May 2025 Volume 7

OPERATIONS & MANAGEMENT

Step 3: Assess Employee Competency (Part 1) By this point, you should have a clear list of skills and competencies for each position that you can use to measure an employee’s success in their current role. Let’s give you a model to easily assess each employee: • Instruction – This is when an employee is brand new to a skill or competency and needs to be taught the basics. • Guided Practice – Once an employee has been taught the basics, they are given an opportunity to practice the skills and effectively, they are often allowed to operate independently with the basics, with someone experienced keeping tabs on them and helping them with the more complex tasks. • Delegation – If an employee demonstrates success during mentoring, they are often given the task as their own. There may be times when the supervisor monitors the tasks or helps when something new pops up, but the employee is responsible for the task now. • Empowerment – As employees operate independently and gain more experience, they can eventually get to the point are given immediate feedback to cement learning. • Mentoring – If the employee navigates the practice

where they are really an expert on the task. They show ownership and even creativity in the role or with the task. Your job is to let them flourish at this point. • Evaluation – Once they’ve mastered a task, supervisors should be looking at the next task to develop their employee on. They evaluate where the employee is on the new task and see which of the above steps is the right starting place for development. For each of the skills and competencies you have listed for this position, they’ll fit into one of these categories. As an example, if you have someone as your social media manager, and they’re fantastic engaging with a virtual audience, then they would probably rate in the Delegation or Empowerment categories on this competency. However, if they’ve never supervised anyone before, and they’re just stepping into the manager role, then some of the skills or competencies regarding management may be rated as Instruction, Guided Practice, or Mentoring. The idea here is to rate each skill and competency with one of the six labels above, which will give you a great sense of where they’re strong and where they need work.

9-Box Talent Matrix

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