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!