The Will/Skill Model

You have one management style. It is the one that suits you, and it lands on everybody the same way. Two of your people are fine on it. One is quietly drowning and covering it well. One used to be your best and now does exactly what is asked and nothing more.

The Will/Skill model, set out by Max Landsberg in The Tao of Coaching, says those four people need four different things from you, and that giving somebody the wrong one is often worse than giving them nothing at all.

What the model is

Two axes. Skill is what they can actually 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.

Box 1, guide. Keen and green. 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 their will is the fragile part. One unsupported public failure early on moves them into box 4 and it takes months to get them back.

Box 2, delegate. Able and willing. 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 them into leaving. Agree the outcome, agree when you will talk, then leave it alone.

Box 3, direct. Neither the will nor the skill yet. Clear instruction, short cycles, close review, small units of work. This is a legitimate place for a new starter to be for a few weeks. It is not a legitimate place for anyone to sit for a year. If directing is not moving them within a defined period, you have a recruitment decision, not a management one.

Box 4, excite. They can do it and they have stopped wanting to. This is the hardest box, the most valuable, and the one owners handle worst. The instinct is to performance-manage. The job is to find out what changed, because something did.

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 really a tool for allocating that budget, and almost every owner allocates it badly, because time drifts towards the people who are enjoyable to work with.

The second thing, and the one that changes how people use it: the box is task-specific, not person-specific. Your best fitter is box 2 on a bathroom and box 1 on managing an apprentice. The day you promote somebody you move them from a box they had earned into a box they have not, and if you keep managing them the way you did last month, they fail at a job they could have done.

A worked example

Illustrative, but the shape of it is common. An owner of a fit-out contractor turning over £1.6m has four people reporting to her. She keeps a rough log of her management time for one week: seven hours in total.

Three hours and twenty minutes of that goes to her contracts manager of twelve years, because their conversations are interesting and he is good company. He is squarely box 2. He needs perhaps forty minutes a week and the authority to sign off variations under £2,000 without asking her.

Twenty-five minutes goes to the office manager she promoted four months ago from an admin role. High will, no experience of managing anyone, currently avoiding a conversation with a supplier because she does not know how to have it. Box 1, and receiving a twelfth of the attention that the person who needs none is getting.

Forty minutes goes to the estimator who used to chase work in his own time and now leaves at five on the dot. He was passed over for the contracts role eighteen months ago and nobody has mentioned it since. Box 4.

Nothing here needs more hours from the owner. It needs the same seven hours moved: forty minutes to the contracts manager, ninety minutes of structured teaching to the office manager, and one honest, unhurried conversation with the estimator that should have happened eighteen months ago.

The mistake most owners make

They read low will as a character defect. In an owner-managed business, a high-skill person with low will is nearly always 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 eight years and nobody has ever asked them what they want next.

Two related errors. Owners mistake quiet for low will, because some people simply do not perform enthusiasm. And they get comfortable in box 1, 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.

How to apply it this week

1. List the tasks, not the people. For each person who reports to you, write the two or three tasks that actually matter in their role. You are about to score tasks, not personalities.
2. Score will and skill separately, out of 10. Do it fast and honestly. A gap of three or more points between the two scores is where your attention should go first.
3. Audit where your management time went. Log it for five days. Most owners find the majority of it sitting with the person who needs the least of it.
4. Move one hour. Take an hour from your box 2 person and give it to your box 1 person, in the diary, as a standing slot. That single change does more than any training course you could book.
5. Have the box 4 conversation. Open with the observation, not the accusation: two years ago you would have been all over this, and you are not. What changed? Then stop talking and let the silence do the work.
6. Re-score in 90 days. If nobody has moved, the model was interesting and nothing else. Movement is the only evidence it was used.

The questions to sit with

• 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 is in box 4 today, and what did the business do to put them there?
• Which of your people have you been guiding for so long that 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 really runs?

This sits at the centre of the Team Performance work. The uncomfortable finding, most of the time, is not that the team is weak. It is that four different people have been receiving the same management, and it was only ever designed for one of them.