Strategy maps are diagrams that draw a company or department’s strategy, and we could say that they are the strategy’s “plans”, which like building plans are used to discuss, communicate and check the suitability and adjustment of the strategy before carrying it out.

From the four typical perspectives from the Kaplan and Norton model in a strategy map, the fourth is normally called “Learning and Growth Perspective”, “Impulse Perspective” or “Potentials Perspective” amongst other names and is the most important perspective, as they are foundations on which all the strategy are based on. It is structured in:

I. Human Capital: The team, their skills, motivation, and knowledge and talent we have.

II. Information Capital The information the people have available for working with. Often related to IT and technology.

III. Organizational Capital: The organizational processes we have, leadership, habits, etc.

Well then, it is in the first point “Human Capital” that the competences play an important role. We will first see that it is not necessary to assess the Human Capital of all the company (that will be HR’s job). What we are really interested in is seeing which work post families are relevant for the strategy we are defining. Given a specific strategy, we can normally find 3 or 4 large families, representing the key part of all the available HR. They could be for example: sales team, marketing, customer services and technical service, in a hypothetical customer oriented strategy.

Once the families of strategic posts have been detected, which competences are needed are assessed, either because we do not have them or because we do and must promote them.

What is a competence? Competence management tries to define what behaviours and skills make a person better in their job to obtain business objectives. These behaviours or skills are called competences.

To continue this example, perhaps due to a specific growth strategy, the sales force:

1. Were lacking analytical capacity

2. Did not have a method

3. Did not have communication with other work teams

The second competence (method) is found in a low or inexistent level and we must therefore introduce it. The first and third competences must be promoted, in other words, the competences have levels and we can define: which level currently exists, which level is necessary and therefore the gap that needs to be covered. The grading is typically between 3 and 5 levels, for example: (1) Inexistent (2) low (3) medium (4) good and (5) excellent. It should be pointed out that it is important to describe a competence properly, as well as the different levels we are talking about, with sufficient examples and in writing, so that people are clear about what we expect from them. The way to strengthen competences is different and includes such broad tools as coaching and training.

Competences make people become a member of the strategy and show them that to obtain their objectives they must improve some skills, habits and behaviours . Competence management is a project related to the Balance Scorecard in the sense that it develops strategic competences that are needed to carry out the strategy and it offers very interesting benefits such as communicating to people what is expected from them, help to promote them, creating a defined and positive framework to discuss how to improve, and relates all of this with strategic plans.