Thank God I’m not the only one!   Now I can “come out of the closet”!

Amusing.  Too bad that your idea of assessing how people deliver key outcomes is precisely how competencies work.  Competencies are very simple:  any characteristic that differentiates performance in a specific role.  (cf. David McClelland, 1973).  Hard to see how THAT could go away unless you want performance outcomes to go away, too.
Don’t blame the competency concept for its many poor messengers.  Competencies have been vastly overcomplicated as people have tried to come up with universal models (which contradicts the whole idea), comprehensive models (which are way too complicated) and badly-cobbled-together models composed of a set of ill-informed opinions.  But at the core, a well-designed competency model delivers results, because that’s what it is intended to do — by definition. 

I actually read it rather carefully.  You wrote: “the senior team and I have identified the four outcomes that define a successful leader and we’ll hold everyone accountable for those at bonus time.  We’ll have our recruiters ask candidates to discuss HOW THEY’VE DELIVERED SIMILAR OUTCOMES.” [Emphasis added, of course]  Hence my conclusion that your solution was not only to define outcomes, but to look at how they’ve delivered them, though the rest of the article refers to only outcomes.
However, defining only outcomes, if that is in fact what you recommend, is necessary but insufficient.  Without diving in a bit deeper, people rarely know why someone is successful; instead they leap to conclusions.  ”Since the firm went up, HE MUST BE good at X.”  Recruiting managers make this mistake all the time, without considering context (e.g., everyone in the market went up) or luck (he was in China) as a factor.  Perhaps you would see this as defining the outcome more closely, but it is closely allied to proper competency derivation technique.  
I’m not disagreeing that competencies have been overused and badly implemented, but your criticisms have nothing to do with the reality of good competency execution, which has been done at any number of places with fantastic success.   The solution to your point that the typical line manager can’t differentiate is clear:  they SHOULD know.  If a manager does not have a solid sense of how and why one person gets outcomes rather than another, they are not doing their job as a manager, and the company has fallen into the trap of seeing competencies as “HR Stuff” without treating it as a business requirement and keeping an eye on what it is!
I see way too many people who judge outcomes without reference to how they were accomplished, i.e., did they get lucky or was there something more enduring beneath?  Recruiting firms make this mistake all the time, and so do hiring managers.
It’s certainly been muddied, but I don’t see you disagreeing with the core concept — because it’s not really possible.  So ditch the word competency and move on.  I have many clients who already have, and there are a number of consulting firms who have reinvented the concept without admitting it.

 Because of programmatic implementation:
* universal competencies are a hold over from the “change our culture” era.  So how’d that work out for ya?
* functional / technical / role specific competencies were supposed to have been mapped onto the outcomes.  causal stuff, developmental stuff.  Well, how’d that work out for ya?  The outcomes were poorly defined and the maps were mush.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a senior HR leader who had been brought in to salvage a major competency IT platform in a large insurance company.  You know the kind, integrated compensation, LMS, performance management, staffing, selection, etc.  After listening for 20 minutes to how the system was developed (painstaking detail work), the reactions of the senior and middle operational leaders, Not once did I hear what was the system supposed to support?  In two or three years the troops will come for her.

I’m with the thinking “What’s supposed to be happening here?”.  That can be at the Corporate level, or at some sub process level.  But for goodness sake – identify it and talk about it.

As an aside – even the so called universal competencies are actually role specific as well.