Define Success Profiles for Key Jobs: The Top 7 Steps

7 Steps to Define Success Profiles for Key Jobs
A success profile is a comprehensive outline of the skills, behaviors, and attributes that are essential for individual and organizational success for a specific role. Knowing how to define success profiles for key jobs enables companies to provide a clear roadmap for behavioral interviewing, customized training programs, performance management, and succession planning across teams, functions, organizations, and portfolios. The inability to define success profiles for key jobs makes it difficult to align top talent with strategic priorities and drive peak performance.

Successful organizations make sure that they have the right people in the right positions to propel the business forward.  Our organizational alignment research found that talent accounts for 29% of the difference between high and low performing organizations in terms of:

• Revenue growth
• Profitability
• Customer Loyalty
• Leadership Effectiveness
• Employee Engagement and Retention

Once you know where a company is headed (i.e., strategic clarity) and how you want to make the journey together (i.e., your workplace culture), your next step is to define the key roles, performance expectations, competencies, and micro-behaviors required to get there.

Let’s start with a few definitions:

• Key Roles Defined
  Not all roles are of equal value strategically or over different time horizons. We define key roles as the most critical, difficult to replace, strategic, and difference-making roles required to ensure success today and, in the future, based upon your strategic business plan and key assumptions.

  For example, at a company with a new growth strategy, a key role could be the Chief Revenue Officer.

• Performance Expectations Defined
  We define performance expectations by answering two powerful questions for each key role. (1) What is the definition of high performance for the role? (2) How should success and failure be measured for the role?

  Example performance expectations for a Chief Revenue Officer could be to increase revenue by 15% year-over-year at a 62% average gross margin.

• Competencies Defined
  We define competencies as the observable and measurable abilities that impact an outcome consistently, successfully, and authentically. Competencies should provide clear guidelines and expectations for the desired actions required to achieve success. Effective competencies are behavior-based and aligned to non-negotiable cultural beliefs, corporate values, and strategic priorities.

  While it is tempting to pick a lot of competencies, it is best to focus on a critical few (3-6) per role.

  A competency example for a Chief Revenue Officer expected to grow profitable revenue could be “Set Strategic Growth Priorities” and be defined by “the ability to set strategic growth priorities based on a logical analysis.”

• Micro-Behaviors Defined
  We define micro-behaviors as definable, observable, and repeatable actions that make up a competency that are predictive of performance outcomes.

  Example micro-behaviors for strategic thinking could include the ability to:

  — Formulate a concrete vision of the organization’s future state.
  — Communicate the vision in a vivid way that gets others excited.
  — Create a vision that appeals to followers’ personal values and needs.
  — Set long-term goals that span 3 to 5 years.
  — Select strategic priorities that follow logically from the gathered information.
  — Select strategic priorities that add significant value and create competitive advantage.
  — Settle on a manageable set of top strategic priorities.
  — Ask targeted questions that require deeper analysis.
  — Find common themes across multiple sources of complex information.
  — Combine seemingly unrelated information to gain a strategic insight..

A Step-By-Step Guide to Define Success Profiles for Key Jobs

1. Ensure that Your Business and Talent Strategies Are Clear Enough
   While it is tempting to kickoff succession planning or talent management projects with a focus on roles or competencies, project postmortem data is clear: strategic clarity and alignment is required to set the proper context and prioritization. Unclear strategies create confusion, misalignment, and frustration.  It is difficult to define success profiles for key roles when leadership is not aligned on strategic priorities.

   Are your business and people strategies clear enough and agreed to enough by key stakeholders to define success profiles for key jobs?

2. Align Your Culture with Your Strategy
   If your strategy is your organizational “What,” your culture is your organizational “How.” Once your strategy is clear enough, your next step is to assess your organizational culture to ensure that “how things truly get done on a daily basis” aligns with your business and people strategies.

   An aligned workplace culture makes it easy for people in key roles to do the right work in the right way.  A misaligned culture makes it hard for people to get work done in a way that is motivating, engaging, and high performing.

   Sadly, culture alignment is the most common step for leaders to skip during talent management projects.  That is a mistake.  How leaders shape their corporate culture to create a high performance culture matters.  In fact, a Harvard research report found that an effective culture can account for up to half of the differential in performance between organizations in the same industry.

   Is your culture healthy and aligned enough for people in key roles to be set up for success?

3. Understand Key Roles in Context
   Your next step is to define each key role within the context of your organization’s strategy and goals. This begins with a clear definition of the work to be done, the day-to-day tasks and challenges, and the results that need to be achieved to be considered a high performer. This often includes the identification of new capabilities and roles needed to achieve longer-term strategies along with a list of the business-critical roles for current priorities.

4. Establish Performance Metrics for Each Role
   Define clear, measurable performance metrics to evaluate the success and failure in each key role. Performance metrics should be aligned with the organization’s strategic goals and can include quantitative, qualitative, leading, and lagging metrics.
5. Identify Key Competencies and Micro-Behaviors for Each Role
   Once your key current and future roles have been identified and defined, your next step is to identify the key personality, cognitive, learning aptitude, motivation, leadership, functional, and technical capabilities needed for each role to be successful. Key competencies can be defined through interviews, sales rep assessment simulations, focus groups, 360 degree surveys, people manager assessment centers, validation studies, job observations, and leadership simulation assessments.
6. Incorporate Cultural Fit
   We know from our organizational culture assessment data that cultural fit matters. When the way people in key roles think, behave, and work do not align with company and team norms, productivity and morale suffer.  Do not underestimate the importance of culture fit when it is time to define success profiles for key jobs.
7. Develop a Success Profile
   Now you are ready to compile the above information into a comprehensive Success Profile to be used for recruiting, onboarding, performance management, succession planning, and professional development that includes:

   — Role Overview: A summary of the key role and its organizational impact.
   — Success Metrics: A clear definition of how high performance will be defined and measured.
   — Key Competencies: A detailed list of competencies and micro-behaviors required to succeed.
   — Cultural Fit: Key attributes and behaviors that align with the company culture.

The Bottom Line
Defining success profiles for key roles is critical to aligning talent with both current and future strategic priorities. Start by understanding each role in its full strategic and cultural context, and clearly define what high performance looks like before identifying the essential competencies. Once established, these profiles become a powerful tool to guide hiring, development, engagement, and retention — ensuring you attract and nurture the top talent needed to drive peak performance today and build organizational strength for tomorrow.

To learn more about how to create talent as a competitive advantage, download The 3 Surprising Ingredients for Talent Management Success

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.