The Performance Canvas: A fresh look at overcoming team performance barriers

Managers and team coaches: this canvas helps diagnose why you might not be getting the team performance results you need, and to get the full picture of how to help boost that performance.

I was recently doing a set of coaching sessions with some management teams, looking at ways to use prototyping and testing to improve team performance. Through that work, this Performance Canvas was born.

The problem: assuming the problem (and the solution)

One particular management team I was coaching was focused on reducing the number of help requests for using one of their systems (let’s call it ACME), especially by employees new to the organisation. Their chosen solution was to create a training program.

When we went through the team’s thinking and plans for this training program, it became really clear that they had basically assumed that the problem was the new employees. And their solution – training – was meant to ‘fix’ employees’ knowledge. When I probed into their thinking, it turned out that they hadn’t really asked these new employees how they saw the problem.

Skill/Will matrix: an exercise in empathy

As I’m sure many of you in coaching, change management and L&D circles know, the Skill/Will matrix comes in handy here, for understanding where people are at with performance in any given area.

The Skill/Will Matrix (created by Max Landsberg, author of The Tao of Coaching) is commonly used as a coaching tool, but in this case it helped this management team in a different way.

It helped them to see that maybe the issue might not be a lack of skill and knowledge, but could be just as much about motivation. Training might help those who are in the low skill and high will quadrant, to build skills and confidence… but would do nothing for those sitting in the other quadrants.?

But this was still only half the picture.

Adding the Hill to Skill and Will

The environment people are in often has just as much to do with their performance and confidence as their skills and motivation. In other words, you might know how to get from A to B, you might really want to get to B, but getting to B is just really hard.?

Again I probed the management team about how much they knew about what these new employees were up against when using the ACME system. This made them realise that there were more insights to be gained by doing a proper needs analysis with the new employees, especially looking into the various barriers or frictions in the way. This analysis unearthed issues like:

• The ACME system itself relied too much on the user having to remember where everything was, rather than having a more intuitive navigation and interface
• New employees saw that the more seasoned staff around them got frustrated when they kept asking for help, so they lodged help requests through the internal help desk instead

Well, that helped the management team to see the problem space in more detail.

But even this still leaves out an essential ingredient…

Adding the Pill to Skill Will and Hill

This ingredient hides in plain sight. Once you realise it’s there, it looks like complete common sense, and you wonder why it’s not already considered.?

The Pill is the set of tools and boosters a person has, to complement their skills, their will, and the hill they have to climb. Examples:

• Tangible tools like productivity software
• Accelerators like templates and AI text-generation
• Job aids like one-page guides and cheat sheets
• Boosters like kudos awards, words of appreciation from colleagues, even something like plants and couches in the office

This gives us another lens through which to view a problem space or a solution space:

• Is the employee having to deal with slow, broken or out-of-date tools?
• Is there a lack of templates to speed up workflow?
• Are there any job aids, so that the employee doesn’t have to rely on memory?
• Could there be some extra boosters to help them along?

Suddenly, the management team I was working with saw a whole lot more potential for creating different prototypes to test!

The Performance Canvas

The management team now had a much better grasp on the problem, AND more ideas to prototype different parts of the solution. Huzzah!

As a byproduct, I arranged the Skill, Will, Hill and Pill into a canvas that anyone (even you!) can use, to have a more productive conversation about WHY particular performance issues are happening, and/or HOW to improve those issues.

You can treat these prompts as questions to answer about either the problem or the solution. Once you have captured ideas and thoughts in each box, you can look over all of the responses, look for patterns and relationships, and then capture a summarised problem statement or design challenge in the middle.

Try it out

I'm interested to know if anyone else has combined 'Pill' with Skill, Will and Hill before. Plus, has anyone used something like this already? If not, try it out, I'm keen to hear if it's useful or not. If you want a copy of this Performance Canvas as a PDF, DM me - I’m happy to send it to you.?