Chief Talent Officer Roz Tsai on Thrivent’s Leadership Competency Model

The Next Practices Weekly call series has become a well-attended and wide-ranging discussion for HR leaders each Thursday at 11am ET / 8am PT. On this week's call, i4cp senior research analyst Tom Stone and i4cp community program manager Bethany Vogel facilitated a conversation with special guest Roz Tsai, Chief Talent Officer at Thrivent. Here are some highlights from the call:

  • Thrivent describes itself as being a "Fortune 500 diversified financial services organization, providing advice, investments, insurance, banking and generosity programs and solutions so people can make the most of all they’ve been given."
  • At Thrivent they define leadership competencies as the skills, behaviors, and mindsets that drive high performance. They are observable, measurable, and learnable. And they are the shared expectations of what great leadership looks like, and how they get work done at Thrivent to accelerate growth and their transformation journey.
  • Recently, Thrivent seized the opportunity to align and strengthen what great leadership looks like at the organization. Drivers of this included:
    • Bold transformation and growth ambitions
    • Rapidly evolving market and client expectations
    • Future-oriented requirements of workforce capabilities and ways of working
    • Leaders and employees with divergent backgrounds and leadership assumptions
  • Tsai shared that at Thrivent, their perspective is that leadership competencies are not just for people leaders: it's everyone's responsibility to lead.
  • Thrivent's new leadership competency model has nine competencies in three categories (for more description of each, see the slides above):
    • Model the Way:
      • Build Trusting Partnerships
      • Bring Expertise
      • Demonstrate Courage and Resilience
    • Rally the Team
      • Build Effective Teams
      • Foster Engagement
      • Develop Talent
    • Deliver Outcomes
      • Make Sound Decisions
      • Plan and Align Work
      • Drive Accountability
  • Participant Poll Question: What is your organization doing with its leadership competency model?
    • 27% We don't have one
    • 20% Our model is staying the same
    • 27% We intend to revise/refresh our model in 2024 or soon after
    • 26% We have recently updated our model
    • 0% We are decommissioning our model
  • Tsai shared how they have made this leadership competency model come to life in the organization. There were three avenues for this, with a few components in each:
    • Build buy-in:
      • Engage full executive leadership team throughout the process
      • Curate from over 110 leaders and employees across divisions, locations and levels
      • Enlist champions and role models
    • Launch and embed:
      • Start at the top: launch at Senior Leader Summit and during high-potential leadership development programs facilitated by trained senior leader peers.
      • Launch throughout the enterprise with support resources such as Training, Assessments, Development Guide, Story Videos, Monthly Meeting Starters, Interview Guide, etc.
    • Develop and reinforce:
      • Integrate into all leadership development programming, 360-assessments, and executive coaching processes.
      • Embed in recognition platform and leadership awards.
      • Build into performance management and talent review templates.
  • The process followed to develop the leadership competency model was quite rigorous, and included:
    • Year-long process
    • Engaged executive leadership team throughout the process
    • Curated through dozens of 1:1 interviews and focus groups with over 110 leaders and employees
    • Benchmarked against established leadership frameworks
    • Validation through external leadership SMEs
    • Prioritized based on critical needs of strategic objectives
    • Produced numerous short videos of illustrative leadership stories
  • Tsai shared many reflections and lessons learned from Thrivent's process and experience developing their leadership competencies model. These included:
    • Engagement builds buy-on
      • Gather executive team input from the get-go
      • Engage wide range of leaders and employees across levels, divisions and locations
      • Enlist champions and influencers to share illustrative and credible leadership stories,
        facilitate learning experiences, and sponsor training events
    • Relevance enhances adoption
      • Meet the organization at its moment of critical need. Drive clarity on the why & what we are solving for.
      • Prioritize the vital few competencies most needed in the organization to achieve its strategic objectives
      • Use wording that resonates with the organization, and illustrate with relatable behaviors and examples
    • Rigor ensures effectiveness
      • Use (or align to) well-established competencies for benchmarking, assessment, coaching and training purposes
      • Validate internally curated competencies against sound leadership frameworks
      • Test, revise and test again with leaders and employees to improve relevance, clarity, and usability
    • Integration increases staying power
      • Fully embed into as many talent processes as possible, in as many channels as possible
      • Plan for the multi-year journey of repetition, enhancements, and reinforcement to drive real impact over time

Links to resources shared on the call:

This event is approved for certification credits.