An effective governance framework, should include a robust, awareness, development and training (ADT) framework related to soft, leadership and strategic competencies to all stakeholders and should be constant for board members and the C-Suite, but also not providing any ADT (and constant) to the board or the executive team is a risk factor that should be included at risk registrar.
In an effort to follow effective governance practice, I successfully influence the executive team of a global oil and gas corporation to develop C-Suite position holders who eventually were also nominated to be board members at the corporation global assets. I was successful, because first, I conducted a benchmark with international organizations including GE, Mazars, and Capgemini, to validate what ADT related to soft, leadership and strategic competencies were provided, because of confidentiality these organizations could not disclose if adequate ADT is at their risk registrar or not. Results indicate that organizations focus mainly on leadership and strategic ADT, and none of them provided ADT related to soft skill. Relevantly, soft competency is possibly the most important skill to develop for high potentials, executive and board members. Lastly, at all corporations ADT is mainly a one-off delivery to high potentials, instead of required and continuous ADT.
Second, I conducted a literature review to find out, if there were ADT models that included soft, leadership and strategic competencies, I found a model developed by Hogan and Kaiser (2005) and Kaiser (2015) that not only included these three competencies, but soft competencies were divided in intrapersonal and interpersonal see Figure 1. I found this model to be strong and thorough because: (1) it is developmental since it is built upon skills in the prior domains. (2) The model is a hierarchy of increasing trainability, with intrapersonal skills being hard to train and leadership/strategic skills being the “easiest” to train. (3) The model is comprehensive; every existing competency framework can be organized in terms of these four domains.
Third, using the model as a guideline, and to be as precise as possible with required intra/inter personal soft, leadership and strategic competencies, I interviewed 30 financial executives, these were from the company, many other C-Suite position holders from international oil and gas corporations, and other well-known international corporations such as Heineken. From their experience, they offered competencies as per each domain. A copy of the model was provided in advance for their better understanding and reflection.
Intrapersonal soft competencies suggested are:
Curiosity
Passion
Self-confidence
Empathy
Accountability
Interpretation
Conscientiousness
Resilience
Judgment
Patience
Ethics
Humility
Discretion
Creativity
Interpersonal soft competencies suggested are:
Relationships
Respect chain of command
Ability to work in a team
Communication
Deportment
Influencing
Trustworthiness
Persuasion
Leadership competencies suggested are:
Leading from experience
Leading from understanding failure
Effective utilization of HR
Situational Leadership
Leading with respect
Providing empowerment
Proactive leadership
Strategic competencies suggested are:
Futurism
Projection
Culture and Environment
Business operations
Scope
Positioning
Vision
Fourth, assessing selected candidates with robust and reliable assessment tools that were developed empirically, these were The Hogan Assessments and the Leader Versatile Index. Once approval by the executive team was confirmed, I conducted the assessments to 24 candidates, with Hogan assessments results only since the LVI is a 360 and it is difficult to do a mapping. Once the assessments were completed, I mapped the assessment results in collaboration with 3 Minute Mile in London and the domain competencies, the mapping provided a very accurate picture of specific competencies that candidates needed to develop and serve to designed individual development plans.
From the mapping, I further utilized data to validate if domain competencies based on their meaning were redundant or related, particularly for soft and leadership competencies, no validation for strategic skill was conducted because I was not interested. Moreover, at each domain there were competencies that were not included in the analysis because I considered them critical for each domain. For instance, at the intrapersonal skill domain, empathy, judgment and ethics were not included at the analysis. At the interpersonal domain, ability to work in a team, communication and deportment were not included at the analysis. Lastly, at the leadership level, leading from understanding failure and leading with respect were not included at the analysis.
A copy of the correlational analysis can be provided upon request.
Intrapersonal Soft Skill after correlational analysis.
Accountability
Interpretation
Judgment
Ethics
Empathy
Self-confidence
Conscientousness
Curiosity
Creativity
Discretion
Patience was not included because of the negative correlation with Curiosity.
Interpersonal soft skill after correlational analysis.
Relationships
Respect chain of command
Influencing
Trustworthiness
Ability to work in a team
Communication
Deportment
Leadership competencies after correlational analysis did not change
Leading from experience
Effective utilization of HR
Situational leadership
Providing empowerment
Proactive leadership
Leading from understanding failure
Leading with respect
Strategic competencies remained the same, no correlational analysis was conducted.
Futurism
Projection
Culture and Environment
Business operations
Scope
Positioning
Vision
Fantastically, and with so little power, the correlational analysis for soft competencies showed very interesting results of how intra and inter personal competencies are related to each other or redundant, for instance in relation self-confidence and passion results showed that these two skills meaning is possibly the same. Also results showed a strong correlation between creativity and curiosity. Similarly, influencing and persuasion are redundant, their meaning is possibly very similar.
I believe the results can serve as a catalyst to conduct a more thorough investigation on soft and leadership competencies at the executive level and from there designed accurate ADTs for executive teams, subsequently promoting effective governance, and minimizing risks.
If you have any questions about this paper or wish to collaborate further, please contact me any time.
Figure 1. Soft and leadership skills domain.