Source: LinkedIn — COL Jonathan Holm
COL Jonathan Holm — an Army officer with 819 followers and a track record of posting operationally grounded leadership content — shared a brief but pointed endorsement of the Skill/Will Matrix, a 2x2 diagnostic framework for assessing team members along two axes: capability and motivation.
The framework is not new. It has been a staple of management consulting and organizational psychology for decades, originating in Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard’s situational leadership model. What makes Holm’s framing notable is the military practitioner’s gloss he puts on it. He identifies the most operationally uncomfortable quadrant — high skill, low will — as the one that “hinders team and interpersonal dynamics” and requires the most deliberate leadership intervention. In his words, managing it is “the eat your vegetables and floss your teeth part of leadership.” The comment from Richard Larson — a retired Army officer — naming the two most desirable quadrant occupants “Willing and Able” as “favorite Soldiers” is the kind of shorthand that signals this framework has genuine traction in military professional circles, not just corporate HR.
The matrix itself maps four archetypes:
| High Skill | Low Skill | |
|---|---|---|
| High Will | High performer — stretch and recognize | Enthusiastic beginner — train and develop |
| Low Will | Capable but disengaged — diagnose and re-engage | Deadweight — address directly |
The practical value of the framework is in forcing leaders to disaggregate performance problems before responding to them. A soldier or analyst who is underperforming may be undertrained, disengaged, burned out, or simply misallocated — and each of those conditions calls for a different intervention. Treating all underperformance as a motivation problem wastes time and accelerates attrition. Treating all underperformance as a training problem produces the same result.
For organizations like OFFSET that are building and scaling small, high-density teams in a demanding operational environment, the matrix has direct utility. The failure mode at this stage of growth is not usually hiring the wrong people — it is misreading which quadrant someone is in and applying the wrong response. A capable analyst who is disengaged needs clarity and autonomy, not a performance improvement plan. A motivated but undertrained new hire needs structured development, not more responsibility faster.
Holm’s framing — that expanding the high-skill/high-will quadrant while actively managing the low-will quadrant is the core work of leadership — is operationally correct and underappreciated in fast-moving organizations where the tendency is to tolerate drag in the name of bandwidth.
Via COL Jonathan Holm on LinkedIn. The original framework post is by Monica Federico; Holm’s commentary is the practitioner lens.