The same thing happens in the real world. Let’s say you have just trained some new associates in the skills and knowledge they need to provide good customer service. You send them out into the field. As long as the customers’ requests stay within the guidelines covered in training, most of them perform acceptably well.
But what happens when, all of a sudden, they are confronted by a customer request that they have never heard before? If they have the relating talent of empathy and/or persuasion, they will perform well. Instinctively they will find just the right words and just the right tone to calm the customer down and resolve the situation.
But if they lack these talents, all the skills and knowledge they have just acquired will be of little help. Their performance will suffer.
The power of skills and knowledge is that they are transferable from one person to another. Their limitation is that they are often situation-specific — faced with an unanticipated scenario, they lose much of their power.
In contrast, the power of talent is that it is transferable from situation to situation. Given the right stimulus, it fires spontaneously. If you have the striving talent of competitiveness, then almost any kind of contest can spark you. If you have the relating talent of empathy, then every emotion speaks to you. If you have the relating talent of assertiveness, then no matter what the subject, you will be able to state your case plainly and persuasively.
The limitation of talent, of course, is that it is very hard to transfer from one person to another. You cannot teach talent. You can only select for talent.
SIMPLE LANGUAGE, SMART THINKING
Now that you know the difference between skills, knowledge, and talents, you can use these terms to throw light on all the other words used to describe human behavior — words like “competencies,” “habits,” “attitude,” and “drive.” At present many of us assume that they all mean virtually the same thing. We use phrases like “interpersonal skills,” “skill set,” “work habits,” or “core competencies” so naturally that we rarely question their true meaning.
This isn’t just careless language. It’s careless thinking. It leads managers astray. It leads them to waste precious time, effort, and money trying, with the best of intentions, to train characteristics that are fundamentally untrainable.
So let’s look more closely at competencies, habits, attitude, and drive. Which of these are skills, or knowledge, and therefore can be changed in a person? And which are talents and therefore cannot?
Competencies
Developed by the British military during World War II to define the perfect officer, competencies are now used in many companies to describe behaviors that are expected from all managers and leaders. Although no one really believes that this perfect manager/leader exists, competencies can occasionally be useful if they help a company think through the ideal set of behaviors for a particular role.
But if you do use them, be careful. Competencies are part skills, part knowledge, and part talent. They lump together, haphazardly, some characteristics that can be taught with others that cannot. Consequently, even though designed with clarity in mind, competencies can wind up confusing everybody. Managers soon find themselves sending people off to training classes to learn such “competencies” as strategic thinking or attention to detail or innovation. But these aren’t competencies. These are talents. They cannot be taught.
If you are going to use competencies, make it clear which are skills or knowledge and therefore can be taught, and which are talents and therefore cannot. For example, a competency such as “Implements business practices and controls” is a skill — all managers can learn it to some minimum degree of proficiency. A competency such as “Calm under fire” is a talent — you cannot teach someone to be cool.
Habits
“Habit” is another potentially confusing term. We have been told that our habits are second nature. We have been told that we can all change this nature and acquire new habits. Again, this advice is well-intended but inaccurate. Most habits are our first nature. Most habits are talents.
If you are habitually assertive or habitually empathic or habitually competitive, then you are going to have a tough time changing these habits. They are enduring. They make you You. It’s potentially disastrous to suggest that the only way to become more effective is to try to change your first nature.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you cannot change some of your behaviors. You can. Over time, through reflection, you might change your values and so learn a more positive and productive way to apply your talents. You might choose to play to one talent more than another. You might combine your talents with relevant skills. You might learn to accept your unique combination of talents and so become less defensive or insecure. There is a great deal you can change.
But whatever you do, the beauty of this approach is that it relies on self-awareness, rather than self-denial, to help you become more effective. Some of your behaviors may have changed, but you haven’t been forced to contort yourself into someone else. You have simply cultivated your unique set of talents.
Attitudes
Many managers say they select for attitude — a positive attitude, a team-focused attitude, a service-oriented attitude. They are right to do so, because a person’s prevailing attitudes are part of her mental filter. They are created by the interplay of her unique pattern of highways and wastelands. Her attitudes are talents.
She may be cynical or trusting. She may be an optimist or a malcontent. She may be experimental or conservative. None of these attitudes are necessarily better than any of the others. None of them will prevent a person from playing certain roles extremely well — for example, the malcontent might be a powerful entrepreneur, driven by her dissatisfaction with the status quo. The cynic might fit right into a role in law, policing, or investigative reporting, anywhere a healthy mistrust is a prerequisite.
But all of these attitudes form part of the person’s recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior. Managers may be able to change someone’s mood from one day to the next. However, managers will always struggle to change that person’s prevailing attitudes. As Mick K., a manager in a large consulting company, describes it: “If I find myself telling the same person to ‘look on the bright side’ time and time and time again, I should take a hint. He’s not a bright-sider. He’s a dark-sider. I should stop wasting my breath and try to find a role where skepticism is key to success.”
Drive
Many managers make a distinction between talent and drive. They often find themselves counseling someone by saying: “Look, you are very talented. But you need to apply yourself or that talent will go to waste.”
This advice sounds helpful. More than likely it is well-intended. But fundamentally it is flawed. A person’s drive is not changeable. What drives him is decided by his mental filter, by the relative strength or weakness of the highways in his mind. His drives are, in fact, his striving talents.
Take the striving talent of competitiveness as an example. Some people have a four-lane highway for competition. Show them scores and they will instinctively try to use these scores to compare their performance with that of their peers. They love scores, because what you can measure you can compare; and if you can compare, you can compete.
However, people with a wasteland for competition will see the same scores and not feel any jolt of energy at all. Putting themselves on a level playing field, pitting their best efforts against their peers, and winning … means nothing to them. They rationalize their behavior by opining, “I don’t like competition; I prefer win-win scenarios,” or the classic, “I prefer to compete with myself.” But these comments are just signs that their filter is, understandably, trying to describe itself in the most positive light.
The truth is that they are not competitive. There is nothing good or bad about this. It is simply who they are. And there is not much that either they or
you, their manager, can do about it.
Similarly, some people have a four-lane highway for constant achievement, a striving talent we call achiever. They may not have to win, but they do feel a burning need to achieve something tangible every single day. And these kind of people mean “every single day.” For them, every day — workday, weekend, vacation — every day starts at zero. They have to rack up some numbers by the end of the day in order to feel good about themselves. This burning flame may dwindle as evening comes, but the next morning it rekindles itself, spurring its host to look for new items to cross off his list. These people are the fabled “self-starters.”
Not all roles require employees to possess this striving talent of achiever. Nurses, for example, do not have to generate all of their drive from within. Instead they have to respond caringly and efficiently to the urgent needs that face them every day — for nurses the altruistic striving talent mission is much more important than achiever. But if you manage roles that do require achiever — like an insurance agent, a pharmaceutical salesperson, or any role where the person must initiate rather than respond — then remember: You had better select for it. Because if a person does not feel this burning fire, you cannot light it for him.
The same applies to all striving talents: the need to be of service, the need to be on stage, the need to be seen as competent, the need to help others grow. All of these drives are talents, and therefore they have the same characteristics as other talents. Namely, they are part of each person’s mental filter. They are unique and enduring.
A manager can never breathe motivational life into someone else. All she can do is try to identify each employee’s striving four-lane highways and then, as far as is possible, cultivate these. (More on this in chapter 5.)
When describing human behavior, we would advise you to stick with the clarity of skills, knowledge, and talents. Tread carefully when using habits or competencies — they lump too much together rather haphazardly. Likewise, if you feel a need to use attitude or drive, be cautious. Remember that a person’s drive and her prevailing attitudes are talents, and as such, they are very hard to change. When you hear yourself berating the person to “get a better attitude,” watch out. You might be asking her to tackle the impossible.
None of this implies that a person cannot change. Everyone can change. Everyone can learn. Everyone can get a little better. The language of skills, knowledge, and talents simply helps a manager identify where radical change is possible and where it is not.
The World According to Talent
“Which myths can we now dispel?”
Guided by their own beliefs, and supported by recent scientific advances, great managers can now dispel two of the most pervasive management myths.
MYTH #1: “TALENTS ARE RARE AND SPECIAL”
There is nothing very special about talent. If talents are simply recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior, then talents are actually rather commonplace. Everyone has certain recurring patterns of behavior. No one can take credit for these talents. They are an accident of birth, “the clash of the chromosomes,” as the ethologist Robert Ardrey described them. However, each person can and should take credit for cultivating his unique set of talents.
The best way to help an employee cultivate his talents is to find him a role that plays to those talents. Employees who find such roles are special. These people are naturally able to do what someone is prepared to pay them to do. We rightly label these people “talented.”
Take nursing as an example. Working with a large healthcare provider, Gallup had a chance to study some of the best nurses in the world. As part of our research we asked a study group of excellent nurses to inject one hundred patients and a control group of less productive nurses to perform the same injection on the same population of one hundred patients. Although the procedure was exactly the same, the patients reported feeling much less pain from the best nurses than from the rest. Why? What were the best nurses doing to lessen the pain? Did they have some special technique with the needle? Did they apply the disinfectant using a firmer hand or a softer swab?
Apparently not. Apparently it all came down to what the nurse said to the patient right before the needle punctured the skin. The average nurses introduced themselves with a brisk, “Oh, don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit,” and then plunged in the needle with businesslike efficiency.
The best nurses opted for a very different approach. They were just as efficient with the needle, but they set the stage rather more carefully. “This is going to hurt a little,” they admitted. “But don’t worry, I’ll be as gentle as I can.”
The best nurses were blessed with the relating talent empathy. They knew the injection would hurt, and each of them, in their own style, felt compelled to share that knowledge with the patient. Surprisingly, this confession eased the patients’ pain. To the patients it seemed as though the nurse were, in some small way, going through the experience with them. The nurse was on their side. The nurse understood. So when the needle broke the skin, somehow it didn’t feel as bad as they thought it would.
The relating talent of empathy is not particularly special. Many people have it and call upon it in all aspects of their life. But those people with empathy who become nurses are special. They can share a patient’s pain. They are “talented.”
Similarly, some people are fascinated with risk. This striving talent is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, although it can prompt some otherwise normal people to hurl themselves out of planes or swim with great white sharks just for the fun of it. However, if these people become anesthesiologists or surgeons, then their four-lane highway for risk becomes a positive strength. For them, the literal life-or-death quality of their work is a thrill, not a pressure. They are special, these people. They are “talented.”
The same goes for the person with the talent for remembering names as well as merely faces. This talent is nice to have, but it becomes particularly valuable if she is hired as the concierge in a hotel.
In all of these situations the talent alone isn’t special. It is the matching of the talent with the role that is special. As with the performing arts, the secret to great performances is all in the casting.
Of course, in today’s highly specialized business world, finding the right fit between the person and the role is a good deal more challenging than it used to be. It is not enough to say, “This person has a talent for assertiveness; I think I’ll hire him to sell.” You have to know very specifically what kind of selling you are going to be asking him to do. For example, to be a great salesperson for IBM, as in many sales roles, you have to love pushing for the close — a striving talent — and you have to know exactly when and how to do it — a relating talent. These talents, among others, are critical to an individual’s success in the role.
But if you are a salesperson for Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, you’d better not have these talents, because you’ll never have a chance to use them. The job will quickly frustrate you. The goal of pharmaceutical sales is for the sales representative to build up influence with the doctor or the HMO gradually, so that, over time, more of your drugs are prescribed. Here, success has a great deal to do with the sales rep’s relating talent for patience and influence and almost nothing to do with a talent for closing.
As a manager your job is not to teach people talent. Your job is to help them earn the accolade “talented” by matching their talent to the role. To do this well, like all great managers, you have to pay close attention to the subtle but significant differences between roles.
MYTH #2: “SOME ROLES ARE SO EASY, THEY DON’T REQUIRE TALENT”
The famous management theorist Oscar Wilde once said:
“A truth ceases to be a truth as soon as two people perceive it.”
All right, so Mr. Wilde was better known for his wit than for his management advice; nonetheless, every manager should be required to remembe
r this one remark. Although he phrased it in the extreme, Mr. Wilde simply meant that the only truth is your own. The world you see is seen by you alone. What entices you and what repels you, what strengthens you and what weakens you, is part of a pattern that no one else shares. Therefore, as Mr. Wilde said, no two people can perceive the same “truth,” because each person’s perspective is different.
This can be both a blessing and curse. You are blessed with a wonderfully unique filter but cursed with a systematic inability to understand anybody else’s. True individuality can be lonely.
One way to cope with this loneliness is to succumb to the illusion that other people operate under many of the same assumptions as you. Your ambitions, passions, likes, and dislikes are not special or distinct. They are “normal.” So you are “normal.” In moments of calm objectivity, you may concede that your point of view is not the only one, but day to day it is simply easier if you assume that everyone shares yours.
Of course, this is a generalization — some people, particularly empathic people, seem able to walk a genuine mile in someone else’s moccasins. Nonetheless it is a generalization that pervades our working world. Managers look at “lower-level” roles like housekeeping or outbound telemarketing and wonder, “How could anyone want to do that job? That job must be so demoralizing.” Misled by the illusion that everyone shares their filter, they make two false assumptions: first, that virtually anyone with the right training could do the job adequately; and second, that everyone, regardless of who they are, will want to be promoted out of the job as soon as possible. With the best of intentions, they then define these roles as “entry-level” and build career paths and compensation plans that reward top performers with speedy promotion out of the “drudgery.”
Great managers do not believe that their filter is common to everyone. Instead, when they select for a role, they are guided by the belief that some people are probably wired to excel at this role and to derive enduring satisfaction from doing it well. The Gallup research confirms this belief. Let’s take hotel housekeepers as an example.
First, Break All the Rules Page 9