BizCoachGurus Blog

  He's the First One In and the Last to Leave. So What Could Possibly Be Wrong? You know the employee. Early to every shift, first to volunteer for a teammate's overflow, never a complaint about staying late. On paper, a manager's dream. And yet: deadlines slip. Deliverables come back needing significant rework. When a problem pops up mid-project, he waits for direction instead of running with it. If you're a manager sitting with this exact contradiction right now, you're not imagining it, and you're not wrong to be confused by it. What you're looking at isn't a motivation problem. It's a Skill vs. Will problem, and the two require completely different fixes. The Framework: Will Is Not the Same as Skill The Skill/Will matrix (originated by Max Landsberg) sorts every performance issue into one of two axes: Will : motivation, attitude, effort, commitment Skill : competence, experience, technical ability to execute the specific task Most mana...

Why "Industry Experience" Still Beats "AI Experience" — And What That Means for Managers Here's a question worth sitting with: if your organization could hire exactly one new employee right now, would you prioritize someone with deep industry experience, or someone with strong AI skills? A 2025 Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey, sponsored by TriNet, put that exact question to 230 SMB leaders. The results run counter to a lot of the current AI-hiring narrative. 52% said they'd prioritize a candidate with a lot of relevant industry experience. Only 7% said they'd prioritize a candidate with a lot of relevant AI knowledge or experience alone. The remaining 34% wanted a candidate with an equal mix of both — but when forced to choose one over the other, industry context won decisively. This is worth pausing on, because it cuts against the assumption that AI fluency is now the top hiring priority for every organization racing to keep up. T...