Splits a performance problem into skill and will, then names the fix for each case: assign, teach, diagnose, or reassign.
Skill vs. Will is a beautifully simple diagnostic that plots performance problems on two axes: capability (can the person do it?) and motivation (do they want to?).
The ideal state is when someone can do the job and wants to do the job. When both are absent, things are clear, too. But when someone can but won’t, the challenge is motivation. And when someone wants to but can’t yet, they need coaching, training, time, and an honest assessment of whether you can afford all three.
Capable but disengaged. The intervention is a conversation about why — fit, purpose, workload, something else. Don't assign training; you'll be solving the wrong problem.
Capability and motivation line up. Give them the work and get out of the way. Any intervention is overhead.
Neither capability nor motivation. The problem isn't the framework's to solve — it's a fit issue. Move them off this responsibility, or release them from it.
Motivation is there, capability isn't. Training problem, not a person problem. Build the skill — someone who wants it enough to try is worth teaching.
The first key is awareness. And if you’re like most leaders, awareness starts with an unpleasant emotion like disappointment or frustration over a performance issue. For example, Homer has six engineering hires he needs to fill before June, it’s April, and he’s hired one (and even that one isn’t great). You’re pissed and very much not looking forward to telling the board.
The second key is general diagnosis. Make an assessment. Is Homer capable of hiring? Does he want to make these hires? Figure out which quadrant he’s in.
The third key, which is much more nuanced, is specific diagnosis. Hiring is not a single competency, but instead a whole set of them. It’s possible Homer is great at interviewing (high skill, high will), but horrible at selling (low skill, high will). Someone can be high-skill/high-will on 80% of their job and low-skill/high-will on a new responsibility they’ve never done before.
The fourth key is to explore options. If Homer is low skill but high will on selling, do you have the time, budget, and attentional capacity to train Homer? Firing him and replacing him with someone else will cost $X. Can you spend $X to effectively train him in the time it would take to replace him? If not, you may need to part ways.
As you explore options, pay special attention when you place people in quadrant two (low skill, high will). You must assess whether you have the time, the budget, and whatever other resources are needed to effectively teach and train someone. If Homer needs to learn to go from a 1 to a 3 on the Dreyfus Model in three weeks, it ain’t happening. Many founders and executives are optimists; they want to believe in people. But wanting to believe in someone doesn’t give them more time to get good. The question is not whether someone can be good at a thing in an absolute sense, given infinite time. It is whether they can become good enough at X inside the window the business has. A lot of the time, the honest answer is no, and then you make a change on the team.
The fifth key is to act, and ideally do so quickly. Once you’ve made a diagnosis and explored options, pick one and get on with it.
If you decide someone is in quadrant two and have the resources to teach and train them, use the Dreyfus Model together with the person to get specific about your assessment of their skill-level in any relevant competencies. Don’t just tell them, “you need to get better at executive presence.” Tell them they’re a 2 and you need them to be a 4 by a deadline. Make sure they understand the plan to get there and check in on progress regularly.
The default state of the disappointed or pissed-off leader is to do nothing. They ruminate, frustrated that they don’t know how to get someone on their team moving. Skill vs. Will gives leaders a memetic methodology for diagnosing performance problems with clear paths of action.
Great managers allocate resources effectively. In an ideal world, every person on the team would be high skill and high will at everything you need them to be, but any manager with their sea legs knows things are salty at sea. To allocate effectively, you need to realistically assess whether you have the right people in the right seats, and if they aren’t doing what you need them to, you need a diagnosis and a plan of action.
Too often, managers attempt to train people who do not care. I remember once hiring an engineer to do devops. Three months into the job, he decided he only wanted to work on new features, not devops. High skill, low will. When someone does not want to do something, you have to accept that you may not be able to convince them to.
Use Skill vs. Will when someone isn’t meeting expectations on a specific responsibility and you’re not sure why. Use it to get clear on what specifically the issue is, and to determine your course of action.
If you decide someone is in quadrant two (low skill, high will), and you’ve assessed you have the resources to teach them, tell them about the framework as you coach them.
Skill vs. Will is most useful before a difficult conversation, not during one. It’s a diagnostic you run privately to figure out which conversation to have. It’s less useful for genuinely ambiguous cases where capability and motivation are entangled, or for systemic problems (bad tooling, unclear goals, broken process) that sit outside the person entirely.
Skill vs. Will is a convergence. Several practitioners arrived at the same idea independently, each using slightly different language. While he never drew a matrix, Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel, stated the underlying principle plainly in High Output Management (1983):
“When a person isn’t doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated.” [1]
As for the matrix, it seems more like the idea has been in the air for a long time than there having been one moment where one person invented it.
Max Landsberg, executive coach and former McKinsey partner, published the Skill/Will matrix in The Tao of Coaching (1996). [4] Danny Meyer, the brilliant restaurateur, operationalized his own version — the “Can, Can’t / Will, Won’t” matrix — across every Union Square Hospitality Group restaurant and surfaced it publicly in his Tim Ferriss interview, crediting upstream “restaurateurs in California” for teaching it to him. [2] Claire Hughes-Johnson, in Scaling People (2023), teaches the same diagnostic as “skill against will,” and attributes it to Landsberg. [3] Her book is where I first came across the tool — she’s the reason it’s on this site — but the credit for it is Landsberg’s.
I’ve chosen to use the title “Skill vs. Will” instead of Grove’s “can/can’t, will/won’t” or other variations because I believe for good ideas to spread, they must be memetic. And “Skill vs. Will” is memorable.