How often, not how good: a different way to look at everyday skills

Ask a manager how good they are at giving feedback and you tend to get one of two answers. A modest one, because nobody wants to sound sure of themselves, or a confident one, because the question feels like a test. Neither answer tells them much about what to do on Tuesday.

Ask a different question and the conversation changes. Not how good am I at feedback, but how often do I do the specific things that make feedback work. Do I say what I saw before I say what I think of it? Do I ask how it landed? Those are questions a person can answer honestly, and questions the people around them could answer too.

Naming the Pattern

Most of leading is ordinary. Planning a week. Keeping a promise, or saying early that it cannot be kept. Running a meeting so the decision is clear when people leave. Handing off a piece of work with the outcome agreed and the how left to the person doing it. None of it is dramatic, and almost all of it happens between other tasks.

Because it is ordinary, it rarely gets looked at. Development tends to aim at the large words, such as communication, strategy, influence, and the everyday behaviours underneath them go unnamed. Yet those behaviours are what other people actually experience. A team rarely experiences a leader's "communication". It experiences whether the note of what was decided went out.

Expanded Perspective

That is the thinking behind Everyday Skills, a new assessment we are using with our first clients in Central Kentucky this fall. It looks at nineteen skills that fill a working week, grouped the way a week is: the skills that keep your own work steady, the ones that make working with one person go well, and the ones that help a team run and learn. Each skill is five plain behaviours, and for each one the only question is how often you do it, from never to almost always.

Two choices in how it works are worth explaining.

The first is that there is no percentile and no colour band. A result that ranks you against a sample you cannot see tells you where you stand in a crowd, not what to try next. Everyday Skills compares you with your own expectations instead. Before your scores show, you guess your two highest skills and your two lowest. Then you see which skills came out higher than you guessed and which came out lower. The surprise, if there is one, is yours.

The second is that it ends on one skill, not nineteen. The result picks one skill, or you choose it, and names the one or two behaviours where a shift would be. Improving a skill is often a change to one or two behaviours rather than an overhaul, and a change that small is one you can actually make this week.

What Steady Leaders Tend to Notice

In our experience, a question about frequency is easier to answer truthfully than a question about quality. It is also easier to act on. If a leader notices they rarely bring a decision to the person above them while it can still be shaped, the next step is plain: bring the next one earlier, and see what happens.

The same behaviours can be answered by the people a leader works with. A colleague answers a short set about what they can actually see, and can say not seen for anything they cannot. Their answers are shown by group, never by name, and a group shows only once three or more have answered. A manager's answers show as the manager's.

Closing Reflection

Leaders in Lexington and across the region are rarely short of ambition to grow. What they are often short of is a next step small enough to take between meetings. Asking how often, rather than how good, turns a large and slightly uncomfortable question into a short list you can actually see, and one or two things to do a little more.