Many owners have one management style that lands on everybody the same way, although different people need different things from them.
The Will/Skill model, set out by Max Landsberg in The Tao of Coaching, says people need different things from you depending on their will and skill for the task in front of them.
What is the model?
Skill is what somebody can do: knowledge, experience, competence at this particular task. Will is everything else that decides whether they do it: motivation, confidence, energy, whether they want the job in front of them.
Score both from low to high and you get four boxes. Each box has a different job for you, and only one of them is delegation.
High will, low skill: guide
They want it and cannot do it yet. Your job is teaching: show, watch, correct, let them run it, review. Give them work slightly beyond their current level and stay close, because the will is the fragile part. One unsupported public failure early on moves them into the fourth box, and it takes months to get them back.
High will, high skill: delegate
Your job is to get out of the way, and to hand over decisions rather than tasks. Handing over tasks keeps the thinking with you and eventually bores capable people into leaving. Agree the outcome, agree when you will next talk, then leave it alone.
Low will, low skill: direct
Give clear instruction, short cycles, close review and small units of work. This is a reasonable place for a new starter for a few weeks, but not for a year. If directing is not moving them within a defined period, you have a recruitment decision rather than a management one.
Low will, high skill: excite
They can do it and they have stopped wanting to. This is the hardest box. The instinct is to performance-manage; the job is to find out what changed.
Why it matters to an owner
Your management attention is a budget, and it is small. In a business with eight or ten people an owner has perhaps five or six usable hours a week for one-to-one leadership. The model is a tool for allocating that budget, which tends to drift towards the people who are enjoyable to work with rather than the people who need it.
The box belongs to the task, not to the person. Your best fitter is in the delegate box on a bathroom and in the guide box on managing an apprentice. The day you promote somebody, you move them from a box they had earned into one they have not — and if you keep managing them the way you did last month, they will fail at a job they could have done.
How to use it this month
- List the tasks, not the people. For each person who reports to you, write the two or three tasks that matter in their role.
- Score will and skill separately, out of 10, quickly. A gap of three or more points between the two is where your attention should go first.
- Audit where your management time went. Log it for five days. Check how much of it went to the person who needs the least.
- Move one hour. Take an hour from your delegate-box person and give it to your guide-box person, in the diary, as a standing slot.
- Have the excite conversation. Open with the observation rather than the accusation: two years ago you would have been all over this, and you are not — what changed? Then stop talking and wait.
- Re-score in ninety days.
The mistakes to watch for
The first mistake is reading low will as a character defect. In an owner-managed business, a high-skill person with low will is often a story about the business rather than the person. Something was promised and not delivered. Somebody was promoted over them. The goalposts moved. Or, most commonly, they have done the same job at the same level for years and nobody has ever asked them what they want next.
Owners mistake quiet for low will, because some people do not perform enthusiasm. And owners get comfortable in the guide box, because teaching is enjoyable and being needed is pleasant — so the guiding never ends, and the person never gets the authority that would prove they had learned anything.
The third is scoring people rather than tasks, which turns a management tool into a label. Somebody who is “a box three” in your head has stopped being somebody who has not been taught this particular job yet.
Questions to ask yourself
- Out of 10, how confident are you that your management time goes to the people who need it rather than the people you enjoy?
- Who in your business has stopped wanting it — and what did the business do to put them there?
- Which of your people have you been guiding for so long that the guiding has become the reason they never take a decision?
- If you were away for a month, whose box would change, and what does that tell you about how the business runs?
This sits at the centre of the team work in Leadership Coaching. Read it with Team Development, which is the same problem at the level of the group, and The Stages of Learning, which explains what teaching has to cover. The full set is in the Mindsets library.
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Frequently asked questions
Is somebody's box fixed?
No. The box describes one person on one task at one point in time. Your best fitter can be in the delegate box on the work they have done for a decade and in the guide box on managing an apprentice, and both are true in the same week. This matters most at promotion. The day somebody takes on a bigger role you have moved them from a box they earned into one they have not, and if your management does not change with it they will fail at a job they were capable of doing.
What do I do with somebody who is good but has switched off?
Find out what changed, because something did. In owner-managed businesses a capable person with low will is often a story about the business rather than the person: something promised and not delivered, somebody promoted over them, goalposts moved, or years at the same level with nobody ever asking what they want next. The conversation opens with an observation rather than an accusation. Say what you have noticed, ask what changed, then stop talking for longer than is comfortable. Performance-managing this person is the common instinct and often the expensive one, because you are treating a motivation problem as a capability problem.
How do I know if I am spending my management time badly?
Log it for a week. Write down roughly how long you spent one to one with each person who reports to you, then put each of those conversations against a box. Many owners find that the largest share went to the person who needed the least of it, often because that person is capable and good company, and that the newest or most stuck person got a fraction of it. The fix costs no extra hours. Move one hour from the capable person to the one who is learning, put it in the diary as a standing slot, and re-score everybody in ninety days.