How to Know What Your People Actually Need to Develop
In the last post, I made the case that development is a strategic lever that connects People, Strategy, and Revenues, and that off-the-shelf training (while it has its place) rarely closes a real gap.
The follow-up question is the practical one. If you are not starting with a catalog, what do you start with?
You start with identifying the gaps that need to be bridged.
Most development plans are built backward. Someone identifies a budget, a platform, or a program that worked somewhere else, and then looks for people to put through it. Completion numbers go up, but behavior does not change and results do not improve. The reason is simple: nobody defined what was actually missing, for whom, and why it mattered to the business.
A gap analysis fixes that. It is the step that turns "we should invest in our people" into a specific, defensible plan.
Where we start
At TruePointe Horizon, we begin by looking at three pictures side by side.
What the business needs. What capabilities does the strategy require to execute? Where is execution slowing down today? What roles, skills, and judgment calls will matter most in the next 12 to 24 months?
What your people can do now. Not what the org chart says, and not what job descriptions claim. What people are actually demonstrating, with evidence, in the work.
The distance between them. That distance is the gap, and it is where development should focus.
The gap is rarely one thing. Sometimes it is a skill. Sometimes it is experience someone has not had yet. Sometimes it is confidence, visibility, or access to feedback they are not getting. Sometimes it is a person in the wrong role, and no amount of training will fix that.
Naming the needs and identifying the opportunities begin to build the roadmap forward.
Focus on competency
Competency can be defined as a specific, observable combination of knowledge, skill, ability, and judgment that determines whether someone can perform successfully in a particular role or situation. A good competency assessment defines the specific behaviors that drive performance in your context and then measures performance against them.
The assessment is also one of the foundational pillars of competency-based development. In the last post, I described competency-based development as preparing individuals and teams for the future needs of the business, including skills and knowledge that may not be relevant today but will be hard to find by the time you need them. You cannot do that without a way to measure where you stand today against those same competencies. Assessment is what makes that intention real instead of aspirational.
A useful competency assessment has four parts:
The competency set. This breaks down into two subsets. Core competencies are relevant to everyone, and role competencies are specific to the job role. The competency set is four to six competencies that actually matter in your business, drawn from your strategy and your operating reality, not copied from a generic library.
Behavior anchors. How do you demonstrate proficiency in the competency? What does good look like in practice on an average Thursday morning? Without anchors (specific and measurable behaviors, clearly defined), ratings are just opinions with numbers attached.
More than one lens. Self-assessment, the manager's view, input from peers or direct reports, and evidence from the actual work. Each lens corrects for the blind spots of the others. A 360 view helps to disrupt bias.
The forward-looking competencies. The ones you are deliberately developing ahead of the need, so the capability exists before the business depends on it.
What you get back is a common language for capability, an honest baseline that provides a comparable view across teams, and a way to tell later whether your development investment moved anything at all.
One caution matters here. An assessment is a snapshot and a conversation starter, not a verdict. Ratings without a conversation create anxiety, not development. The value comes from what the leader and the person discuss afterward, and clarifying the expectation is all it takes to move performance forward.
Keep it simple
Start from strategy, not from people. Prioritize two or three pressures the business is dealing with over the next 18 months. Growth, margin, a new market, a leadership transition, a system change. Those pressures define what the assessment needs to test for, focusing the assessment on the areas where performance matters most.
Define the competencies those pressures require. Write the behavior anchors at three levels. Does the behavior demonstrate Advanced, Proficient, or Developing? This is the step most organizations skip, and it is the step that determines whether the results mean anything.
Assess with more than one lens. Run the assessment the same way for every person in scope so the results are comparable.
Separate individual gaps from organizational ones. If two people are weak in a competency, that is an individual development conversation. If most of the team is weak in it, that is an organizational gap and it needs a different response.
Choose the method after the gap is known. A skill gap points to targeted training. A behavior or mindset gap points to coaching. Judgment and context point to mentoring or stretch assignments. Direction and motivation point to career pathing. The method follows the need.
Put it on a rhythm. Revisit twice a year. A gap analysis done once and filed is a report, not a practice.
What the output should look like
Not a 40-page deck. A short, clear view: the top three organizational gaps, who owns each one, the method chosen for each, and what you will check and when. Underneath that, individual conversations with each person about where they stand and what they want to grow into.
If the output does not change what you do next quarter, it was not a gap analysis. It was paperwork and a lack of leadership commitment.
Where this usually needs help
Assessing capability honestly is hard to do from the inside. People protect their teams, ratings drift upward, and the competencies that matter most are often the ones leadership assumes are fine. An outside party facilitating the discussion gets more accurate answers faster, and asks questions nobody inside wants to raise.
That is why deep assessment and gap analysis is a core service offering at TruePointe Horizon. We build the competency picture from your business reality rather than a prepackaged curriculum, and we use it to design the development mix that actually fits the gaps we find. It can run as a standalone engagement if you only need clarity, or as the first phase of a broader development program you build out afterward. Either way, you get the gap named before anyone spends money trying to close it.
The bottom line
If you cannot name the gap, you cannot close it, and you cannot prove you closed it.
Development without a gap analysis is recurring cost with a good reputation, but no impact on the success of the business. Development that starts with an honest assessment of where your people are and where the business needs them to be becomes something else entirely: the most direct line between your people and your results. People. Strategy. Revenue!
Start with the gap. Everything after that gets easier, and carries a meaningful return on investment.
TruePointe Horizon helps leaders run the assessment, name the real gaps, and build the development mix that closes them. If you want to know where your development gaps actually are, we are ready to help you move forward with intention.