Developmental levels in an Employee Life Cycle

To understand Leadership better, it is first important to understand the various developmental levels in an employee's life cycle.

There are 2 parameters to be considered when you talk about an employee developing within an organization... or under a leader, Skill and Will!!

When we talk about Skills we are talking about a combination of Knowledge & Skill together…

Let’s understand the two separately first.

“Knowledge is understanding or awareness of something through information or facts”

or

“Knowledge is information that you have about something”

- These could be some definitions of Knowledge that you can think of…

“Skill is learning the method of accomplishing a particular task and can be learned through practice”

Or

“Skill is when you learn something through practicing and are able to do it mentally & physically”

- These could be some definitions of Skill that you can think of…

If I have to put it in simple words, Knowledge is the "What" of a particular topic or subject and Skill is the "How" of it..

One of the biggest sources of knowledge is the environment we live in and the experiences that we have had in our lives from the day we were born... through awareness and understanding…

Skill is simply knowing how to do something and can be obtained and improved by consistent practice of the actions and behaviour required.

Let’s take an example of Cooking to understand this better.

The knowledge of cooking is the awareness that I have to take edible products and apply various techniques on them to be able to consume them... the awareness of the various techniques... such as chopping, grinding, boiling, frying, braising, roasting, baking, etc.

The skill is actually, practically take a knife in your hand and chop the onions into pieces... the first time you do it, it will not be uniform... but you have acquired the skill at a nascent level...

As you practice you will get better and develop the skill…

For the purpose of this topic we will club Knowledge & Skills together and call them Skill... so just be aware that whenever I mention skill in the next few articles... I mean both of them together…

So is working knowledge and skill enough to accomplish a task? (And I'm not saying accomplishing it well... just accomplishing it)

Not really!

What really completes the troika of accomplishing a task is the “Desire” to do it… Which comes from genuine willingness to do something…

And that is the Will we are talking about.

So for anything to be accomplished effectively you need a confluence of the three... What, How and Desire…

So to understand the developmental levels of an employee in his/ her life cycle, we would need to map these 2 parameters on a graph and understand where exactly the employee lies in the life cycle with respect to these parameters.

More of this later… Stay tuned…