I assess team members silently, mapping their skill level and willingness to take on a stretch project. My go-to tool is the Skill-Will Matrix: high skill, low will. A classic profile. Competent, capable, but not hungry for the work in front of them.
The matrix tells me something important: I need to motivate team members. But what motivates each one is different. That’s where the real work starts.
Then I started digging into Ikigai research, thinking about team development from a different angle. And something clicked.
Those people I’d assessed as “high skill, low will” sat exactly where Ikigai would place them: in the overlap of “What You’re Good At” and “What People Will Pay For,” but disconnected from “What You Love” and “What the World Needs.” Both frameworks were describing the same person. Same emotional state. Same risk. Same retention problem.
When I started mapping my entire team against both matrices simultaneously, the pattern became clear: they weren’t two separate assessment tools. They were two angles on the same human reality.
This post explores what I found.
The Two Frameworks, Briefly
The Skill-Will Matrix is straightforward. You plot people on two axes: their capability in a domain (Skill: 1-5) and their motivation to grow or perform in that domain (Will: 1-5). The four quadrants become your management signal.
Ikigai is more poetic but equally practical. It asks: what do you love, what are you good at, what does the world need, and what will people pay for? The person who sits in the center, where all four circles overlap, has found their ikigai: a life of purpose and sustenance.
Most people don’t live at the center. They live in one of the two-circle overlaps, and that overlap tells a story about fulfillment, income stability, and whether they stay.
On the surface, one feels like management math and the other feels like personal philosophy. But they’re measuring the same thing:
The alignment between what someone can do, what someone wants to do, and whether the world values it enough to pay for it.
The Overlap: Four Profiles Appear in Both Frameworks
High Skill, High Will lands at Ikigai’s center.
This person is good at what they do (Skill), hungry to improve and take on bigger challenges (Will), in demand by the organization (World Needs), and compensated well (Paid For). They’re in the sweet spot. They feel purpose and competence at the same time. You don’t worry about them leaving because they have room to grow within your org. They’re the person mentoring others, pushing boundaries, building systems.
High Skill, Low Will lands in Ikigai’s “Profession” zone.
This is the person who is undeniably competent. The world needs them. They’re paid well. But there’s no love in it. It’s a job. They show up, deliver, and the moment they find somewhere that aligns with their love, they leave. This happens more than we admit. The engineer with five years of strong performance who suddenly quits because they want to build community tools. The product manager who’s shipped successful features but feels hollow after every launch. They’re not failing at their job. They’re succeeding at something they don’t believe in.
Low Skill, High Will lands in Ikigai’s “Passion” zone.
This person is on fire about the mission. They care deeply about what the organization is trying to achieve, and they want to be good at their role. But they’re still building capability. The risk here isn’t engagement, it’s runway. They need structured coaching, clear skill-building paths, and honest conversations about timeline. If they don’t see progress, the will can flip to frustration. If they do, they’re your next high performer. This is your highest-potential hire, if you invest correctly.
Low Skill, Low Will lands in Ikigai’s “Trap” zone.
This person is disconnected from love, disconnected from mastery, disconnected from mission. They’re there for the paycheck, and often not even a good one. This is the hire that went wrong, or the person who landed in a role that doesn’t match their strengths or interests. The clock starts ticking on exit the moment they feel agency to leave. You can’t motivate your way out of this quadrant.
What Both Frameworks Reveal That One Alone Misses
The Skill-Will Matrix told me I needed different motivation strategies for different people. That’s useful. But it doesn’t explain the underlying state.
If you only use the Skill-Will Matrix, you map a profile. You see someone is high skill, low will. But you don’t see why. You might assume it’s laziness, or disengagement from the company. So you push harder on motivation, try new incentives, restructure the role. And nothing sticks. Because the problem wasn’t motivation in the abstract. It was that this person was in the wrong domain.
What the Ikigai layer reveals is different: this person might be unmotivated specifically because they’re disconnected from love and purpose in what they do. Their skill is real and valuable. The market agrees. They’re well compensated. But they fell into this role by accident, or by following opportunity, and now they’re trapped by their own competence. They’re good, so the organization keeps loading them with more work in that domain. And they’re quietly miserable.
Conversely, if you only think about Ikigai, you might see someone in the “Passion” quadrant and assume they’re on a healthy journey. What the Skill-Will Matrix tells you is that without actual competence-building, passion burns out in 6-9 months. Your brilliant, motivated hire becomes frustrated and leaves because nobody gave them real skill development or clear pathways to mastery.
Together, the frameworks answer a question neither one answers alone: is this person stuck, and what kind of stuck are they?
The Quiet Signals: Retention, Culture, and Who Actually Stays
I’ve been managing and working in teams for over a decade. Here’s what I’ve learned through pattern recognition, not theory:
People in High Skill, High Will stay for years.
They build systems. They mentor. They become the people you can’t imagine replacing. Not because they’re afraid to leave, but because there’s growth available in your organization. You don’t have to fight retention for these people; you have to fight the temptation to overload them.
People in High Skill, Low Will leave within 12-18 months of hitting competence.
I’ve seen it so many times. Strong engineer ships three solid features, says thanks but no thanks, and bounces to a startup where they can build the product they actually want to build. The organization always acts surprised. But the writing was on the wall. They were never in it for the mission. They were proving something to themselves or riding a paycheck.
People in Low Skill, High Will either graduate to High Skill, High Will within 12 months, or they plateau and get bitter.
This depends entirely on whether they have a real skill-building environment. If you’re coaching them, pairing them with senior folks, and actually protecting space for learning, they level up fast and become your most grateful, loyal performers. If you treat them like they’re already competent, they burn out fast. The will can flip hard.
People in Low Skill, Low Will leave or get managed out.
This is the shortest tenure. If they have options, they exit within months. If they don’t, they become the person everyone complains about.
This matters because
you can’t hire culture into the High Skill, Low Will quadrant, and you can’t manage skill-building out of the Low Skill, Low Will quadrant.
Different problems. Different solutions. Same tool that’s hard to read without the second framework.
Why This Matters Right Now
We talk a lot about retention, engagement, and culture fit. But we rarely diagnose accurately. A manager will say “I have a motivation problem” when they actually have a domain-fit problem. A founder will say “I need to hire more driven people” when they actually need to create clearer skill-building paths.
Here’s what gets me about this dual-framework thinking: it forces you to separate two things we usually conflate.
You can’t motivation-talk your way into High Skill, High Will if someone is in High Skill, Low Will.
The problem isn’t will. It’s fit.
You can’t competence-test your way out of Low Skill, High Will.
The person is trying. They’re just not ready yet.
This clarity matters when you’re:
- Deciding who to stretch with a big project. Stretch the high-will quadrants, regardless of starting skill. Never stretch someone in High Skill, Low Will on a mission-critical project; they’ll do it perfectly and then leave.
- Building your first leadership team. You need High Skill, High Will. You need at least one or two Low Skill, High Will people you can develop. You cannot build a functioning leadership culture around High Skill, Low Will, no matter how competent they are.
- Diagnosing why a team feels flat. If your culture feels hollow, count your High Skill, Low Will people. That’s usually your signal. Competence without engagement creates cynicism.
- Understanding who should leave. Sometimes the most uncomfortable thing a leader does is tell a competent person that they belong somewhere else. If they’re in High Skill, Low Will and you sense it, have the conversation. There’s no shame in it. They’ll find their ikigai somewhere else.
The Research Question I Can’t Shake
Here’s what I can’t stop thinking about: does everyone move through these quadrants on a predictable path, or does it depend on the person?
Does someone typically start Low Skill, High Will (learning, eager), then either graduate to High Skill, High Will (mastery + mission), or slide into High Skill, Low Will (competent but stuck)? And does that transition point depend on whether the organization actually invests in skill-building, or is it more about fit?
I don’t have the answer yet. But the hypothesis feels important:
if you want to prevent people from landing in High Skill, Low Will (the “comfortable emptiness”), you need to make High Skill, High Will reachable in the first place.
That means intentional skill development, clear mission articulation, and actually rotating people into work that matters to them, not just work that’s important to the business.
The alternative is a org full of competent, disengaged people shipping features nobody really wants. Which, come to think of it, sounds familiar.
Closing Thoughts
If you’re a manager or leader, start mapping your team on both matrices at the same time. Don’t do them separately. The overlap is where the signal lives.
If you’re founder with a small team, pay attention to how many people are in High Skill, Low Will. That’s your retention risk and your culture ceiling.
If you’re in High Skill, Low Will yourself, don’t wait for permission to move. Find a domain where you can be High Skill, High Will. Life’s too short to be competent and empty.
If you’re Low Skill, High Will, find a leader who will invest in your development. That relationship matters more than the title or the paycheck.
And if you’re curious about this intersection, I’d love to hear what you see in your own teams. The pattern I’m seeing isn’t universal yet, and it should be.
Additional Resources
- Why Your Product Team Isn’t Shipping explores how motivation and priorities intersect when teams lose momentum.
- If Your Absence Breaks Delivery, Your System is Fragile digs into team resilience and what it signals about culture.
- The Tech Alchemy of Product Management covers the deeper work of mastery and leadership beyond certifications.
This intersection of frameworks is still new territory for me. If you’re working with this model in your team, or if you see different patterns, I’d like to talk about it.
Reach out at tahirshahzad.com/contact/ and let’s dig deeper into what this means for your specific context.
Tahir Shahzad
Tahir Shahzad is a Product Manager, Product Owner, and technology consultant with over a decade of experience helping startups and organizations build products people actually use. If you are working on a product problem worth solving, reach him at tahirshahzad.com/contact/
