What Learning to Ride a Bike Taught Me about Competencies

When I was 12 years old, my parents gave me my first bike. A thing of beauty, this bike was a 12-speed silver number. In my pre-bike life, I would sit on my front porch watching my friends roam the neighborhood like a nomadic tribe. So when I finally got my bike, I knew I was one step closer to becoming a member of the tribe, with nothing but freedom and adventure ahead of me. There was just one small glitch though –  I did not know how to ride a bike.
 
 In the American context, age 12 is rather late in childhood to learn to ride a bike. Yet, I had been watching people on bikes for so long that I considered myself to be pretty bike savvy – little kids on their tricycles learning to pedal under the watchful gaze of their parents and boys with the confidence of daredevils, though barely older than I was at the time, wheezing by at breakneck speed. So, when I finally got my bike, I thought “How hard could it be?” After the first attempts to get my feet on the pedal while trying to stay upright, I realized that riding a bike is not as easy as it looks.
 
What was unbeknownst to me, before attempting to teach myself how to ride a bike, is the number of things I needed to know (like how to use the brakes!) and the number of actions my muscles would have to memorize (like how to keep my balance) before I could stay upright and then pedal without falling. What I did not appreciate until much later is the number of competencies I had to master in order to become one with the neighborhood kids who formed the nomadic tribe in search of adventure.
 
What is a Competency?
Anytime a person is doing something, whether opening an umbrella or writing an article, there are things the person needs to know and things the person needs to be able to do. A competency is a combination of the knowledge applied (also known as skills) and behaviors necessary to complete an activity efficiently and effectively. Since people are continually performing new tasks, a person acquires competencies at any stage of life or career.
 
Why Do Competencies Matter?
Competencies focus on the skills and behaviors a person needs to perform optimally in the present as well as in the future. For example, learning to ride a bike gave me the technical know-how and confidence foundational to learning to how to roller skate the following year. For this reason, competencies are considered to be forward looking because they create the conditions for a person to keep adopting new knowledge and skills or increase their proficiency within the same competency. This is what allows a child to transition from tricycle to bicycle.
 
Not all competencies are created equal.
Some competencies, like constructing a polite greeting, are very common and everyone knows how to do them. Other competencies, such as problem solving, are also important but not everyone excels at them. Rarer still are competencies, such as conflict management, that an organization needs to have in large supply but very few people possess. When categorized, these make up three levels of competencies.
 
Level I: Price of Admission Competencies (High Supply)
A mix of skills that everyone needs and almost everyone has but which do not set the average performer apart.
 
Level II: Leveraging Competencies (Moderate Supply)
A mix of skills that everyone needs but most people either do not have or have not achieved mastery.
 
Level III: Competitive Competencies (Low Supply)
A mix of skills that an organization needs but few have or are working on acquiring.
 
What is a Competency Assessment?
A competency assessment is a tool used to evaluate the degree to which a person can complete an activity in an optimal way. This tool usually takes the form of a set of questions to answer or an activity to complete.
 
For me, the competency assessment moment came when I joined the kids in my neighborhood for a bike ride. Wobbly, I had trouble taking the turns as quickly as they could. After all, I knew the mechanics of bike riding but I was inexperienced. Within a few days, however, I was much better able to keep up, which convinced me that, while I still lagged in my degree of mastery, I was getting much better.
 
Types of Competency Assessments
There are several ways to gauge a person's degree of proficiency and mastery. These three are most commonly used competencies:

Self-Assessment
The individual uses personal experience to determine a level of proficiency in each competency. For example, as I was learning to ride my bike, I could tell how inexperienced I was compared to the kids who were very comfortable on their bikes just as I could tell that I was getting better.
                                                                                  
Peer-based Assessment
Colleagues, selected by someone senior like a supervisor (sometimes with input from employee) determine the person’s proficiency in one or more competencies based on their observations. For example, while the kids in the neighborhood let me ride along, they could see that I had trouble taking turns. So they would wait for me a little ahead in order to let me take the corners at my own speed and still be able to catch up.
 
360°  Assessment
A 360° assessment is a broadening of the evaluators to include not just the person and peers, but also the person’s supervisor, as well as any other stakeholders whose input will add value to the employee’s development. For example, when I first started to learn to ride my bike, my sisters and my parents would often watch me in support and would give me feedback on how well I was doing or what I needed to do differently.
 
Competencies are invisible to the untrained eye yet essential for performing any task or activity effectively. When I was learning to ride my bicycle, having a breakdown of the various steps to master, as well as the best way to master those steps, would have enabled me to be more psychologically prepared. Also, it would have alerted me to the fact that investing in knee pads is a very wise choice.