What Drives Competency Utilization

We've all heard of competencies I'm sure. The very things (characteristics, traits, dispositions) that differentiate the outstanding one's from the ordinary.  In a sense it is like asking "What Makes Schumacher what he is".   Is it something that anyone can get, acquire or learn and become.  Yes!!! That is why the whole competency movement came about.   Primarily it is the outcome of works of  Richard Boyatzis,  David McClelland and others who pioneered the concept.

Now organizations you have seen and heard about spend several millions of Dollars each year on competency based processes, systems and frameworks.  They are investing significant  time and managerial effort to work out the competency definitions, models and so on.  So the question that one should ask is what really determines the utilization of the competencies that employees have.  How else would you be able to drive the utilization and the resultant benefit derived from the  competencies that your employees have.  Wouldn't you want your employees competencies to be used to improve, to do new things for your organization, ... in short to be better, faster, more innovative.  Yes Of Course.... Then the question is how do you drive up competency utilization.   

Is the utilization of competencies something that happens by itself just because you hired the person with level 4 on a given competencies.   Is the person going to shun using his competencies for some reason.  Such questions would surely come to your mind. 

In a series of posts I will try to answer such questions and provide some insights based on my research done over a period of time.   But before that think about how does one define a competency.  More on this in later post.