Defining Leadership by What Leaders Do: Talent Praxis' Blueprint for Competency-Driven Growth
Transformative leadership development begins when organizations stop guessing what good leadership looks like and start defining it with precision.
At Talent Praxis, we partner with organizations to translate informal leadership expectations into structured, behavior-based competencies that drive measurable business outcomes. Our approach moves beyond theory to help companies capture the leadership behaviors already being rewarded, make those patterns visible and consistent, and use them as the foundation for coaching, hiring, performance reviews, and succession planning.
1. Understanding Why Most Competency Models Fail to Create Lasting Change
Many companies already apply competencies informally. Promotions, performance reviews, even who gets high-profile projects—all of these decisions reflect certain leadership behaviors. The problem is that these expectations are rarely named, shared, or consistently applied.
Competency frameworks often fall short because they're:
Overly generic and disconnected from your unique business context
Misaligned with actual strategic priorities
Too complex for practical implementation
Lacking clear ownership or accountability measures
That's where Talent Praxis comes in. We help clients formalize existing patterns into behavior-based leadership models that are relevant, usable, and directly tied to business goals.
2. Identifying the Leadership Behaviors That Matter Most
Rather than importing someone else’s model or starting from scratch, we begin by uncovering what effective leadership already looks like in your organization.
Our discovery process includes:
Analyzing real-world decisions (promotions, terminations, 360s)
Mapping business priorities to required leadership capabilities
Capturing insights from high-performing leaders and their teams
Identifying consistent patterns across teams and departments
We ask questions like: In three years, what must our leaders be doing differently to succeed? Which leadership behaviors are creating value, and which are creating friction? What expectations are being reinforced through backchannels that should be made explicit?
The goal is to identify organizationally rewarded behaviors and make them visible, so you can scale what’s working.
3. Designing Practical and Actionable Competency Models
Competencies describe how the work is done. They are observable patterns of behavior shaped by the skills, traits, and expertise leaders use to drive results. At Talent Praxis, we focus on defining these behaviors clearly, rather than relying on vague strengths or leadership stereotypes. A strong leadership model gives people a concrete understanding of what great leadership looks like in practice.
Each Talent Praxis competency includes:
A clear, behavior-based definition
Observable actions and identifiable red flags
Real-world examples from your specific work environment
Supporting skills, traits, and expertise
Leveling with the evolution of the competencies across seniority
This creates clarity across the organization. Managers know what’s expected. Employees know what to aim for. And everyone has a shared language for discussing leadership effectiveness.
4. Aligning Leadership Competencies with Business Strategy
Leadership models shouldn’t exist in isolation from your company’s strategic goals. We ensure that competencies reflect both your current environment and the future you’re building toward.
For example, if scaling sustainably is a top priority, we help define what it means to:
“Lead through ambiguity”
“Optimize resource allocation”
“Delegate for scale”
These behaviors then shape coaching conversations, hiring decisions, and performance evaluations.
By aligning competencies with your business strategy, you ensure that leadership development directly builds the behaviors, decision-making skills, and management capabilities required to advance your company’s top priorities and objectives.
5. Embedding Competencies Across the Employee Experience
A competency model only creates value if it’s consistently used. That’s why we focus on embedding your framework across the full employee lifecycle.
We help clients integrate leadership competencies into:
Onboarding and orientation programs
Coaching and development initiatives
Performance reviews and promotion criteria
Feedback systems and recognition programs
Team-level training and workshops
When competencies show up everywhere, they begin to shape culture, reinforce accountability, and drive meaningful behavior change throughout the organization.
6. Creating Competency Models That Scale and Adapt Through Coaching
At Talent Praxis, we bring leadership competencies to life through structured coaching, guided experimentation, and personalized leadership planning. Our programs are designed to help leaders turn insight into action by applying new strategies in their real-world context.
Coaching is fully integrated into the competency design process. Leaders not only learn what great leadership looks like but also explore how to apply it through feedback, reflection, and strategic experimentation.
Our three-step model—Clarify the Vision, Discover and Grow, and Craft the Strategy—guides each coaching engagement. Leaders define goals, identify critical behaviors, and create actionable plans to drive meaningful growth.
Rather than relying on abstract development plans, our coaches partner with leaders to:
Translate broad competencies into clear and personalized leadership goals
Use experimentation and reflection to assess which behaviors are making the greatest impact
Adjust development focus as leaders grow, teams change, and priorities evolve
Build consistent habits into daily management practices like delegation, communication, and performance management
Competency frameworks are most powerful when they evolve with the business. Our coaching approach adapts alongside your organization so that development remains aligned, actionable, and tied to the behaviors that matter most.
7. Clarifying Behavioral Expectations for Leadership Development
The best development plans start with clear expectations. When leaders understand what great leadership looks like in their context, growth becomes intentional and measurable.
Leadership is the process of inspiring others to achieve common goals. People management is the process of organizing and orchestrating people, projects, and processes to ensure effective execution to achieve goals.
We support this clarity by helping organizations define what impactful leadership looks like at different levels, starting with emerging leaders in their first people manager roles and extending to experienced leaders and executives.
This helps create fairer evaluations, stronger coaching conversations, and more equitable opportunities for advancement across the organization.
8. Building a Competency Model That Drives Growth at Every Level
Leadership effectiveness isn’t about one ideal set of strengths. It’s about utilizing diverse strengths to succeed in behaviors aligned with business outcomes. Talent Praxis helps you define success in your unique context, so every leader knows how to grow and every team knows what to expect.
Our behavior-based model becomes a foundation for strategic talent decisions, from performance management to succession planning. And because it evolves alongside your organization, it remains relevant through every stage of growth.
There’s no single formula for leadership success. The most effective leaders have many strengths, but success comes from aligning those strengths with the behaviors the organization values most.
Translate Leadership Insight Into Business Impact
Ready to define what impactful leadership looks like in your organization? Talent Praxis will help you build, implement, and sustain a competency framework that drives real results.
Our proven approach helps you:
Clarify and align leadership expectations across levels
Connect coaching and development to strategic business needs
Create a shared language for leadership effectiveness
Build a pipeline of leaders ready for tomorrow’s challenges
Let’s turn insight into action. Partner with Talent Praxis to create a competency framework that transforms potential into performance.
