This week on the Distance Leader Podcast show 0109, we’re talking about different definitions of performance and leadership competencies. Here are some of our guiding questions:

How is a competence different than a skill or an aptitude?

What are some common competency approaches currently used in work environments?

You’ll hear it more and more in HR conversations: Competency-based hiring, competency definitions, and competency-level training. What exactly does the term “competency” mean? To uncover the definition, we’ll need to take a trip to the past.

What is a competency?

The short answer is simple: Outcomes-relevant measures of knowledge, skills, abilities, and traits and/or motives. This is a definition developed in 1973 by David McClelland. In 1973, McClelland questioned the reliability and validity of intelligence and aptitude tests in his paper. At the time, the United States had invested in the idea of standardized tests to assess and track students into colleges and employment. For example, police officers in Boston were being given vocabulary tests to determine if they were “right” for the job. That would have been great if the vocabulary was for police-related terms. However, the terms were totally unrelated to police work. What, then, were they measuring?

Alfred Binet and French Schooling

In the early 1900s, Alfred Binet was commissioned by the French government to explore student intelligence. Whether it was for students who needed additional support or were somehow more competent than their peers, there was no easy way to measure intelligence. Until Binet developed his approach to measuring intelligence, there was not really a good way to measure innate intelligence. French law required every student to attend school, so knowing which students would need remediation was extremely important. Binet and Theodore Simon developed a “mental age” approach that was designed to show which students were “below,” “above,” or “at” the physical age in their demonstrated intelligence. 

Since Binet’ and Simon’s work was heavily connected to schools, the concept of intelligence was also connected to grades and grading. Even though Binet himself did not believe that his testing was effective in every situation, as intelligence changed over time and could be impacted by something as simple as vocabulary differences, his theories were adopted with great abandon in the United States. Lewis Terman, working at Stanford University, developed a hybrid of the intelligence test, called the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. You probably know it as the intelligence quotient, or IQ, test: The IQ score was calculated by dividing the test taker’s mental age by his or her chronological age and then multiplying this number by 100. 

The long arms of the (intelligence) law

Schools in France and the US jumped on board with this quickly. Having a way to objectively measure students either before or during their entry into the educational system was considered a real advantage, especially since students who were not “smarter” on the IQ tests never had the option to take any higher-level courses. Grading became a corollary to IQ tests, indicating whether or not students were performing at an “average” level or above or below the average. The military used IQ tests to identify which roles recruits could fulfill, and colleges and universities decided that they could also be part of the process by developing standardized tests.

The roots of standardized tests go back to the beginning of the 1900s, and there are numerous court cases and research studies that show the bias of standardized tests have on English learners, people from poorer backgrounds, and people with less robust education. Whether it’s vocabulary, reading and writing skills, or experiential processing skills, standardized tests have been used to “grade” people for over 100 years.

Meanwhile, back to David McClelland in 1973…

McClelland realized that traits or skills were too