The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) deployed its new Management Competency Assessment Tool, or MCAT, during a briefing to federal civilian agencies yesterday afternoon. In her January 25th memo to the Chief Human Capital Officers, Director Linda Springer stated:

“The MCAT is a Web-based instrument for assessing the skill levels of managers, supervisors, team leaders, and others in key leadership and performance management competencies. It allows an individual to conduct a self assessment and receive a supervisory assessment to determine competency strengths and areas for improvement. Agencies can use the results of the assessments to support their leadership competency gap analysis, succession management, and development efforts.”

According to a Government Executive article published yesterday, MCAT applies a five-level scale across twenty-eight leadership and six performance management competencies. GovExec also reports that the system is not mandatory, which is somewhat surprising given the results from the 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey which show that only 49% of respondents have a high level of respect for their organization’s senior leaders (question 36), with only 38% agreeing that their leaders generate high levels of motivation and commitment in the workforce (question 37).

With employee attraction and retention continuing to challenge both civilian and military agencies, significant enhancements to leadership approaches, accountability and sustainability need to occur. MCAT does represent a positive development, but without required participation, OPM may not see demonstrable results for quite some time.

Let’s keep the conversation going.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under Human Capital/Human Resources, Public Sector. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.