Leadership competencies: behaviors, not a framework

Somewhere in a shared drive at almost every company over a few hundred people, there is a leadership competency model. It has eight or twelve or thirty-four entries — Strategic Vision, Drives Results, Builds Inclusive Teams, Demonstrates Executive Presence — each with a paragraph of definition and a five-point scale. It was expensive to produce. It is referenced twice a year, during reviews, and forgotten the rest of the time. And here is the quiet truth almost nobody says out loud: no one has ever become a meaningfully better leader by reading one.

That's not because the competencies named in it are wrong. "Communicates clearly" and "develops others" really are things good leaders do. The problem is the form. A competency model is a map of the territory written at the altitude of a satellite — accurate, comprehensive, and useless for deciding which street to turn down. It tells you that "strategic thinking" matters. It does not tell you that in last week's planning meeting you jumped to the solution before anyone had finished describing the problem, three times. The first is a label. The second is something you could actually change.

This pillar is built on that distinction, and this piece is the argument for it. If you want to get better at leading, the competency framework is the wrong unit of work. The right one is the behavior underneath it.

Where competency models came from, and what they were for

It helps to know the framework wasn't designed for you. The modern competency movement grew up inside large organizations as a tool for systems, not individuals — a common vocabulary so that a hiring panel in one division and a promotion committee in another could claim to be measuring the same thing. Its jobs were selection, calibration, and defensibility: deciding who to hire, ranking people consistently across managers who'd never met, and producing a paper trail that would survive a disputed termination.

Those are real organizational problems, and a competency grid is a reasonable answer to them. But notice that not one of those jobs is your development. The model exists to let an institution compare many people cheaply, which is exactly why it operates in abstractions — you can't run a thousand people through "in the March incident review, did you ask a clarifying question before assigning blame?" You can only run them through "Accountability: 1–5." The abstraction is a feature for the org and a bug for the individual. When you inherit the org's tool to work on yourself, you inherit a vocabulary optimized for comparison and stripped of everything that would tell you what to do on Monday.

A competency is a cluster of behaviors

Take any line off a competency model and the same move works. "Strategic thinking" isn't a substance you have more or less of; it's shorthand for a set of behaviors — you ask what problem you're actually solving before proposing how, you connect this quarter's work to a destination you can name, you say no to good ideas that don't serve the direction. "Develops others" decomposes into: you give people work slightly beyond their current level, you debrief it, you let them keep the credit. "Executive presence," that most slippery of competencies, is mostly just: you speak in claims rather than throat-clearing, you don't flood the room, you stay legible under pressure.

This decomposition is the whole trick, and it cuts both ways. It means a competency you're "bad at" is never a verdict on who you are — it's a small number of specific behaviors you currently do or don't do, each of which is learnable. And it means a competency you want to develop becomes tractable the moment you name the two or three behaviors that constitute it for your role. "Get better at strategic thinking" is a New Year's resolution. "Before proposing a solution, write down the problem in one sentence and check whether the room agrees" is a thing you can do on Tuesday and notice on Friday.

Why the behavior is the only part you can work on

There's a deeper reason to drop to the behavior level than just tractability: it's the only level feedback can actually reach. Ask a colleague to rate your "leadership effectiveness" on a five-point scale and you'll get a number that says more about how much they like you than about anything you did. Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall laid out the uncomfortable evidence in The Feedback Fallacy: humans are unreliable raters of other humans on abstract qualities, and most of a competency score turns out to be noise — the rater's own tendencies and mood, not a clean read on you. Rate the abstraction and you measure the rater. Ask about the behavior — "when I disagreed with you in the standup, how did that land?" — and suddenly there's something real to report, because the person was there for it.

Behaviors are observable, which means they're the unit other people can give you honest signal on. Competencies are interpretations, which means asking about them just invites more interpretation. If you want feedback that changes anything, you have to ask at the altitude where the other person actually has data.

The catch: you can't see your own behaviors

Which leads to the move that makes this whole approach work — and the reason it isn't just "set behavioral goals and try harder." The behaviors that make up your competencies are largely invisible to you. You experience your intentions; everyone else experiences your behavior, and the two diverge more than anyone is comfortable admitting. The researcher Tasha Eurich, who has studied this at scale, found that most people believe they're self-aware and most people are wrong — we are confident, specifically, about the parts of ourselves others see most clearly and we see least.

So you can't develop a competency by introspection alone, and you can't develop it from a framework that only describes the destination. The mechanism that actually works is a loop: form an honest picture of how you think you behave, get the people around you to tell you how you actually behave, look hard at the gap, change one behavior, and re-measure later to see if it moved. This is the same reason some leadership skills are impossible to develop alone — the perception-level ones are invisible from the inside by definition. It's why self-assessment has to come before peer feedback: the gap between the two is the signal. And it's why the questions you ask have to be anchored to specific behaviors, not to the competency labels, or you'll get back the same flattering noise the rating scale produces.

A competency framework gives you the list. The feedback loop is the engine. The framework without the engine is a poster on the wall.

You don't need a model. You need three behaviors.

Here's the practical liberation in all of this: as an individual leader — a manager, a founder, a senior contributor who picked up a team — you do not need your company's thirty-four-item competency model, and you definitely don't need to build your own. Comprehensive coverage is an organizational requirement, not a personal one. You are one person trying to get better, and getting better happens one behavior at a time.

What you need is much smaller. Pick the handful of competencies that actually matter for the leader you're trying to become. For each, name the two or three behaviors that constitute it in your specific role. Find out, from people who see you work, which of those behaviors you already do and which you only think you do. Then work on one — in a loop, not a workshop. The leaders who develop fastest aren't the ones with the most complete model of leadership; they're the ones who've found the one behavior with the highest return and are deliberately, observably changing it while everyone watches.

That's the inversion this whole pillar runs on. The framework asks, "where do you sit on every dimension of leadership?" The better question — the only one that produces change — is, "which specific behavior, if you changed it, would your team notice first?"

Find your behaviors before you pick one to change

You can't choose the behavior with the highest return until you can see your behaviors clearly, and you can't do that from inside your own head. That's the gap Mirorly is built to close. It's a 360 review you run on yourself first: you answer a set of behaviorally-anchored questions about how you lead, send the same questions to the people you work with, and read your self-view next to theirs. The core leadership behaviors template is where most people start — not a competency grid to be scored against, but a dozen concrete behaviors, your honest answers first, and a clear picture of where how-you-think-you-lead and how-you-actually-lead pull apart. That gap is your shortlist. Everything else in this pillar is about what to do with it.

The shift, in one place

• A competency model is a map of leadership written for organizations to compare people, not for a person to improve. Don't mistake the org's tool for your own.
• Every competency is a cluster of specific behaviors. The label is for filing; the behavior is where the work is.
• "Get better at X" is a wish. "Do this specific behavior, in this situation, and watch what happens" is a plan.
• Feedback can only reach the behavior level. Ask people to rate an abstraction and you measure the rater, not yourself.
• You can't see your own behaviors from the inside — most people who feel self-aware aren't. The loop of self-view, peer-view, and the gap between them is how the invisible parts become workable.
• You don't need a thirty-item model. You need the few behaviors that matter for the leader you're becoming, and the honesty to find out which ones you actually do.