Competencies Capabilities Skills

Although often used interchangeably, the terms ‘competencies’, ‘capabilities’ and ‘skills’ do not actually mean the same thing. For those responsible for people in organizations it is vital to be clear about these differences. It is important to actually know what it is you are looking for from others if you want to see them become; more skillful, create more capabilities and demonstrate high-quality competencies. If you are accountable for how people perform and if you are involved in appraising team-members, you need to organize your thoughts about their skills, capabilities, and competencies.

If you want to be seen to be developing yourself, then you need to know how to describe what you have achieved; are you becoming more skillful, are you becoming more capable, are you becoming more competent? Given dictionary definitions, and using the following concepts in just about every programme I have delivered as a consultant, this is how I define the differences between skills, capabilities, and competencies. Your skills are created over time given the experiences you have gone through and the knowledge you have gained; be it academic study, through training-courses or learning from mistakes.

We absorb this knowledge-gaining, use it in our day-to-day work and so we build experiences. Skills are created by deploying your hard-won knowledge and experience. Someone who has little knowledge and has none or limited experience is certainly not going to be skillful. By gaining knowledge, building experience and thus creating skills we create capabilities – the sum of all these parts; understanding and practice of what to do.

These definitions work for all the functional expertise needed in the organization from IT, finance, marketing, sales, operations, logistics, HR and all processes, activities, and tasks; how capable a salesperson, management-accountant or logistics-expert am I? This pattern also works for defining how capable a manager is, notwithstanding their functional expertise. These are the capabilities which are the bundles of knowledge, experience, and skills across the key areas of management: planning; organizing; staffing; directing; coordinating; reporting; and budgeting. Where are your weaknesses? What can we do to improve your knowledge, experience, and skills in these weakness-areas to ensure you become a more capable-manager? So when we say someone is a capable-manager, we are explicitly letting others know this manager knows what it is they need to be doing as a manager, over and above the functional aspects of their role.

Might be their planning, organizing, reporting, and budgeting is exceptional so they are very capable in these areas of management. But they may have gaps in knowledge about directing projects or they might lack experience in organizing a search and selection process to find the best recruits. They might have a great deal of knowledge about coordination. Perhaps an academic understanding gained from off-the-job training. But because they have no experience of improving their coordination, their coordinating-skill is poor; so this manager is not a capable coordinator.

Through understanding the differences between management-skills and management-capabilities, we can help develop more effective managers by focusing attention on areas of weakness in either knowledge or experience. If we identify managers who are skillful and are capable because of their knowledge and experience, then they know what to do. But knowing what to do as a manager does not mean you know how to be a good manager and leader of people.

How we manage, how we conduct ourselves when carrying out our management processes, activities, and tasks, defines our management-competencies. Our attitudes and our consistent-behaviors as a manager define our leadership-competencies. To be competent, you need great management capabilities as well as outstanding attitudes and consistent-behaviors.