Reflections on policy competency

Going in circles to go forwards

Policy competency is neither a small topic nor a simple concept. Having earlier posed the question “Competent policy practice: what supports it?”, my first reflection was that some smaller ideas needed unpacking first. Like any policy inquiry into a complex issue, this might involve going in circles a few times, to answer the first questions, integrate the findings, and explore the new questions that arise before landing on a new hypothesis.

But where to begin?

Since talent comes from individuals, but competence is relative to the task at hand, the workplace foundation for competence strikes me as a good place to start – management.

Competency as a product of coaching

As a middle manager in a public policy organisation, a big part of the role is coaching staff of varying degrees of skill, experience, knowledge, and habits of appropriate behaviour.

One part of this coaching is to improve the staff member’s performance in role, by ensuring they are learning how to give their best to the tasks before them. Another part is to support their progression in role, by cultivating the capabilities and mind-sets they will need to do the next role ‘up’. A third part is to support their progression in life by revealing what the career ahead will demand of them, so they can prepare for it.

These are complex discussions. Some of the complexity derives from the need for the staff member to engage in honest reflection on their performance. Added to this is a need to put a shape to the future. The staff member must confront whether they can actually develop the necessary skills et al – competencies for short. In addition, they must confront the further question of whether they actually want to. 

To make these discussions useful, both the manager and the staff member need to prepare. The difficulty with preparation is that modern job descriptions say a whole lot about high-level values and specific tasks, but are thin on the detail of what the ‘how’ really looks like.

There is a presumption that the manager will be proficient with the ‘how’ to such a degree that they will be able to identify gaps in others’ practice and prescribe remedial actions. There is a further presumption that the staff member will be able to independently act on the prescription and make the necessary changes. However, a staff member may know that the manager is not addressing their area of personal concern; the manager may not know that that area is also one of professional concern that they should be addressing.

Old lessons, new value

Two decades ago, competency tables that described a core set of competencies and how they looked at each major career grade were the norm. They have largely passed away because they were (very) complicated and too unwieldy for performance discussions. As such, they encouraged a ‘tick-the-box’ mentality among managers and staff. Also, they could never really describe more than eighty percent of the job – there is always that ‘x factor’ required, that brings everything together into a quality of practice that exceeds the sum of the parts – something that today’s ‘values’ are meant to address.

However, it seems obvious, when engaging with staff – whether junior, middle-rank, or senior – that the removal from organisational canon of meaningful descriptions of the ‘how’ of the job, and what it looks like at each grade, has undermined the ability to hold useful development discussions. There are good resources to be drawn on, like Lombardo’s For Your Development, and Adding Value to Policy Analysis and Advice by Scott & Baehler. However, as useful as they are, simply handing these over to someone and saying “read this” is akin to providing coordinates without a reference map.

In the mid-2000s I was involved in a project synthesising selections from the competency frameworks of a half-dozen policy agencies into a core of 21 competencies for five grades of analyst and adviser. Inevitably, this revealed the limitations of the approach – despite its size the framework has gaps, the descriptions have overlaps. Nevertheless, every year since, I have had two or three staff members at a point in their development where taking them through the tables has given them something tangible to focus on.

Perhaps more usefully, the framework aligns typical tasks to each competency. For more people, more often, being nudged to try different things, in lieu of an esoteric discussion of competencies, is what is really needed to establish a base of practice that a later competency-based discussion can build upon.

But, for the manager, having that esoteric understanding is critical. Being able to assess gaps, suggest a menu of tasks that rehearse the under-developed competency, and then discuss why the task was useful, contributes to helping the staff member take logical steps to grow. By revealing the framework to them, these individuals can then take conscious control of their own development and get proper value out of the available supports for self-directed learning.

Two hypotheses, two questions

My first hypothesis is that moving away from competency tables was the wrong solution to the wrong problem: over-simplification in the face of low levels of policy manager capability. It is an unfortunate fact that policy manager training is, so far as I have observed over the last 20-odd years, unstructured, unplanned, and unlikely to progress much beyond process management.

My second hypothesis is that the consequences of this lack of planning around growing fully-formed policy managers is being passed through and compounded in the reduced ability of this cohort to run structured development processes that create consciously competent policy staff.

There are bright spots, like: the professional education available through the Australia New Zealand School of Government; and the lead practitioner discussions and outputs being catalysed and produced through the Policy Project, led out of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

But if you participate in these opportunities, you tend to see a lot of a small number of familiar faces. This is, in part, a logical consequence of how time poor middle managers are. But it also reflects the fact that most people prefer being busy doing stuff over being productively reflective. Consequently, ‘work smarter not harder’ is a very worthy goal for middle managers to pursue, but it is hollow advice and uncommon practice.

Following one of these opportunities, when you return to your organisation, you usually go straight back into a set of business behaviours that focus on policy as a craft – which emphasises natural flair – rather than on policy as a professional discipline. And this view is promulgated through the attitudes modelled by many senior policy leaders.

So, to conclude these reflections, I find I have two further questions to consider:

·      What is the missing competency in the middle management cohort?

·      What does it really mean to think of policy as a professional discipline?