Have you ever wondered why you have been stuck on the proverbial corporate treadmill for so long? You are huffing, puffing, and cursing but going nowhere. Do you have people reporting into you, and while they seem busy, your table has no room? You have no time to wrap your head around your day job, let alone indulge in forethought or get your life in shape. It’s often owing to your inability to surround yourself with wise people, those who can help you move up the value chain, or at least help themselves. It largely comes down to delegation—the kink in the armour of every new manager. But before you delegate, you must ascertain your team on the Skill-Will Matrix. Most managers rush into pushing their work away just to see it getting back at them in uglier ways. Let’s get back to the basics.
A skill-will matrix plots the people on their skill levels and their willingness to perform a job. As depicted in the figure below, the four simple strategies are as follows:
High Skill and Low Will: Show the big picture, motivate, restate the purpose and keep at it.
High Skill and High Will: Only when both are high, one must delegate with confidence. Till such time, work on the people to get them into that quadrant.
Low Skill and Low Will: Be directive if the job must be done, and then ease the person out of the system if there are no signs of improvement.
Low Skill and High Will: Offer training, coaching, mentoring or other means of competence development.
Most leaders adopt this powerful tool intuitively and come up with approaches on how to manage their teams. However, let’s discuss a few principles that offer gravitas to the model and can make a difference between a scientific versus a commonsensical approach to team management.
The default setting is that everyone in your team must do a part of your work, and then it rolls up to your boss and ad infinitum. This division of labour and cascading of tasks is the basic building block of organisational machinery, except that delegation is seldom the lever that it appears. It is mostly fraught with inefficiencies, friction and mistrust. Resultingly, managers end up correcting the job they delegated in the first place – paying people for their repeated mistakes. No doubt, such managers are held hostage by their team’s indifference and organisational dictates.
One way out of this maze is to reframe the delegation problem as ‘earned’ and not default. Only when a team member is high on skill and will, that delegation must happen. Till such time, the manager must invest in terms of skill and will development. The sequence can’t be reversed. You don’t first delegate and then figure out why the work isn’t happening. Each team member must earn in, or better still, you use the Skill-Will matrix as a check-gate for getting people onto your team.
If given a choice between a person with low will versus one with low skill, which would you rather have? Most will go with low will, for it seems to be just a matter of nudging, motivating and showing the big picture versus spending hard currency in training. But if you consider your personal cost, you quickly realise that inspiring is a far prohibitive proposition than getting a person trained. Motivating, giving pep talks, rekindling a sense of purpose – none of these can be delegated. They need first-person attention. You can’t outsource motivating your team to an external coach, who will otherwise be happy working on your team’s skills. Ergo, a person in Quadrant 1 is chipping away a lot of your time and attention.
Further, if someone slips on the motivation scale every now and then, it means that the job doesn’t have much of an inherent meaning. It might construe that the task is not enriching enough for its own sake, and hence extrinsic motivations are in order, which is a dubious bet than getting one’s talent amped. Such people can rapidly slip to Quadrant- 3, and then out.
This might come as a surprise to many. Shouldn’t one’s performance review be kept under wraps, lest you create outright animosity and rift within the team? But reconsider the proposal of making the matrix public. When everyone knows where one stands relative to others in the team, two vital functions are met. Firstly, the poor performers have benchmarks available and can emulate the skills and attitudes to adapt to the work at hand. Secondly, when someone is asked to look out, it doesn’t come as a surprise or eeks of personal vendetta. You, as a supervisor, should say, ‘You stand at Quadrant-3, as of now, and I am willing to invest in you for another six months to move up, but if you fail to do so, I won’t have much of a choice’.
By making the matrix public and performing it every six months, you keep your team members competitive, and they know that your assessments are objective, instead of based on your preferences. The same can then be cascaded. It might come as a shock, but soon your team will be one of radical candour and performance oriented.
In short, the Skill-Will matrix never goes out of fashion for its simplicity and versatility. As a manager, do it openly, regularly and mindfully, and let the team members earn their work, for you keep a tight zip on your time and efforts to where they count. All the best managing.