Success Stories

Competency Modeling

Health Care and Retailer Company

To help this client keep pace through its periods of growth and transformation, Cambria’s first step was to develop competency models for all professional, managerial, and executive positions. Following the company’s acquisition of a major health care provider, we worked with the inside client team to redefine the competency requirements of leaders at all levels in keeping with a new business strategy and expanding market opportunities.

Subsequently, we created position-specific competencies for all roles in retail operations (store managers, regional and district managers, and pharmacists) as well as the professionals in the company’s walk-in clinics. All of this was designed to upgrade skills and performance levels throughout the company to a new high-performance standard. The client has implemented the competency models, built on a common competency language that translates across all roles and levels, in performance management and training programs for each of these positions.
 

Professional Services Firm

Cambria was brought in to play the key role in an engagement code-named “Top Talent Project”. It involved a study of three unusually successful partners at the pinnacle of their careers to identify the key competencies and traits that they had in common, as well as others that distinguish them as individuals. The goal was to understand what made them exceptional, so that the firm could recruit other high-potential people, identify others with the same characteristics early in their careers, and develop a pipeline of leadership talent over time.

The study identified the key abilities and traits of the partners as a group but also the distinguishing characteristics that were unique to each and the career experiences that were pivotal to those partners during early and mid-career development. Recommendations included how to spot top talent early, breaking the normal upward trajectory of high-potentials with substantive lateral moves, and how to keep future top talent engaged and retained within the firm.
 

Investment Management

This firm, which was noted for its comprehensive approach to leadership development, needed to develop a talent management framework that could be used across the enterprise. Historically, each of its business units had its own process and criteria for developing talent, which did not serve the need to have a consistent way of identifying and developing people for key senior management roles.

Cambria collaborated with the company’s HR team to create a talent development architecture accommodating technical and business knowledge, key work experiences, leadership behaviors, and personal characteristics to be used in hiring, performance management, training and development, career development, and succession planning. The centerpiece of this architecture, the Leadership Success Profile, was a set of leadership competencies defined by organizational level and validated through interviews with top performers in line and staff functions.

This model was implemented via enterprise-wide 360-degree feedback and became the foundation of its leadership development programs. Subsequently, following a change in strategy, Cambria was engaged again to refine, simplify, and realign the Leadership Success Profile to the new business direction and priorities.