Why can’t they deliver like you do?

We recently started teaching our oldest daughter how to drive the boat. Although she's one of the most diligent 12-year-olds you'll meet, driving is completely foreign to her and it creates quite the entertaining experience. As the surfer behind the boat, you never know what you'll get when she's pulling you out of the water—super slow and steady, or sudden jerks with full-throttle jumpstarts. Thankfully, it just leaves us laughing.

But the stakes are much higher at work. When employees can't perform tasks as well as we do, we're quick to frustration and assumptions. We often forget what it takes to develop new skills and abilities.

This Two-Minute Tip takes a quick deep dive into this very issue through the lens of a recent coaching conversation with one of my clients.

• Read the video transcript

  Our family loves to go boating just up at the local lake in the mountains, and typically we use the boat as an opportunity to bring friends up there and get some dedicated time with them out on the water. But recently we decided we needed to go out just the four of us. My husband was about to take off on some more business travel and we needed some dedicated family time. At first the girls were bummed we weren't bringing friends, but then it ended up being such a great evening, just the four of us out on the lake that night.

  What it provided was some extra time for us to each work on new skills that we were trying to develop, whether it was surfing skills or driving the boat. My oldest is learning to drive the boat.

  And what I find is when we are teaching somebody a skill that we already know how to do, our expectations of how easy it should be for them are up here when the reality is it takes time and diligence and patience and a lot of different mechanisms to help them get to here.

  Just recently, I was working with a leader who had delegated a big project to an employee and his expectations were here and delivery was down here. And so in his mind he thought, well, this employee just isn't capable of doing that. But the truth is, it really wasn't a matter of capability. It was a matter of giving them the time and the teaching needed to grow in that skill.

  So I asked the leader, "Hey, can you think back "to when you were first developing and learning this skill? "How long did it take you to get to this level, "and what did you do and who helped you to get there? "What was most helpful in getting you from here to here?"

  If you have delegated something to an employee and they are not delivering it in the way that you want them to, don't just jump to this belief that they are not capable of doing it. Instead, think back to when you were developing that skill and think through how long did it take you and what was most helpful in aiding you in developing that skill.