Overview of the Model

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NGO CEO Competency Model

Cluster 1: Personal Competency
How to think about the world based on belief and experience so that judgments and decisions are made by selection, interpretation, remembrance, and use of information

1. Value Affirmation: It is about the passion and commitment in core values of serving regarding social justice, positive rights, worthiness of human beings, honesty and integrity and the action in articulating, advocating, affirming and living up to these values and aligning these values with the core principles, values and beliefs of the agency, the sector and the community.

2. Vision and Foresight: The ability to recognize social patterns quickly from a higher perspective, to predict what is needed in the future, to articulate the pattern seen to others in an emphatic way and to turn the vision into commitment and courses of action ahead in time to arrive at the desired future state.

3. Systems Thinking: A holistic and analytical approach to see how people, systems, structures and processes are interconnected and influence one another. It regards incidents and problems as part of the system instead of being a specific part. Balance of the system is strived with strategic pragmatism and continuous reflection.

4. Social Intelligence: It is a sense of valuing and treasuring interaction and rapport building with people and the social world, which involves one's prompt identification, assessment and handling of a set of interpersonal dynamics, using empathy, attunement and proactive communication to build honest relationships based on an ethical foundation.

Cluster 2: Operation Savvy
How to deal with the Systems and the Present

5. Operation Engineering: It refers to a drive that influences and guides one to accomplish the strategies and operations of the agency in courses of action involving designing, building structures and processes to align board/committee members, staff teams, tasks and programme goals together into a productive framework to achieve operation efficiency and effectiveness, and to ensure adherence to principles of governance in accountability and transparency.

6. Sustainable Resource Management: It is the stewardship, creation and ability to achieve optimal tangible and intangible resources creation and deployment in line with strategic priorities and core values by establishing systems. These systems are able to facilitate effective decision-making in relation to the estimation and forecasting of resource needs for different scenarios that would affect sustainability and with such system, resource dependency could be reduced.

7. Impact and Mission Centricity: It is about the sense of focus and courses of action on value creation for stakeholders and the social change brought to the community through the delivery of services. It involves the evaluation, maximization and articulation of service impact in alignment with the collective vision of stakeholders and mission of the organisation, and to prevent goal displacement.

Cluster 3: Development Consciousness
How to see and deal with the future

8. Strategic Planning with Entrepreneurship: It is about taking on the road to the future proactively with the ability to understand and interpret the dynamics and complexity in internal and external environments and see gaps in coping with the future, to translate mission and values into possible future paths, to take manageable risk in making deliberate decisions on creative courses of actions from consolidation to expansion, and to make persistent effort in pursuit of social change and the sustainability of systems despite ever rising and changing expectations of various stakeholders on NGOs.

9. Continuous Renewal and Innovation: It involves an embracing attitude towards change and the ability to reflect on, capitalize on and adapt to the changing dynamics in internal and external environments for the sustainability of an organisation. This involves leading through continuous generation of improvements or new ideas on processes, mechanisms and systems, and fostering renewal and innovation culture through active engagement with stakeholders in promoting and institutionalizing enabling tools and systems.

10. Human Capital Nurturing: It is about the belief of the importance of people in embracing change and the courses of action to unleash human potentials to effect change. It includes the ability to create tools, systems, and different development channels to inspire and empower individuals for the succession in the talent pipeline.

Cluster 4: Multi-stakeholder Acumen
How to see and treat the people, including direct stakeholders like clients, staff, board members, volunteers, funders, partners, the government, mass media, etc and in-direct stakeholders, like the community and the world as a whole

11. Boundary Spanning: It is the awareness and action to cross the boundaries of a social group to advocate and influence multiple stakeholders with social agendas in pursuit of social change and positive impact . This involves proactively searching and re-defining of key stakeholders and persistently engaging and communicating with them amidst of diversity or under unfavourable situations.

12. Strategizing and Creating Synergy: It is the intelligence to see the needs and intrinsic values of different stakeholders and be able to create win-win solutions and shared vision for different parties strategically in an ambiguous or even a hostile environment. It involves relationship-based and institutional-based communication, education and coordination among stakeholders with conflicting expectations within and outside the agency to develop collaborative and integrative tools that contribute to a long-term social solution and credibility building.