A while back I wrote a blog post that talked about my career path to my current role. One pivotal role that I didn’t spend a ton of time on was when I was manager of an IT department for a theater chain.

This was my first real management role — I’d had team leader type roles in the past, but this was the first role where I was in charge of everything — hiring, firing, processes and procedures, budgets, hardware and software choices … it was a lot! And I was in my late twenties and did not know what I was doing.

I’ve also talked before about how much I struggled and how close I came to giving up. Eventually I realized I needed to get better at a whole lot of things. In a moment of lucidity I realized that for me to help my team get things done, I needed to get things done myself. So I did some research, bought some books about productivity and wound up really connecting with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done.”

After implementing that, I was able to manage my own time. That may not sound like much, but it was a huge deal for a guy who had struggled with ADHD his entire life (but had only been diagnosed a few years before). Personal productivity is like a super power that I never knew you could just … learn!

I shared GTD with the team and we worked together to implement a better workflow. The people on the team had always worked hard, but now we weren’t working hard in a million different, sometimes contradictory, directions. Now we were all working hard together, and we knew what everyone was doing.

The hidden blessings of a really rough job

Every manager can improve. Everyone has skills they need to build or deficiencies they need to remedy. But a lot of time these skills (or lack thereof) aren’t particularly obvious. That’s because, if a manager is in a healthy situation, there are fallbacks and other people to help cover for the things you lack.

The one benefit of my really rough job was that it quickly became incredibly obvious what I lacked. There was way too much work to do, so I needed to make sure to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of my day. There was the problem, GTD was the solution that I came across after some research. Problem identified and (mostly) solved.

Once I was more productive the next problem was equally as obvious: of all the many things on the list, which should I focus on first? Greg McKeown’s “Essentialism,” among other books, provided a lot of guidance there. I needed to become better at identifying the truly high value work I could do. More study went into that skill.

And I really mean I NEEDED to do these things. My success and the welfare of my family depended on it. The areas where I lacked skill became incredibly clear and it was incredibly urgent that I rectify that.

But what if you don’t have that hidden blessing?

A number of people have approached me for mentorship, specifically mentorship around leadership and management. I really wanted to do right by these people, but the main issue was that they weren’t in the exact same situation as me. Their needs weren’t as obvious either because they weren’t yet in a leadership role (though they hoped to gain one), or because the role they were in was in a culture that was, well, healthy. If they lacked in certain areas, the team around them helped make up for it.

To help these people I tried to reverse engineer my own growth. The pattern mentioned above became pretty obvious, which we can summarize as:

1. Fail in some way
2. Find the lacking skill that led to the failure
3. Work on that skill
4. No longer fail in that way
5. Fail in a different way
6. Rinse/Repeat

Obviously, if at all possible, I wanted to help the people who had come to me avoid step 1. What that meant is that we would have to find a lack of skills that would lead to a failure, before that failure actually happened.

To do that we would need two things:

1. A list of important skills managers need
2. A way of measuring someone’s skill level

For number two I landed on the concept of proficiency scales (which I’ve written about before).

Number one is a trickier question.

What skills does every manager need?

I looked through management books that listed skills, I talked to people, I examined my own history and I made lists and lists of potential skills. Then I started grouping these skills and what I noticed is that a lot of skills fall into a handful of categories:

• Interpersonal skills (communicating and conflict resolution)
• Getting stuff done (being productive as well as knowing what to do)
• Improving (alternately called “problem solving,” but basically making the daily work consistently better)
• Sustaining (or creating healthy, sustainable cultures)

The vast majority of skills fell roughly into one of these four buckets. I focused on “Getting Stuff Done” first because, as you’ve seen above, that was a skill that I lacked and had to learn so it was a good test case.

And, as I showed above, before I could help a team be productive, I had to be productive myself. I realized that most of these skills followed a similar pattern:

1. You learn to do something yourself
2. You learn to do that thing with a group
3. You learn to lead other people in doing that thing

So for each of our four buckets I created three “scopes” that would focus on developing that skill in that scope. Ideally you would master each “scope” of each skill before you move on to the next one because they organically move in that direction. The scopes would up being:

1. Individual (you do something yourself without requiring outside interaction)
2. Team (you do something with other people either as a team member or a team leader)
3. Leader (you direct and/or teach other people the thing you learned in 1 and 2)

Let’s use “Doing” as our example.

• Individual Scope — you learn to be productive on your own, after studying something like getting things done. Someone gives you tasks, and you do them efficiently.
• Team scope — you learn to be productive with others using a tool like Agile or Kanban. Someone gives your team tasks, and they get done efficiently.
• Leader scope — This is a fairly major shift because now that you and your team are productive you must decide what to do. In the other two levels the tasks are given to you. As a leader you must choose your tasks by learning strategy through something like Rumelt’s “Good Strategy/Bad Strategy”

I feel that there is a natural progression there that is easy to grasp, and would definitely help someone move from an individual contributor, to a team member, to a leader. That’s the goal for this exercise — to allow people to measure their leadership skills, and know where they are and where they need to continue to develop.

Skills Matrix version … 5 at least? So many revisions.

So now we have the skill matrix, with our buckets and our scopes, which looks like this:

	Individual	Team	Leader
Interpersonal
Doing
Improving
Sustaining

And I’ve slowly been feeling out the specific skills at each scope level. For some I just have a skill that I’d like to find a good resource for, for others I have a skill and a good resource (my goal here was not to reinvent the wheel so I’ve leaned heavily on existing resources instead of trying to create my own). It currently looks like this:

	Individual	Team	Leader
Interpersonal	Written Communication (I can’t decide on this one)	Active Listening (Supercommunicators)	Conflict Resolution (Leader Effectiveness Training)
Doing	Personal Productivity (Getting Things Done)	Agile/Kanban (Making Work Visible)	Strategy (Good Strategy/Bad Strategy)
Improving	A3/PDCA (A3 Thinking)	Theory of Constraints (The Goal)	Continuous Improvement (Toyota Kata)
Sustaining	Personal Workload management (Essentialism)	Managing team workloads (Scrum)	Creating healthy cultures (The Culture Code)

I will continue to fiddle with the table and find other resources, but I feel like this is a pretty good start.

I can’t ever decide if this is too much or too little. In “The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership” the authors talk about how Toyota focuses so heavily on problem solving (they call the process “Toyota Business Practices” or TBP) and don’t explicitly teach a lot of the other stuff I mention here.

They make the case (and I think it’s a decent one) that teaching people one skill really well enables them to build other skills on their own, which is very important to Toyota.

That led me to change how I imagine this could be used. At first I pictured it as a series of classes where you could meet and learn a new skill each month and have follow ups and the whole nine yards.

But I think this would work better as a guided personal exercise. You measure yourself, decide on what needs improvement, and then use the listed resources to develop that skill on your own or with a mentor. In that way this could function well as a book or website that would basically … measure your skills and then point you to other books. It’s a little weird, but honestly I think that’s the best way to use it.

Still working on it

This continues to be a work in progress, but I like the idea of structuring it as a book or website that an individual uses. Honestly, I think many people could simply look at the table and go “Yeah, I probably need to work on this” without needing a big quiz, but I like the idea of having some more concrete evaluation options for those people that maybe … lack in self awareness.

Let me know if you’re interested in seeing updates about this as they come! I’ll keep working on it and using it with people I’m mentoring, but if you want some public updates periodically I’m happy to provide that too.

Now that you understand my thinking behind this, what am I missing? Are there skills that need to be up here? Different buckets or scopes? Different resources? Is it too much? To little? Overly simple or overly complex? Let me know!