continuous learning is essential in order to create strong, valuable and competent teams. But what makes a team competent?
The first thing we can identify is that any team will consist of a combination of the following team members, novices (those who are inexperienced), skilled members (those who have experience) and experts (those who are able to teach the inexperienced). Ideally, skilled and expert team members will be what is commonly referred to as T-shaped employees, i.e. specialized in one area but also experienced in other relevant areas.
If we break the structure of teams down into components that influence team competence it can be argued that there are four main building blocks: individual competence, helping each other, team communication and, perhaps most important of all, the creative tension within a team. By improving these four elements, a team is bound to be more competent.
The strength or competence of a team can only be as good as the sum of its individual members, so the main focus of team improvement should be individual competence development. There are a number of factors which should be taken into consideration for this, but first and foremost managers should lead by example. It’s basic human nature to copy observed behaviours so, if managers commit themselves visibly to professional development, this will lay the seed for a learning culture and a continuous learning environment within an organization.
The second building block for team competence is the team’s internal communication. This is probably the most important factor when it comes to having competent teams, but also the one teams struggle with the most. When it comes to communicating effectively, we should focus on talking more and talking better through face-to-face communication as well as the power of establishing rituals.
The third block is all about team members helping each other. As with developing individual competencies, the key here is for managers to lead by example. Other options would be to organize internal mentoring programmes or run short workshops. An alternative popularized by software developers are so-called hackathons or exploration days. The idea here is to allow your staff to come together and experiment with any crazy notion they dreamt about. Although the practical outcomes might not always be useful, these days provide a great opportunity to engage and motivate team members; allowing them to develop, self-educate and find their purpose within the organization.
The final piece of the building block puzzle is creative tension. This is the idea that team members look at the same thing from different perspectives and so come up with more innovative ideas. For this to work effectively, teams would need to be as diverse as possible. We’re talking much more here than just gender balance, for a team to experience (positive) creative tension team members should come from different social/cultural backgrounds, have different levels of experience/education and so on. Anything goes really, although it would probably a good idea to not stress religious or political diversity as this rarely leads to positive creative tension.
Besides team diversity, roles in a team can also be used to encourage creative tension. By assigning roles such as coordinator, observer or questioner to team members, will help them challenge each other which in turn will heighten the creative tension. Crucial here is that the roles assigned are clearly outlined and that everyone understands the function of different roles. If this is not the case ‘roleplay’ might lead to negative creative tension.
There it is, four building blocks to help the novice, skilled and expert members you’ll find in any team develop themselves and their teams to the best of their abilities. The question now remaining is how to identify which skills the team should develop. A popular Management 3.0 tool named the Competence Matrix can assist with this.
The Team Competence Matrix
The team competence matrix is a great tool to visualize a team’s strengths and weaknesses. As can be seen in the sample above, the matrix is just a simple grid of columns and rows. This first column lists all the competences the team needs to master. The second column indicates the Required Competence Levels (RCL) and lists how many experienced and expert team members are minimally required to make the team function effectively — there’s no need to list novices as they won’t be required. Subsequent columns show the names of the individual team members.
Once the required competences and RCLs have been decided on each team member marks their level of experience for each of the competences listed (i.e. a red dot for novice, yellow for experienced and green for expert). Now it can easily be identified what is missing and the team can decide on appropriate measures to take for improvement.
In the example above, the second row is looking good whereas rows one, three and four need some improvement. As in all these rows at least one team member identified as an expert, the other team members can be brought up to speed through internal mentoring or training.
The situation is different for the fifth row. In this row all but one of the team members identified themselves as novices and there’s no expert. This means that an external trainer needs to be brought in or that team members will have to be sent away for training.
As you can see, the Competence Matrix is a powerful tool to identify the weak spots and appropriately develop the competence of any team.
[T]here you are.
