They are not where you need them. Now name what is actually in the way.
This is the companion to grading your team. That model tells you where somebody is. This one tells you what stands between there and where the role actually needs them, and it works unchanged on a process or a whole business.
You know somebody is not where you need them to be. That is the easy part. The useful part is naming what is actually in the way, because it is almost never one thing, and the thing people reach for first is usually the wrong one.
Three questions, in this order
As is
What does this person's actual week look like right now? Real activities and real hours, not the job title. Titles hide everything; a week does not.
To be
What does it look like when the role is done properly? Who reports to them, what do they spend their time on, and what does an average week contain?
The gap
What sits between the two? Never one thing. If your answer is a single word, you have not finished the exercise.
The test that stops you fooling yourself
Write the job advert for the to-be version. If you cannot write it, you do not know what the role is, and no amount of training or hiring is going to fix a role nobody has defined. This takes twenty minutes and it is the single most useful thing on this page.
The six gaps
Skill
They do not have a skill set the to-be role requires.
Knowledge
They do not know something they need to know.
Time
The to-be role needs hours that the as-is role does not leave them.
Capacity
Work is stuck on them because nobody else can do it.
Growth
There is no defined path, no stated possibilities, and no compensation attached to taking more on.
Mindset
They do not yet believe the to-be version is available to them, or they are resisting the change.
The gaps interlock, and that is the whole value
These are not a checklist to tick off one at a time. They cause each other, and working out which one is actually upstream is the real job. There is no formula for it.
Time is usually caused by capacity
Somebody has no time because work sits on them that nobody else can do. You do not solve that with better scheduling. You solve it by moving the work to someone else, which means hiring or training, which is the capacity gap wearing a different coat.
Skill and knowledge look identical and are not
A skill is a thing you can do. Knowledge accumulates from doing it and reflecting on it. You can teach a skill in one session. Knowledge only arrives through iteration, which is exactly why running a training session and expecting change is the most common way this fails.
How to run it
Diagnose where they are
On this specific role, not in general. Somebody excellent at one job can be genuinely poor at a different one, and that is information rather than a verdict.
Ask whether they can get there at all
Are they intelligent, do they take initiative unprompted, do they want to improve, and do they care about the outcome. If the honest answer is no, everything below is wasted effort and you are having a different conversation.
Map as is to to be, and list every gap
All six, with a sentence on what each one actually means in this case. Vague gaps produce vague interventions.
Pick one intervention per gap
A training session, a hire, an exercise, a piece of homework, a growth plan, a system. Naming the gap without attaching a move to it is just a nicer way of complaining.
This works unchanged on a process or on a whole business, not just on a person. Ask what it does now, what it should do, and what sits in between. The six gaps rename themselves slightly and the method holds.
Doing this properly is most of a first month
Mapping the gaps across a whole team, and then filling them, is a large part of what I do inside a business. The strategy call is free and you keep the plan either way. If the timing is not right, the community costs nothing.