The Enthusiastic Beginner - D1

 

D1 - THE ENTHUSIASTIC BEGINNER

We had a look at the Skill Will Matrix in the last article and understood the mapping of employees in their life cycle developmental levels based on their skill & will levels. We also listed the 4 categories of employees based on this.

Let’s understand the first one today – “The Enthusiastic Beginner”

This is an employee who has just begun his career or a new role in an organization.  Since he is new in his career or role, his skill levels are going to be considerably low.

**Please consider 'He, his' to be gender neutral terms for some time in these articles..

However, since it’s a new beginning for him, his motivation levels, energy and enthusiasm are going to be high.

So if you plot him on the matrix... this is where he would be.

This phase will last for a couple of months where he stays self-motivated and tries to learn skills he needs to, in order to do his role.

Now what we are going to talk about in this entire series is the natural progression of an employee if the right kind of leadership interventions or behaviors are not exhibited by the designated leader.

Ideally if you look at the levels at which he is in the two parameters, let us understand what confluence of Leadership he requires.

Since he is low on skill he would require High Task oriented behaviors or Directive behaviors.

Also, his will or motivation levels are already high. So he does not require high relationship oriented behaviors or Supportive behaviors.

A point to note, however, that it would not affect him negatively, if the supportive behaviors are marginally higher. The aspect to be taken into consideration, however, is that too much supportive behavior might lead him to complacency or might end up the leader being taken for granted or taken advantage of!

So the ideal confluence of behaviors for an Enthusiastic Beginner is –

High Directive Low Supportive

This is also known as the “Directing” style of leadership and should be maintained to improve his skill levels to attempt to gradually move him into D4 or Peak Performer without letting him slip into D2 or D3.

We will also focus on all 4 Leadership styles together once we complete detailed discussions on each developmental level in a separate article.

That’s it for now. Will come back soon with the “Disillusioned Learner”. Stay tuned!

Ciao!!

The Skill Will Matrix

 

The Skill Will Matrix

We have spoken about the Developmental Levels of employees in their life cycle & the various leadership Behaviors in the previous two articles.

Let’s understand the Skill-Will Matrix today!

This is simply a tool to categorize employees in their life cycle to enable Leaders to exhibit the right kind of Leadership behaviors with them.  

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 Alert!!

Please be aware that this is not an exact science though. We are, after all, talking about individual human beings, with emotions and feelings and not about machines or robots. So there will never an exact fitment into the mold.

This is just a guideline!

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The 2 parameters for gauging the developmental levels of employees are Skill & Will.

So we graphically represent the two parameters on the two axes to get a confluence of the two to ideally be able to gauge where the employees stands from a “Life Cycle” point of view.

This would then help the leader arrive at the ideal confluence of behaviors to be exhibited. But more about that later.

So if “Skill” is the X-Axis and “Will” is the Y-Axis, this is what we will get –

Any employee would lie in one of the four quadrants, based on their Skill & Will levels, and the leader who is able to gauge this effectively will then have to exhibit the right kind of behaviors for them, to influence them towards their growth.

One important aspect to bear in mind, however, is that every leader has his/her own predominant leadership style which would need to be consciously altered when dealing with employees in various stages of development.

Based on this matrix, we get four categories of employees –

1.       Enthusiastic Beginner

2.       Disillusioned Learner

3.       Reluctant Contributor

4.       Peak Performer

We shall look at each of these individually in the next few articles.

Ciao!