Part #1: Introduction to Lominger Competencies

31 May 2026, Singapore: Hyperlink to Part 2 - Lominger Competencies List & Definition; Hyperlink to Part #3 - Mapping Lominger Competencies to 4 Levels of Leadership Pipeline

Lominger Competencies: The Leadership Framework That Actually Scales

Most competency models are either too vague (“be strategic”) or too academic. The Lominger Leadership Architect® is different. It was built from data, not theory — and that’s why it’s still the backbone of succession and development in Fortune 500s 30 years later.

What is it?

Developed by Mike Lombardo and Bob Eichinger at Lominger Limited (later Korn Ferry), the framework started with a simple question: what separates people who succeed as they move up from those who stall?

They interviewed thousands of executives, studied performance data, and codified 67 observable behaviors — called competencies — that predict success across roles, functions, and industries.

Each competency is defined in one sentence, has clear “skilled vs unskilled” behaviors, and comes with development tips. No fluff.

The 67 sit in 4 clusters: 

Why it stuck

1. It’s behavioral, not trait-based. You’re not rated on “charisma.” You’re rated on “34. Managerial Courage: provides direct, actionable feedback.”
2. It scales across the pipeline. The same 67 work for an IC, a first-line manager, a manager of managers, and a CEO. What changes is which ones matter most.
3. It includes the dark side. Lominger added 19 “Career Stallers and Stoppers” — derailers like Arrogant, Overmanaging, Betrayal of Trust. These explain why talented people fail.
4. Development is baked in. Every competency comes with on-the-job learning tactics (70-20-10), not just training courses.

How companies use it

1. Hiring & Assessment

Instead of “5 years of experience,” job profiles pick 6-8 competencies. Ex: a Product Manager might need 14. Creativity, 51. Problem Solving, 31. Interpersonal Savvy, 16. Timely Decision Making.

2. Performance & 360s

VOICES® 360 asks raters to score the 67. You get a heat map of strengths, gaps, and hidden derailers.

3. Succession

Map competencies to leadership levels:

• Leading Self (IC): 24. Functional/Technical Skills, 53. Drive for Results, 29. Integrity and Trust
• Leading Others: 18. Delegation, 19. Developing Direct Reports, 34. Managerial Courage
• Leading Leaders: 59. Managing Through Systems, 58. Strategic Agility, 5. Business Acumen
• Leading Organization: 65. Managing Vision and Purpose, 38. Organizational Agility

4. Development

Lominger’s research showed 70% of development happens on the job. So each competency includes “stretch assignments.” Ex: low on 8. Comfort Around Higher Management? Present to the exec team quarterly.

The big insight: Success changes as you move up

The trap most companies make is promoting people for what made them great at the last level.

• The best engineer (high on 24. Functional/Technical Skills) often fails as a manager if they never build 18. Delegation.
• The best manager (high on 20. Directing Others) often fails as a director if they stay tactical and never develop 58. Strategic Agility.
• The best director often fails as a VP if they can’t let go of control — 59. Managing Through Systems.

Lominger makes that shift visible.

Limitations to know

• It’s comprehensive, which can feel like 67 things to fix. Good practice: focus on 2-3 per year.
• It was built in a US corporate context in the 1990s. Some language feels dated (“Command Skills”), but the behaviors hold.
• It’s not a personality test. It measures what you do, not who you are.

Bottom line

The Lominger Competencies Framework gives you a common language for talent. Instead of saying “she’s not ready,” you can say “she’s strong on Drive for Results and Customer Focus but needs work on Delegation and Developing Direct Reports before leading a team.”

That clarity is why it’s lasted — and why it still powers Korn Ferry’s assessments today.

Three Reasons Performance Management will Change ....

09 August 2014, Singapore: This is an article worth reading. It is written by Sylvia Vorhauser-Smith. It is not my usual "short & sweet" but a bit lengthy. Happy reading!

Click the hyperlink if you want to read it from the source: 3 Reason Performance Management will Change in 2013

Three Reasons Performance Management will Change in 2013

By Sylvia Vorhauser-Smith

Is there any organizational practice more broken than performance management? Not if you concur with Marc Effron & Miriam Ort who state “perhaps no talent management process is more important or more reviled than performance management.” In fact, it draws universal agreement on several fronts:

• everyone hates it – employees and managers alike
• nobody does it well – it’s a skill that seemingly fails to be acquired despite exhaustive training efforts, and
• it fails the test of construct validity – it doesn't do what it was designed to do, i.e. increase performance

Traditional performance management programs have become organization wallpaper. They exist in the background with little or no expectations for impact. Yet despite its poor popularity, the concept of performance (at an individual and organizational level) is critical to business success. It can’t just be ignored.

Why is it so broken?

In a large survey conducted by WorldatWork, 58% of organizations rated their performance management systems as “C Grade or below.” That gets a giggle. The performance management process itself gets subjected to its own methods of setting criteria and rating performance against them – and fails.

I believe there are three reasons almost all current performance management systems are broken:

1. People have changed
2. Technology has changed
3. People’s relationship with their technology has changed

Repairing the damage?  In order to compete in today’s market, companies must move to adopt a much more agile performance management approach.

People HAVE CHANGED

Employee expectations have changed. It’s not just Gen Y – employees everywhere and of every generation expect more. More involvement, more accountability, and more transparency. When it comes to managing their performance, employees have shifted from being passive recipients to active agents. Not satisfied with a one-way download of performance feedback, employees want to participate in the performance data collection process. And they liken the ‘annual event’ of a performance review to arriving at the pearly gates on Judgment Day.

Managers have changed too. Command and control is no longer cutting it – managers are expected to guide and coach, provide balanced constructive feedback and inspire, rather than enforce, performance.

Add to that what science is now telling us about what really drives human motivation. Like, goal pursuit motivates performance much more than goal achievement, peak performance is best achieved in states of flow, and multi-tasking only dilutes performance on all tasks undertaken concurrently.

Key Changes for High Performance?

Paradigm shift. What used to work no longer does. Managers need to:

1) be real – communicate openly and often.

2) set stretch goals and inspire individuals to work to their potential.

3)  get out of the way – trust their teams and empower employees with accountability.

Technology HAS CHANGED

We’re reaching a tipping point for technology in the talent management arena. It began with simple automation: take the paper processes and put them on a computer. Fine, but that left us with so many spreadsheets, Word templates, proprietary systems and disconnected point solutions that we were drowning in complexity and data overload. It also highlighted that many of the processes we were automating actually needed to be revised, simplified or eliminated altogether.

Baffled by the complexity we created, focus in recent years has been on process simplification, user-friendliness and redirecting attention to what actually matters. A good step forward, but we still suffer from too much data, too little meaningful information.

The “big data & analytics movement” has now really raised the bar – not just in terms of what data can be gathered, aggregated and analyzed but also how it is filtered and presented to audiences to provide immediate management insights. Activity lists are being replaced by composite dashboards, lengthy reports by simple performance heat maps – yes, pictures, literally replacing thousands of words.

Key Change for High Performance?

A shift in focus from process to outcomes. Burn the forms. With technology finally up to the task of producing meaningful information, managers can turn their attention to driving performance outcomes rather than being bogged down in laborious processes.

The relationship between people and their technology

On demand. Ubiquitous. Better, faster, cheaper.

It’s really not so long ago that your only likely encounter with a computer was when you went to work, laptops were expensive and rare, and mobile devices were pagers and Walkmans. Today, can you even imagine getting past 10:00 a.m. without having accessed a myriad of your online applications? We work online, shop online, socialize online, we are connected 24/7 – online.

Enterprise technologies are not far behind. Perhaps you are still in a workplace that restricts or bans social media, but they are in decline. Perhaps your organization refuses cloud-based applications for privacy or security reasons, but they are in decline. The fact is: organizations that try to block out the world simply ostracize themselves. And they are in decline.

Key Change for High Performance?

An agile, social and mobile work environment. You will set dynamic goals and adjust them in response to change; your manager will provide just-in-time coaching wherever you are; skills and knowledge you need will be recommended and streamed to you; your performance journal will continuously capture and cluster feedback, ideas and suggestions from your peers and customers; your formal annual performance review will be permanently deleted from your calendar…and you will finally be in a position to manage your own career.

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Literature Review: Performance Management

03 January 2014, Singapore: Just want to share with you the history of performance management / appraisal. Thanks to Christopher Mills

Exhibit 1: A Historical Flowchart of Performance Management Approaches

(Source: Performance Management under The Microscope - Christopher Mills (2002) - SHRi Publication)

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