Improving Managerial Talent

18Moving on to personal competencies

In Section 1, it was suggested that competencies mediated between upstream personality factors and downstream measures of performance. Section 13 recapped how intelligence and three of the Big Five personality factors were found to connect with four specific, commonly used, competency clusters.

Personal competencies became a focus of interest in the mid-1980s, in the wake of Richard Boyatzis’ seminal book The competent manager. In the UK, Michael Wellin published a lesser-known volume, Behaviour Technology: A new approach to managing people at work. In this book, the author included 16 ‘Major problem-solving ...