The second pillar of management: Competence

There are 3 pillars of strong management in a team:

• Priority: Choosing the right work
• Competence: Ability to do the work
• Motivation: Effectively doing the work

Competence is essential because you can't empower a team to make decisions without an extremely high competence team, and you can't do great work without an empowered team.

Two teams with very different levels of competence

I was working at this big company with tens of thousands of employees.

Most of my colleagues were working on this decades-old legacy system, and their software engineering skills needed to be updated: No version control, no automated testing, no database schemas and migrations, etc.

This absence of competence led to many issues:

• The software would be unstable and frequently crash
• The data would be stored in ways few people, sometimes nobody, understood, and with no data integrity
• Integration with other software was made in an ad-hoc and error-prone way
• Because of a lack of automated tests, it was impossible to know if new features broke existing functionality
• Many nights and weekends of grueling, instead of fulfilling, work

As a result, leaders were often the only ones taking initiative and making decisions: Can we integrate these two systems? Can we launch this risky feature? Every decision was high stakes because the team couldn't manage the risks.

Einstein's "You can't solve a problem with the same mind that created it" applied here. No amount of extra effort would create high-quality work under these circumstances.

When I joined my first startup, the experience couldn't be more different: The team was incredibly competent, and we kept up-leveling the team's skills as we took on more challenging work.

It was still very challenging: startups are hard. But it was fulfilling and at the edge of software engineering best practices, or at least as close to the edge as small startups can afford.

As a result, the engineers would make many decisions: Should we integrate the systems? Should we launch this risky feature? The team knew risks and their mitigating effects: they knew what was going on and how to manage things if they went wrong.

No amount of process and management techniques would replicate the startup's results at the big company. The teams were at very different levels of competence related to their work.

The first step to doing excellent work is having a capable team. There's no way around that.

The bar for competence is much higher in an empowered team

In the book Turn The Ship Around, David Marquet dedicates a whole section to Competence.

In the book, he emphasizes the importance of building a high level of team competence when moving decision-making to the team in the high-stakes environment of a nuclear submarine. He also reflects on a past failure to do so.

Have you tried to divest control without first making sure your organization is competent to handle more decision-making authority? I learned the hard way that control without competence is chaos.

We had been taking actions that pushed authority down the chain of command, that empowered the officers, chiefs, and crew, but the insight that came to me was that as authority is delegated, technical knowledge at all levels takes on a greater importance. There is an extra burden for technical competence.

If all you need to do is what you are told, then you don’t need to understand your craft. However, as your ability to make decisions increases, then you need intimate technical knowledge on which to base those decisions.

This was going to be hard. We were going to have to train our guys to a higher level of technical competence if we wanted to give them more authority. Fundamentally, this is where I think I failed on the Will Rogers. I had tried to push authority and control, but the technical competence of the engineering department, who were accustomed to being given specific guidance, had atrophied.

Marquet, L. David. Turn The Ship Around! (p. 126). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Team competence, like many other aspects of the work, is moveable and flexible – it's not a fixed thing through time, and it changes as the work, the people, and their skills change.

While we're each responsible for our competence, the manager is responsible for ensuring they have an exceptionally competent team. If the team isn't highly competent, the manager is the one underperforming.

While this means sometimes you have to part ways with people who aren't the best fit for the team, it also means ensuring your team is constantly building up their competencies.

Training is the manager's job

In High Output Management, Andy Grove makes the case that the manager is responsible for training the team. He even dedicates the whole last chapter to "Why Training Is the Boss's Job."

Let me explain why, beginning with what I believe is the most basic definition of what managers are supposed to produce. In my view a manager’s output is the output of his organization—no more, no less. A manager’s own productivity thus depends on eliciting more output from his team.

A manager generally has two ways to raise the level of individual performance of his subordinates: by increasing motivation, the desire of each person to do his job well, and by increasing individual capability, which is where training comes in. It is generally accepted that motivating employees is a key task of all managers, one that can’t be delegated to someone else. Why shouldn’t the same be true for the other principal means at a manager’s disposal for increasing output?

Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform.[..]

This assumes, of course, that the training will accurately address what students need to know to do their jobs better. This isn’t always so—particularly with respect to “canned courses” taught by someone from outside. For training to be effective, it has to be closely tied to how things are actually done in your organization.

Some 2 percent to 4 percent of our employees’ time is spent in classroom learning, and much of the instruction is given by our own managerial staff.

Grove, Andrew S.. High Output Management (p. 223). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Mapping team competencies

The first step to having a competent team is assessing the team's competence.

Assessing your team's competence requires you to assess each team member, including yourself, and then the competence of the whole team.

My favorite way of mapping competencies is through scorecards. Here's how you go about doing that.

1. Create a list of the competencies expected of each team member based on their current roles
2. Create a scorecard for each competence on a scale of 1-5 or 0-10, with descriptions for what each of them means within this competence
3. Assess it given your knowledge of their current skill level on that scale

That's it: 1) List competencies 2) Create scorecards 3) Assess. Don't skip this!

Scorecards are essential because they help you clarify what it means to be at a particular level of competence.

If your team is not highly competent in all its relevant areas, you must be strategic about which areas to improve to build the most impactful competence in your team's work.

Critical: Your areas of improvement must not necessarily be the lowest-scoring areas. It's often more valuable to improve the areas where your team is high-scoring than low-scoring.

Once you've completed evaluations, find the most important areas of improvement and outline how you plan to increase them.

Improving your team's competence boils down to two steps: Training your team or replacing existing team members. If you're not doing either, you're not improving your team's competence.

Replacing team members is sometimes inevitable, but it's the most expensive way to improve competence. Most of the focus on a currently high-performing team should be on coaching, training, and other types of professional development.

Building an empowered team

The bar for competence is much higher in a team empowered to make decisions. Only an exceptionally competent team, empowered to make decisions, can be top-performing.

To build an exceptionally competent team, you must first own the responsibility for achieving it.

Knowing where your team's competence lies requires you to assess it. The best way to assess a team's competence is by building and filling competence scorecards for all team members, including yourself.

Once you identify the areas to improve competence, you should create a plan to improve it, which may be parting ways with team members or, most likely, building their competence through coaching and training.

This is the cycle of the second pillar of management, the pillar of competence. Use the example below if you don't have a scorecard for team members and your teams yet.

Remember, you own having an exceptionally competent team, and that's a required step to doing great work.

Example: Management and Leadership 0-10 Scorecard

Here's an example of a 0-10 scorecard for Management and Leadership. Feel free to use, edit, and customize to your needs.

Management and Leadership Scorecard

0 (No Proficiency)

No experience or knowledge in leading or managing teams. Unfamiliar with basic leadership or management principles.

1-2 (Beginner)

Basic understanding of leadership and management concepts. May have led small teams or projects but lacks experience in managing complex team dynamics or strategic leadership. Limited ability to motivate, delegate, or manage tasks effectively.

3-4 (Basic)

Comfortable with managing small teams or projects. Familiar with basic leadership styles and team management techniques. Can set goals, delegate tasks, and handle common management challenges, but may struggle with complex leadership situations. Basic skills in conflict resolution and team motivation.

5-6 (Intermediate)

Good leadership and management skills, with experience in leading larger teams or more significant projects. Proficient in various leadership styles, team building, and effective communication. Capable of strategic planning, performance management, and developing team members. Experience in managing team dynamics and fostering a positive work environment.

7-8 (Advanced)

Strong leadership and management capabilities. Proven track record of successfully leading and managing multiple teams or large-scale projects. Skilled in advanced leadership techniques, such as transformational leadership, change management, and cross-cultural team management. Able to mentor and develop other leaders, manage complex organizational challenges, and drive strategic initiatives.

9 (Expert)

Recognized as an expert in leadership and management within their field. Extensive experience in high-level leadership roles, managing complex organizations or multiple teams. Influential in developing and implementing innovative management practices. Regularly contributes to leadership thought leadership through writing, speaking, or mentoring.

10 (Master/Leading Expert)

Leading authority in the field of leadership and management. Known for pioneering new leadership theories or management practices. Sought after for high-level advisory roles, executive coaching, or board memberships due to exceptional leadership qualities.