Bridging Behavioral Futures: Mapping the Tomorrows Compass Skills to the Korn Ferry 38 Competencies
- Dr. Eric Albertini
- Jul 8
- 4 min read
In talent management circles, few frameworks have the enduring influence of Korn Ferry’s 38 Competencies.
For decades, this model has shaped how organizations define, measure, and develop leadership and professional performance.
Yet the world has changed. AI, hybrid work, geopolitical volatility, and shifting workforce values demand that competencies evolve from static checklists into dynamic behavioural capabilities.
That’s precisely why we built Tomorrows Compass.
Our twelve behavioural skills, grouped into three integrated skillsets, are designed to help humans thrive amid uncertainty, complexity, and technological change. What’s both reassuring and strategic, is how directly these modern skills map back to Korn Ferry’s foundational competencies
Competency Alignment Overview to Korn Ferry 38 Competencies
Below is a table synthesizing each Korn Ferry Competency with one or more aligned Tomorrows Compass Skills and a summary of their behavioral alignment.
KORN FERRY COMPETENCY | ALIGNED TOMORROWS COMPASS SKILL/S | ALIGNMENT SUMMARY |
|---|---|---|
Manages Ambiguity | · Enquiring Mind · Embracing Uncertainty | Reframes the unknown (uncertainty) and ambiguity as opportunity and models resilience. |
Nimble Learning | · Inquiring Mind, · Adaptive Digital Intelligence · Change Agility | Fosters curiosity, rapid learning, adaptability, and comfort with the unfamiliar |
Plans and Aligns | · Dynamic Resourcefulness · Purposeful Focus | Transforms strategy into action through prioritization and commitment. Combines visioning and mobilizing of resources |
Cultivates Innovation | · Design Thinking, · Dynamic Resourcefulness | Encourages user-centered ideation within constraints. |
Strategic Mindset | · Contextual Intelligence · Paradoxical Thinking · Purposeful Focus | Supports systemic thinking and holding competing truths whilst staying focused and deliberate in pursuit of vision and objectives |
Decision Quality | · Contextual Intelligence · Purposeful Focus | Combines situational awareness with value-driven clarity. |
Ensures Accountability | · Purposeful Focus | Aligns intention with execution integrity. |
Drives Results | · Change Agility · Dynamic Resourcefulness · Purposeful Focus | Generates outcomes through momentum and adaptability. Transforms strategy into action through prioritization and commitment. Combines visioning and mobilizing of resources |
Action Oriented | · Purposeful Focus · Dynamic Resourcefulness | Transforms strategy into action through prioritization and commitment. Combines visioning and mobilizing of resources Promotes agile, creative action-taking. |
Collaborates | · Relational Influence · Digital Teamwork | Enables cross-role and cross-platform human-centered collaboration. |
Communicates Effectively | · Inquiring Mind · Relational Influence · Contextual Intelligence | With emphatic curiosity enhances empathy and reads the context (audience awareness) with clarity. |
Balances Stakeholders | · Paradoxical Thinking · Relational Influence · Inquiring Mind | Balances opposing needs with logic and empathy (emphatic curiosity) and builds relationships based on trust. (Influence Without Authority |
Builds Effective Teams | · Relational Influence · Cross-Cultural Collaboration · Digital Teamwork | Builds inclusive, trust-based team dynamics in physical and/or virtual teams |
Develops Talent | · Relational Influence · Adaptive Digital Intelligence (Growth Mindset) | Fuels growth through mentorship and inclusion and by influence through personal power. |
Directs Work | · Purposeful Focus | Ensures effective delegation linked to outcomes – passionately mobilizes teams |
Drives Engagement | · Relational Influence · Purposeful Focus | Inspires through emotional resonance and adaptability, transforming strategy into action with passion |
Builds Networks | · Relational Influence | Fosters authentic, trust-based professional connections. |
Being Resilient | · Change Agility · Embracing Uncertainty · Adaptive Digital Mindset (Growth Mindset) | Reframes the unknown (uncertain) as opportunity, and grounds emotional strength to navigate adversity with confidence of a growth mindset |
Courage / Courage of Convictions | · Embracing Uncertainty · Inquiring Mind · Adaptive Digital Intelligence (Growth Mindset) | Encourages risk-taking through inquiry and openness with a growth mindset. Maintains integrity amid risk and pressure. |
Instils Trust | · Inquiring Mind (Emphatic Curiosity) · Relational Influence · Cross-Cultural Collaboration | Suspends judgement, and builds trust through behavior alignment and understanding and valuing differences. Co-creates through differences. . |
Self-Development | · Inquiring Mind · Adaptive Digital Intelligence (Learning Agility & Growth Mindset) | Drives intentional self -growth through curiosity, learning agility and a growth mindset. |
Situational Adaptability | · Contextual Intelligence · Change Agility | Enables behavioral flexibility through system awareness. |
Tech Savvy | · Adaptive Digital Intelligence | Cultivates digital fluency and AI collaboration with a growth mindset and learning agility. |
Optimizes Work Processes | · Dynamic Resourcefulness · Digital Teamwork | Streamlines innovation via creative efficiency and tech fluency. |
Resourcefulness | · Dynamic Resourcefulness | Embodies improvisational, constraint-solving behavior. |
Global Perspective / Mindset | · Cross-Cultural Collaboration · Contextual Intelligence | Navigates global mindsets with humility and fluency making sense (and attaching meaning) to the global context. |
Interpersonal Savvy | · Relational Influence · Contextual Intelligence · Cross-Cultural Adaptability | Assess the context (relational dynamics), resonates with others through emotional and situational fluency valuing and leveraging differences. |
Organizational Savvy | · Contextual Intelligence · Relational Influence | Builds connected relationships (based on trust), and navigates organizational systems, timing, and power dynamics with awareness. |
Persuades | · Relational Influence · Paradoxical Thinking | Straddles conflicting perspectives and uses empathy and clarity to ethically influence. |
Drives Vision and Purpose | · Purposeful Focus · Paradoxical Thinking · Relational Influence | Fuses clarity with paradox to guide long-term strategy, and cultivates connected (trust based) relationships. |
Values Differences | · Cross-Cultural Collaboration · Inquiring Mind | Understands and appreciates differences between people, and celebrates inclusion through curiosity and humility. |
Attracts Top Talent | · Relational Influence · Inquiring Mind · Adaptive Digital Intelligence (Growth Mindset) | Suspends judgement , and sees potential in others (growth mindset) and forms connected , trust – based relationships. |
Manages Complexity | · Paradoxical Thinking · Contextual Intelligence | Handles multi-layered systems with integrative awareness. |
Demonstrates Self-Awareness | · Inquiring Mind | Promotes introspection as the basis for authentic leadership. |
Business Insight | · Contextual Intelligence · Purposeful Focus | Sees patterns and cues in the business environment and operates with focused intent |
Manage Conflict | · Paradoxical Thinking · Relational Feedback | Manages contradictions and different perspectives through connected and authentic relationships |
Customer Focus | · Relational Influence · Inquiring Mind · Design Thinking | Builds effective customer relationships , and asks questions to identify opportunities (customer insights) and provide customer driven solutions |
Financial Acumen | · Contextual Intelligence | Understands and systemic nature of the business environment and by identifying trends, patterns and cues, applies appropriate financial tools and techniques. |
Conclusion
Future-Ready, Not Just Framework-Ready
The rigorous mapping shows that Tomorrows Compass is not separate from Korn Ferry’s 38 Competencies - it’s the next evolution.
· It preserves the wisdom of a time-tested model.
· It translates traditional competencies into measurable, behavioural skills
· It embeds a future-focused lens on how humans must operate in fast-changing contexts.
In an era where 70% of job skills are evolving by 2030 (WEF), the organizations that thrive will be those who modernize their people strategies. Tomorrows Compass offers the bridge between classic competency models and future-ready capability building.
For organizations seeking to modernize their leadership frameworks without losing foundational rigor, this alignment offers both continuity and transformation
Curious to hear from others:
How are you evolving your competency frameworks for the future?
