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Admire Help

Core concepts

A few ideas underpin everything in Admire. Once these click, the rest of the platform makes sense.

The building blocks

Section titled “The building blocks”
  • Skill: a specific, observable capability someone can develop (e.g. “De-escalates an upset customer”). Each skill has a way to assess it and a bar for what counts as mastery. Skills can be organized into trees, with broader skills made up of narrower ones. Skill is Admire’s unit of management; see Skills overview.
  • Role: a grouping of the skills expected of a person in that role. Assigning someone a role sets their skill expectations, and the same skill can belong to many roles.
  • Person (staff): a member of your team. People are assigned to roles and teams, and inherit the skills those roles expect.
  • Meeting: any session you run with a person: a regular 1-1, a coaching session, or a formal observation. You take notes, talk through how things are going, and coach on skills, whether they’re demonstrated live in the session or explored by talking them through. Meetings replace the separate doc or tool you’d otherwise run 1-1s from, and they’re the heart of how skill levels get measured.
  • (Skill) Observation: a single recorded assessment of one skill, captured during a Meeting or on its own.
  • (Skill) Mastery: the point at which someone has reliably demonstrated a skill, based on its score threshold and, optionally, a number of consecutive sessions at that level.

How they fit together

Section titled “How they fit together”

The building blocks all serve one coaching loop. Each stage of the loop is something you do, and the building blocks are what you do it with:

flowchart TB
  D["1. Set expectations<br/><small>assign a Role: the Skills expected of the person</small>"]
  C["2. Coach and observe<br/><small>run Meetings and 1-1s, record Observations</small>"]
  T["3. Track progress<br/><small>watch Mastery build, skill by skill</small>"]
  P["4. Re-prioritize<br/><small>pick the skills to focus on next</small>"]

  D --> C
  C --> T
  T --> P
  T -. regularly repeat .-> C
  P -. periodically repeat .-> D

You set expectations by assigning a role, which groups the skills expected of the person. From there, most of your time is the inner loop: coach and observe in Meetings and 1-1s, and track the mastery that builds, with no need to keep revisiting expectations. Periodically, you re-prioritize: review which skills matter most for what’s coming and update each person’s focus, so the loop always coaches the skills with the most impact.

Who’s involved

Section titled “Who’s involved”

Most people wear more than one hat (a manager is usually also a staff member with their own role and skills) but it helps to know the three vantage points. (For the underlying access levels, see Users & permissions.)

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”