One of my favorite analogies is the fire triangle. It's simple, familiar, and applies well in a variety of situations.
(Image from the peer reviewed journal, Wikipedia)
Anything with three primary elements that breaks if any one part is missing is fire triangable. Learning? Existing knowledge, transmission, and retention. Body building? Calories, muscle exhaustion, and repetition. Fire triangle created. Since it seems nearly every framework comes in threes, and a large percentages of these frameworks are co-dependent, the fire triangle becomes ubiquitous.
Take one fire triangle for leadership and team management:
Knowledge - What is the plan? Does the employee know what (not know how) they are supposed to do? What are the priorities, KPIs, process, routine?
Ability - Is the employee presently capable of achieving the objective?
Motivation - To what level is the employee committed to achieving the goal? How much oversight and followup is needed to keep the employee on task and giving all of their effort?
When all three are present, I see a functioning team. Everyone knows their place, is capable of doing their job, and is committed to following through to the goal. What I find most interesting, however, are diagnostic failures. I have often talked over plans of what to do with "underperformers" with managers. There are cases in which the environment has no direction or plan, but the manager believes the employee is incapable. At other times the employee simply does not have the skills to perform a function, yet the manager still believes that one more pep talk just might do the trick. Finally there are those employees who "just aren't capable," yet they switch managers and become a rising star. Misidentification is a mistake we all make, but once you recognize it, testing the hypothesis before throwing the employee out can yield surprising results.
Anything with three primary elements that breaks if any one part is missing is fire triangable. Learning? Existing knowledge, transmission, and retention. Body building? Calories, muscle exhaustion, and repetition. Fire triangle created. Since it seems nearly every framework comes in threes, and a large percentages of these frameworks are co-dependent, the fire triangle becomes ubiquitous.
Take one fire triangle for leadership and team management:
Knowledge - What is the plan? Does the employee know what (not know how) they are supposed to do? What are the priorities, KPIs, process, routine?
Ability - Is the employee presently capable of achieving the objective?
Motivation - To what level is the employee committed to achieving the goal? How much oversight and followup is needed to keep the employee on task and giving all of their effort?
When all three are present, I see a functioning team. Everyone knows their place, is capable of doing their job, and is committed to following through to the goal. What I find most interesting, however, are diagnostic failures. I have often talked over plans of what to do with "underperformers" with managers. There are cases in which the environment has no direction or plan, but the manager believes the employee is incapable. At other times the employee simply does not have the skills to perform a function, yet the manager still believes that one more pep talk just might do the trick. Finally there are those employees who "just aren't capable," yet they switch managers and become a rising star. Misidentification is a mistake we all make, but once you recognize it, testing the hypothesis before throwing the employee out can yield surprising results.
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