Training Alone Won’t Close Management Talent Gaps in the Federal Workforce
Recent Office of Personnel Management (OPM) regulatory changes that implement legislation enacted in 2004 require federal agencies to provide managers with better training throughout the supervisory phase of their careers. The frequently stated purpose of this new focus on management training effectiveness is to strengthen each agency’s mission-accomplishment capabilities by closing what are commonly referred to as workforce talent or skills gaps.
The frequent use of the words “talent” and “skills” interchangeably indicates a widespread and potentially problematic blurring of the fundamental difference between these two different types of human capacities. This misconception—which appears to exist among well-intentioned federal law makers and conscientious OPM regulators alike—could produce unrealistic and unrealized expectations for the legislatively mandated mission-integration of federal agencies’ management training and succession planning programs.
Talent, or what human performance researchers commonly refer to as “potential,” is not nearly as susceptible to enhancement through training as are knowledge and skills. That is because most of the knowledge and skills needed to manage employees effectively are capacities which lie at or near the surface of an individual’s conscious awareness and can therefore be cultivated by targeted instruction and guidance.
In contrast, human performance research has shown that much of the talent or potential that ultimately distinguishes outstanding from average “people managers” is embodied in capacities which either reside at or are absent from the deeper levels of human consciousness and are therefore very difficult to create or increase through training or coaching.
For example, well-designed training programs can introduce newly minted supervisors and reintroduce experienced supervisors to those factual and how-to items—actions, options, strategies, techniques and procedures—which they need to know and use when:
- conducting employee performance appraisals
- dealing with unacceptable performance and poor performers
- mentoring employees to improve their performance and productivity
But even the most thoughtfully conceived training cannot foster in current or future managers the underlying motivation needed to truly care about an employee’s professional development, or the underlying self-concept needed to actively embrace accountability for grooming employees to replace current managers.
As agencies begin to monitor their training efforts more strictly in compliance with the recent OPM regulation, the fundamental distinction between skills and talent has at least three significant implications:
- First, since training often builds management skills but seldom increases management talent or potential, federal agencies will do well to remember the “make-or-buy” challenge of workforce development strategy and focus their hiring and promotions on potential while concentrating their training and coaching on skills (and knowledge).
- Second, agencies should use the results of relevant, valid and reliable job competency research to identify the specific management competencies associated with outstanding performance in each of their supervisory management jobs or job series. (Management competencies are the personal characteristics that research has shown to drive outstanding performance in a particular organizational management job, role or function).
- Third, agencies should review published management competency inventories and dictionaries to determine which of their supervisory job competencies are surface-level or intermediate-level capacities for which incumbents and candidates can and should be trained and coached, and which of their supervisory job competencies are deeper-level or underlying capacities for which current and future supervisors can and should be selected and hired or promoted.
Agency heads and their human capital management teams must remain mindful of these important selection-versus-development guidelines and apply them judiciously if they expect to establish management training and succession programs that are in constructive compliance with the statutory provisions and implementing regulations of the 2004 Federal Workforce Flexibility Act.
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