Tonkin + Taylor's Journey on The Path

“[The Path is] a very comprehensive framework for people in, or aspiring to be in, the HR function to map out and track the operating level and functional area of their HR career.” - Vicki Bazalo  

After a successful launch in November 2022, The Path, the Capability Framework for HR Professionals, has received an abundance of positive feedback.  

HRNZ loves hearing anecdotally about all the ways that individual practitioners and organisations alike have utilised The Path in their professional development, or even implemented it as a part of their everyday HR practice. 

"I love the new capability framework. I have just started working on career pathways for my team and this makes it so much easier. I can stand on the shoulders of giants instead of creating everything from scratch myself. Thanks so much!” 

After receiving the above feedback from Barbara Daxenberger, People and Capability Manager at environmental and engineering consultancy Tonkin and Taylor, HRNZ decided to have a chat with Barabara to learn more about how Tokin + Taylor are utilising the Capability Framework in their day-to-day HR practice.  

The primary way that T+T have incorporated The Path into their HR function is through their performance review and development conversation practices. They have aligned the Capability Levels of The Path with the levels of their remuneration framework, to provide greater clarity around expectations, salary, and development. Barbara Daxenberger shares:  

At T+T, our remuneration framework is based on role profiles which contain a broad description of job levels including expertise, work complexity, impact, and scope of a role, linking the job level directly to a grade and salary band. These job levels are generic across many areas of the business and provide high level guidance to managers and staff members on expectation of roles in the various grades we have. 

I have used The Path to make these descriptions more HR specific and easier to apply to HR roles. For example, I have linked three of our generic grades to the Capability level ‘Delivers’ and used both our role profiles and the information on the ‘Delivers’ level of The Path to create a better description of what is required at theses grades. This allows us to make better decisions when we review the team’s salary and when we have development conversations about what someone needs to do to get to the next level, both for the generalists and specialists in the team. 

Tonkin + Taylor have also hosted a professional development day for their People and Capability team, which involved using The Path, and the interactive Path card deck, to facilitate development conversations and skills planning. 

At the beginning of the year, we brought the whole P+C team together at our ‘P+C Unconvention’ for 1.5 days of connecting, planning and learning. We finished up the second day by pairing up the team in twos and asking them to have a peer-facilitated development conversation supported by our P+C Career Framework, as described above, and The Path cards. The conversation was focused on what skills and expertise the team wants to develop in 2023 having just gone through 1.5 days of workshops. 

T+T have successfully used The Path in their mid-year reviews for a small part of the team and plan to use it later in 2023 to assist with their performance reviews for the whole team. We are looking forward to hearing about the outcomes of this process, and how The Path assisted!  

The ways that Tonkin and Taylor have incorporated The Path into their HR practice provide a great example of how The Path has been designed – it is flexible and fluid enough to be used in a variety of different ways, to suit different practitioner’s unique circumstances.

How will you be using The Path? 

If you would like to find out more about how Tonkin + Taylor have woven The Path into their organisation’s HR practices, please reach out to Barbara – [email protected]  

To further explore The Path and discover how you may use the Capability Framework in your own practice, check out our website: https://hrnz.org.nz/professional-accreditation/the-path-the-new-capability-framework and email [email protected] if you have any questions or feedback.