Core Competence-How to Energize Your Life and Become Successful in Everything You Do

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Project managers in owners' as well as contractors' organizations are experienced professionals dedicated to the success of the project. Each demonstrates leadership, is a project team builder as well as a project builder, possesses the requisite technical, managerial, and communications skills, and is brought into the project early. To be a smart buyer, an agency should retain in-house personnel who understand the agency's mission and requirements, as well as customer needs, and who can translate those needs and requirements into the agency's strategic direction FFC, Agencies or entities whose mission includes providing facilities have a greater need to retain technical, general, and project management core competencies to ensure that they provide quality facilities that meet owner and user agencies' needs.

General management skills include leading as defined above , communicating verbally and in writing , negotiating, problem solving, influencing the organization, and the ability to get things done PMI, Department of Defense services and agencies, as directed, and to federal agencies and others on a case-by-case basis. NAVFAC has four engineering field divisions, each of which provides a full range of construction services, including project management, contracting functions, and construction management. In response to the committee's questionnaire, NAVFAC identified its core competencies as master planning, project planning, cost estimating, engineering, design, construction, acquisition, and project management.

Identified core competencies include the following capabilities:. To fulfill its mission, GSA has reorganized itself as a portfolio-management organization with four primary goals: Federal agencies should retain the organizational core competencies necessary to act as smart owners or smart buyers when acquiring facilities.

Provider agencies require additional technical competencies in engineering, architecture, general management, and project management to perform effectively. Because agencies' roles in acquisition vary, the types of federal facilities acquired also vary widely. In addition, a wide range of new and evolving contract methods for project delivery have inherently different levels of risk and management requirements. For these reasons, no single approach or set of core competencies for the acquisition of federal facilities can be applied to all agencies or situations.

Senior leaders and staff of each agency should identify the organizational core competencies necessary for effective facility acquisitions to support their current and future missions.

Federal agencies face a number of challenges in developing and retaining core competencies for facility acquisitions. As part of its performance and accountability series, GAO issued a series of reports on the major management challenges and program risks facing federal agencies. Among its findings were: The ability of the U. Department of Defense, less than half were given any financial or accounting-related training in or , a time when the department was attempting to implement significant accounting reforms GAO, b. Problems in attracting, training, and retaining qualified staff for facility acquisition are not confined to the federal sector.

A report by the Center for Construction Industry Studies based on projects from 31 public and private-sector organizations showed that approximately 62 percent of planning, design, and procurement functions were outsourced. At most federal agencies, the major portion of operating costs is devoted to personnel costs and salaries. Because mission requirements, client demands, technologies, and other environmental influences change rapidly, a performance-based agency must continually monitor its talent needs…In addition, this talent must be continuously developed through education, training, and opportunities for continued growth.

Federal agency staffs need a broad range of management, technical, communication, and leadership skills to act as effective stewards when acquiring facilities for the government. Agency leaders should evaluate current organizational skills, identify organizational skills likely to be lost through attrition, retirement, or continued reductions, forecast needs based on projected workloads, technologies, and contract types.

A number of approaches can then be used to acquire, develop, and retain the necessary organizational core competencies and skills. Each agency will have to determine which approach or combination of approaches will be the most effective for its specific circumstances.

One approach is to hire personnel from the public or private sector who have the training and experience necessary to perform these functions. A second approach is to provide the training and professional development for in-house staff to acquire necessary skills. Project management is increasingly being recognized as a professional discipline. A recent NRC report found that to satisfy the basic core competencies required for a federal agency to be a smart owner, and for agencies that elect to retain their management activities, the staff involved with implementing capital programs should be trained and certified in project management.

This professional training should be updated throughout their federal employment NRC, Agencies can also design and conduct training programs based on industry best practices but tailored to the federal environment. NASA, for example, has developed a training program based on best practices identified by the Construction Industry Institute.

Agencies should investigate the training and education available by other agencies and by outside organizations before developing their own training programs. For owner agencies or entities involved in providing facilities, one way to maintain and enhance technical proficiency is by retaining a portion of the planning, design, or construction management in house as part of a professional development program. Simply having in-house resources. Professional development programs should be appropriate to the staff level of experience.

Mentoring programs can be an effective approach to on-the-job training, as well as to capturing institutional knowledge. GSA, for instance, has plans to create a learning center where less experienced project managers will have access to information and training. A mentoring program is also planned to encourage people who might be considering retirement to stay on and become mentors to less experienced personnel FFC, Staff training should also focus on acquisition of competencies tailored to reflect an agency's context and requirements.

This training should be comparable to the training available to employees of commercial architecture-engineering and construction-management firms. By maintaining professional skills at a level comparable to the skills typical of commercial design and construction firms, training and certification programs can provide a significant incentive for qualified personnel to enter and remain in government service. Professional development should also be nurtured through tangible and intangible rewards for effective program and project management, including emphasis on leadership and the opportunity to exercise it, management of a portfolio of projects, and the opportunity to advance an agency's strategic objectives through the implementation of specific projects.

Ownership and management functions in the facility acquisition process differ. An owner's role is to establish objectives and make decisions.

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Management functions include the ministerial tasks necessary to carry out or implement the owner's decisions. In reviewing Section 7. In essence, therefore, the distinction between inherently governmental functions and commercial activities is the same as the distinction between ownership functions and management functions. The first step is to determine whether the function involves decision making on important issues ownership or ministerial or information-related services management. If it is a management function, the second step of the analysis is to consider whether the function might unduly compromise one or more of the agency's.

If a management function survives this threshold analysis, then the agency should determine whether or not to outsource the function based on a number of factors outlined in Chapter 4. Unless a federal agency's mission is to provide facilities, facility acquisition and management are not core functions i. However, when acquiring facilities, federal agencies assume an ownership responsibility as a steward of the public's investment. The requirements that a federal agency be accountable for upholding public policy and have the authority to commit public resources are indivisible.

This combination of responsibilities requires that any federal agency acquiring facilities have the in-house capabilities to translate its mission needs directly into program definitions and project specifics and otherwise act in a publicly responsive and accountable manner. Other organizational core competencies needed to direct and manage specific projects vary, depending on the agency's role as owner, user, or provider of facilities.

A smart owner of facilities must be capable of performing four interdependent functions related to acquisition: Each federal agency involved in acquiring facilities is accountable to the U. Each agency is responsible for managing its facilities projects and programs effectively.

Responsibility for stewardship cannot be outsourced. Key factors in determining successful outcomes of outsourcing decisions include clear definitions of the scope and objectives of the services required at the beginning of the acquisition process and equally clear definitions of the roles and responsibilities of the agency. Owners and users need to provide leadership; define scope, goals, and objectives; establish performance criteria for evaluating success; allocate resources; and provide commitment and stability for achieving the goals and objectives.

However, assistance in discharging these responsibilities may have to be obtained by contracting for services from other federal agencies or the private sector. The successful outsourcing of management functions by federal agencies requires competent in-house staff with a broad range of technical, financial, procurement, and management skills and a clear understanding of the agency's mission and strategic objectives.

Core Competence: How to Energize Your Life and Become Successful in Everything You Do

Because federal facilities vary widely, and because a wide range of new and evolving project delivery systems have inherently different levels of risk and management requirements, no single approach or set of organizational core competencies for the acquisition of federal facilities applies to all agencies or situations. Provider agencies should retain a sufficient level of planning, design, and construction management activity in house to ensure that they can act as competent providers of planning, design, and construction management services.

Agencies should provide training for leaders and staff responsible for technical, procurement, financial, business, and managerial functions so that they can oversee the outsourcing of management functions for planning, design, and construction services effectively.

University of Texas Press. Adding Value to the Facility Acquisition Process: Best Practices for Reviewing Facility Designs. Major Management Challenges and Program Risks: Competing for the Future. Spirituality and inner Peace 7. Legacy and Charity In this book I speak about charity and how rewarding charity is for your soul. I implement this attitude by donating a Euro of each book sold for children suffering from cancer.

In his professional career he early discovered the importance of communication skills. Since then he focused on how to succeed in all aspects of life using self development techniques. Avy Ellis's first book published in was a pioneer work as it was the first extensive book about Service Level Management in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

It currently ranks among the top 30 in Process- and Quality Management books Amazon. Core and leadership competencies were seen as critical catalysts. These provided the rare spark that was typically required to ignite innovation and new technology. These provided the energizing motivation that could steer innovation through the many roadblocks and tedious details required for successful implementation.

Because the core and leadership competencies are often fuzzy and ill defined, those organizations that can identify and focus on teaching them to their people will have a performance edge that can tilt otherwise level global playing fields in their favor.

But what makes the critical difference in the core and leadership areas? When we brainstorm in focus groups with top leaders in almost any specialty, we've found most can paper the walls with chart sheets listing competencies they feel are important in their fields. It is like choosing doors. The problem is not that we can't identify enough, but that we can speculate on too many.

How do we focus? To help answer these questions we conducted in-depth interviews with identified top performers. We focused on their specific observable behaviors on the job and looked for patterns the successful performers had in common. Based on that, we have identified a manageable number of core and leadership competencies we believe make the distinguishing difference in performance across different technical specialties and organizations.

Your own Investigative Interviews can identify those for the specific career field that interests you. Here we will focus instead on 12 core and a small number of supplemental leadership competencies that have emerged as most important for success across most career fields and organizations. Figure14 shows the twelve core competencies identified in the research as important for everyone. The competencies are organized in three sections: When you have limited time, these 12 give you a highly leveraged starting point for identifying your own personal competency strengths and development needs.

As shown in Figure 14, of course, these competencies are only labels. What do they mean? Labels alone are useless. You need to know how successful people act out these competencies in their behaviors. Here again the key is focus. You could take full semester courses on each of these individual competencies.

You could learn a hundred different behaviors for each. However, with limited time it helps to know the distinguishing few. What are the three to five most important things the interviews showed successful people do to demonstrate each competency? Our research concentrated specifically on what these few most important distinguishing behaviors are. For example, Figure 15 shows the 5 most highly leveraged behaviors we found successful people demonstrate in performing the Communication and Influence competency. We define these as observable behaviors because each describes a specific action or behavior you can perform - and you can readily observe whether you yourself and others are really performing them.

These are not mysterious psychological traits. These are simple actions anyone can consciously choose to perform or not perform. If you rate yourself - or others rate you - as low on some of these behaviors that doesn't mean you're defective. It simply means you are not remembering or choosing to do them. The simple solution is to start doing them.

Account Options

You always have that option if you want to improve things. Practice can bring significantly increased skill in exercising each of the behaviors. On the surface, many of these behaviors may seem obvious. When they are spelled out this clearly, most people would agree these are things we should be doing. When I first read one of Steve's competency models my immediate reaction was "so what's new? What's also new is knowing what few of the hundreds of good things I might do are most likely to have the highest impact.

When less successful people read through the key behaviors for the competencies they usually agree these behaviors are important, but typically they don't really do them and their excuse is they don't have time. Successful people acknowledge the importance of the behaviors and agree it's difficult to find time to do them. Typically, however, successful people tell us they force themselves to take the time because they've learned that doing these things saves much more time in the long run.

It eliminates much wheel spinning and repetitive false starts which less successful people waste time on because they won't take time to rise above day-to-day fire fighting and find a way to prevent the fires from starting. Successful people interviewed in the research said they learned the critical competency behaviors by:. Few of us are intuitive observers. We watch others' behavior but in the daily rush it isn't so easy to isolate what specific actions are making others successful - or unsuccessful - in their performance.

For instance, if I had the opportunity to observe a world class surgeon perform a complicated operation, when it was over I'd have a hard time saying what he or she specifically did or did not do that made the operation successful. On the other hand, if a medical student with a written checklist of key surgical behaviors for that operation watched, he or she could continually compare the surgeon's actions with the checklist and learn a great deal about what the surgeon was and was not doing to succeed. Most of us could benefit from a similar checklist of core competencies - something we can carry around in our day planners and glance at to diagnose what's happening when we see others performing successfully or unsuccessfully.

The checklist can help us learn in real time what works and doesn't work. It can also be a valuable self-assessment tool. When we succeed or fail at a leadership or communications attempt, we can later sit quietly at our desk and pinpoint what we specifically did or failed to do that influenced the outcome. Figure 16 illustrates the format we use for a competency assessment form designed to help you observe your own and others' behaviors.

Here you see just one sample item from the three page Core Competency Self-Assessment Form we use in our workshops.

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