How to Identify Essential Frontline Manager Competencies

Summary:

To identify essential frontline manager competencies, align leadership behaviors to business goals, assess current skill gaps, and focus development on the capabilities that drive success. Learn the five steps to building a competency-based frontline leadership development program.

What does it take to be a good manager? It’s one of the top questions we hear from clients and leaders alike, who are trying to define what good leadership looks like in their company culture. They often begin by trying to define the essential frontline manager competencies, but it turns out to be a lot harder than they think. After all, there are a lot of great qualities you want to see in your leaders. How do you boil it down to the most essential behaviors your leaders need?

The good news is that identifying essential frontline manager competencies doesn't have to be complicated. By focusing on the behaviors that drive business results and leadership success, you can build a competency framework that guides hiring, development, and promotion decisions. Here's how to identify the right frontline manager competencies and use them to maximize the impact of your leadership development program.

Why Should Leadership Development Be Competency-Based?

Before diving into the competencies themselves, let’s start with why leadership development should be competency-based in the first place. First, let’s talk about competencies themselves. A competency is a cluster of specific behaviors and capabilities, centered around a single construct, that a leader needs to demonstrate to achieve success in a particular job.

Some companies don’t include competencies when developing their leaders, using a more unstructured approach to learning about leadership topics. But that can create a deeply chaotic leadership environment. If every leader is doing something different, how do you define your leadership culture? How do you evaluate the success of your leaders and measure progress?

When talent development professionals take the time to define the competencies needed for success, it can yield major payoffs. A competency framework creates a common leadership language that defines what great leadership looks like across the organization. By connecting business goals to specific leadership behaviors, competencies help leaders understand where to focus their development and how success will be measured. They also create alignment across hiring, development, performance management, and succession planning, making leadership development more intentional, measurable, and impactful.

The caveat, however, is that competency models shouldn't become an endless exercise in perfection. The goal isn't to identify every possible leadership behavior; it's to identify the competencies that matter most for success in your organization. Start with the competencies most closely tied to your business priorities, then refine them over time as leadership expectations and organizational needs evolve.

In short, don't wait for the perfect competency model. Start with the right one.

Criteria for Effective Frontline Manager Competency Models

While it’s important to have competencies for your frontline managers, not all competencies are created alike. How can you tell a strong competency model from a weak one?

While I could write about this topic alone for a while, I’ll briefly mention three important criteria when building a competency model for frontline managers:

• Align to strategic business priorities. Too often, HR’s strategy is divorced from the business strategy. For example, if your company strategy depends on driving innovation and expanding into new markets, but your competency model is primarily focused on behaviors linked to driving process efficiency, you won’t maximize the impact your development, selection, and succession efforts can have on your business goals. 
• Differentiate for leader levels. Many companies try to use a single competency to reflect a certain skill. But the behaviors are often different at each level. For example, effective communication at the frontline leader level primarily takes place in conversations, performance management, and some presentations. Meanwhile, great communication at the executive level looks very different. So when creating a frontline manager competency model, make sure the competencies are specifically geared toward frontline manager actions.
• Focus on observable behaviors. This is a big one. Poorly defined competencies focus on outcomes and leave a lot open to interpretation. Instead, competencies need to be focused on clear, observable actions. At DDI, we call these key actions. You need to know exactly what it looks like to perform the competency well.

Competency-Focused Leadership Development in 5 Steps

So now that you understand what makes for an effective frontline manager competency model, what are the steps for designing a competency-focused leadership development program?

Here are five steps:

1. Identify business drivers.

Question to ask: What’s the bigger picture?

At DDI, we refer to business drivers as the top 3-4 challenges that executives and senior leaders consider most critical to their organization's future success. These might include driving innovation, creating a high-performance culture, building strong customer relationships, and similar high-level business objectives. While a lot of companies want to say, “We’re trying to do all of these things,” the goal is to narrow it down to your top 3-4 most important challenges.

2. Identify critical frontline manager competencies.

Question to ask: What drives leadership success?

Once you have these identified, each specific business driver is supported by competencies that fuel the strategy. For example, if one of your organization’s business drivers is to foster a high-performance culture, the associated frontline manager competencies would focus on inspiring others, coaching, and guiding team success.

In addition to these business-specific competencies, you may want to include foundational leadership competencies that consistently drive success, as well as future-focused skills that prepare leaders for emerging business challenges. DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast shows organizations expect leadership skill requirements to change significantly over the next five years, making it critical to balance current needs with future readiness.

3. Diagnose competency strengths and weaknesses.

Question to ask: What’s strong and what’s weak now?

Once you’ve identified the business drivers and their relevant competencies, you can then assess your frontline leaders’ current strengths and weaknesses. A best practice is to use objective assessment data to gain these insights into capability. If you don’t have assessment data, focus on performance reviews, culture surveys, or other organizational feedback. Armed with this data, you can choose which strengths to leverage and which weaknesses to bolster to achieve your organization’s highest-priority results.

4. Focus development goals and action plans.

Question to ask: Which actions get the best results?

Help leaders create competency-based development goals and action plans. You could offer your leaders training, coaching, digital learning, and practice opportunities to build their skills. To accelerate and sustain their learning and motivation, you might also subscribe to learning platforms, research resources, or coaching services. 

5. Set up support.

Question to ask: How do I maintain momentum?

Check in with leaders to understand how they’re feeling about development. What can you do to make sure development sticks? Are leaders struggling to access learning or practice key skills? Understand the challenges and strive to remove barriers to your leaders' development. And once your program is up and running, make continuous improvement a pillar. Ask your leaders what’s working and what’s not and take their feedback to heart.

Identifying Critical Frontline Manager Competencies

Now, let’s dive a little deeper into identifying the frontline manager competencies you need. In the previous section, I discussed how to identify unique competencies aligned with your business strategy.

In addition, you may want to pull in some of the foundational competencies that nearly all frontline leaders need. Here are a few of the most common:

• Communication
• Building partnerships
• Coaching
• Decision making
• Facilitating change
• Execution

However, the demands on frontline managers continue to evolve. Today’s leaders must navigate rapid technological change, increasing workforce expectations, economic uncertainty, and ongoing talent shortages. As a result, several leadership competencies have become increasingly important for long-term success.

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast found that 83% of HR organizations expect a significant increase in the need for new leadership capabilities over the next five years. Yet many of the skills leaders view as most critical remain underdeveloped.

Based on the report, the largest leadership capability gaps across organizations today include:

• Setting strategy
• Managing change
• Identifying and developing future talent
• Decision making and prioritization

While some of these competencies are often associated with more senior leaders, frontline managers play a critical role in translating strategy into action, leading change, developing talent, and making effective day-to-day decisions.

Explore DDI's leadership competencies framework and learn how competency-based development helps organizations build stronger frontline leaders.