Talent is so obvious, it hides in plain sight

by Dries Lombaard; Strategic Leadership Institute

talent

ˈtalənt/

noun

1. 1.

   natural aptitude or skill.

   "he possesses more talent than any other player"

   synonyms:

   flair, aptitude, facility, gift, knack, technique, touch, bent, ability,expertise, capacity, power, faculty; More
2. 2.

   a former weight and unit of currency, used especially by the ancient Romans and Greeks.

   "a mighty steed bought from a Thessalian merchant for thirteen talents"

There are different perspectives of the term "talent".  The most common association of the word will always be to link it to "skill".  And I suppose, within some contexts, this may be accurate.  Generally what we perceive and observe as performance, and then call "talent", is actually skill....(mostly fuelled by talent).

From my perspective, talent is not the same as skill at all.  It is actually very different. (For more on the difference, read this blogpost).

Let me drill through the clutter and make the term "talent" as understandable and practical as possible.  In my experience through coaching people in their natural talent, it can be condensed to two words:

Energy, and Need. 

• Sustainable Energy

However you may define natural talent, it will always be a source of energy to you.  This energy tend to manifest in one or more of three areas:  emotional energy, physical energy and / or intellectual energy. Actually, it is more than mere energy.  It is sustainable energy.  Energy that you cannot ignore, avoid or get away from.  Energy that truly defines you.  (Some people may define this energy with the word "passion", but for me, passion is a broader concept than talent. Passion is your yearning, your desire, your lasting interest.) 

This energy obviously manifest mostly through specific activities.  And it is in the actual doing of the activities that you express your skill (or sometimes, lack of it). 

The ability to define your sustainable energy is crucial, as it gives it identity and you thus get a grasp on it in order to celebrate it for the unique talent that it is.  The moment you give expression in language and understanding to the different talents, something happens.  It is as if you truly own it then, simply because you can accurately name it for what it is. 

This is where people experience the research from Gallup so useful in this field, and why the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment is such a fantastic tool - defining 34 themes of talent.  StrengthsFinder accurately assess your talent energy, and then gives it names, ranked in order of importance according to your unique response to the 178 questions asked in the assessment.  True, some of the words used to describe the talent theme may be a bit confusing at first, but once you understand the true meaning behind the chosen term in context, it is always an empowering and even liberating experience to have a language to express your combination of sustainable energy to yourself and to others.

(If you know StrengthsFinder, think about someone having "Arranger Energy", "Ideation Energy", "Empathy Energy" or "Significance Energy".  Simply connecting the CSF terms with the word "energy" opens up a new understanding - especially if you coach people using StrengthsFinder as a baseline tool.)

• Unrelenting Need

A talent is a need. An unrelenting, lasting need for specific expression and specific stimulation. My experience in this field taught me that understanding talent as a need, even more than an energy, leads to the most important paradigm shifts within peoples discovery of their own brilliance and uniqueness.  In the same way that talents are energy in thought, emotional or behavioural expression, the different energies (talents) are constantly yearning to be fed. Talents have needs. Specific needs, and generic needs. These needs they have in order to function…to survive…to contribute.  If the “needs” are not met, the Talent will go dormant or stagnate.

Talent contribution is directly linked towards specific talent needs, and it is these needs that need to be managed well in order for the energy to flow best - and the talent to become a strength. 

Some needs are generic to all talents themes, like the need for affirmation, for celebration, for permission or opportunities to play or for expression.

Then again, there are needs specific to certain talent themes, like the need for more time, the need for people interaction, the need to connect with individuals, the need for constant comparison, for emotional expression, for action or activity, for accuracy, for routine, and yes, even a need for chaos.

Understanding talent themes as needs are so important because it is the key that unlocks the true development, and releases your talents to thrive and contribute fully. It is also the practical element in managing your talents well. If you know what a talent need, then you can feed it!

Even more, if the unique needs of talents are understood, it bring an element into the understanding of others that seldom get the attention it deserves within partnerships, relationships or teams. If you can view someone else not from the perspective of what they should bring, but from what they naturally need in order to function with  maximum energy, the dynamics change forever. 

Imagine being a manager who knows the exact needs of each of your team members, and providing them with the right opportunities and environment to unleash their natural energy within their talents.

Imagine being a spouse who can read the signs of your partners thoughts, feelings and behaviours when it longs for talent energy to flow.

Imagine being a parent who can guide your teenager according to his or her exact needs when it comes to the abundance of talent energy that flows through them.

Imagine being a person with enough self respect to be attentive to your own needs of talent, managing it well, so that your energy that is so unique to you can play as strengths when it combines with the needed knowledge, skill and experience.

(Referring to the StrengthsFinder tool, think about someone having "Focus Needs", "Maximizer Needs", "Includer Needs" or "Learner Needs".  Unpacking this with people you coach takes them to a new stratosphere of understanding themselves and others.)

• A simplified perspective on Talent

Whenever you hear the term "talent" again, do not think "ability", "skill", "performance" or "contribution".  Think ENERGY and NEED.  Then look at the people around you with the lens that identifies the energy for the beauty that it is (even when misdirected or miss-managed), and see their specific needs that yearns for opportunities.

If you want to experience the impact of this simple yet powerful approach, contact me at dries@strengths.institute . It is my passion to help people and companies thrive within their natural energy, by understanding and meeting the specific needs.

Dries Lombaard is the co-owner of Strategic Leadership Institute and NeuWorx, and has more than 7000 hours of Strengths Coaching experience over the last decade.  He is leading a vibrant and growing network of Strengths Coaches in Southern Africa, and works with corporate and multinational leadership and management teams and C-level leaders as a Strengths Coach and training facilitator.   

What Is a Strengths-Based Team? - [Guest Article]

By Ryan Darby, Gallup Learning and Development Consultant

One of the more difficult concepts that managers, and sometimes coaches, struggle with is the strengths-based team. On the surface, it seems an easy idea. It’s a group of individuals who all use their talents and strengths to accomplish a common goal. Great! That does sound simple. It is, however, wrong. Not only is this incorrect, but trying to operate like this can actually hurt a true team. A strengths-based team requires much more than everyone simply working on their strong points; it requires a deep knowledge of each team member’s strengths and weaknesses and, importantly, the orchestration of those strengths and weaknesses to fit the goals of the team. Without that orchestration, teams flounder, flail, and fight.

Let me share with you a recent experience I had with a strengths-based team. I was working with a team charged with developing some really innovative ideas for one of our clients. At the project kick-off, we had gathered the team together to brainstorm and ideate on all the different things we could do -- the more ideas the better. Many people in the room had talent profiles that were perfect for such a task. We had lots of ideation, positivity, strategic, and self-assurance, amongst others. And the majority of people in the room were leaning into those strengths and generating great ideas at a rapid pace, except for one guy -- there’s always one, right? This person was not in brainstorming mode; this person was in full on execution mode. Whenever a somewhat decent idea would develop, he would ask what the next steps were or try to assign responsibilities. He was using his talents -- he has tons of activator -- but unfortunately, he was using it at the wrong time and place. As a result, he was completely throwing off the pace of the group. We would stutter and the idea generation, which was the point of the meeting, would grind to a halt. Happily, the team leader not only knew each of our strengths and weaknesses, but also knew how to orchestrate them to meet the specific demands of the project. “Jim, I love your enthusiasm, but I think you are moving a little bit ahead. Right, now what we need is less activator and more context. What do you know has worked in the past for similar clients?” And off Jim went recounting past successes, giving great ideas in the process. Erstwhile Jim was hurting the group, now Jim was a valuable and leading contributor. Some of our best ideas came from him!

The genius of what that team leader did was not that she put a stop to Jim’s activator, but that she orchestrated his other talents to fit the needs of the group and the needs of the project. Where Jim had at first been a contradictory partner -- his talents were completely offsetting the actions of the group -- Jim was now a complementary one. And this is the key to strengths-based teams -- forming complementary partnerships. To do so, one must know each of the team member’s talents and strengths, help team members understand which of their specific talents and strengths are needed by the group, and then position them in a way to contribute to the common goal. It’s not easy, but when all of these things occur, a team will finally become a strengths-based team.

Dr. Ryan Darby is one of Gallup’s leading Learning and Development Consultants. He works with the world’s top organizations to transform their corporate cultures into engaging and thriving workplaces. Darby has a doctorate in psychology from the University of California, San Diego, and a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University. His academic expertise and publications are on the influence of emotions on decision-making and behavior. He currently lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.

Most HR Data is Bad Data - {Guest Article}

By Marcus Buckingham; Founder of TMBC

How good a rater do you think you are? If you were my manager and you watched my performance for an entire year, how accurate do you think your ratings of me would be on attributes such as my “promotability” or “potential?”

How about more specific attributes such as my customer focus or my learning agility? Do you think that you’re one of those people who, with enough time spent observing me, could reliably rate these aspects of my performance on a 1-to-5 scale? And how about the people around you – your peers, direct reports, or your boss? Do you think that with enough training they could become reliable raters of you?

These are critically important questions, because in the grand majority of organizations we operate as though the answer to all of them is yes, with enough training and time, people can become reliable raters of other people. And on this answer we have constructed our entire edifice of HR systems and processes. When we ask your boss to rate you on “potential” and to put this rating into a nine-box performance-potential grid, we do it because we assume that your boss’s rating is a valid measure of your “potential”— something we can then compare to his (and other managers’) ratings of your peers’ “potential” and decide which of you should be promoted.

Likewise, when, as part of your performance appraisal, we ask your boss to rate you on the organization’s required competencies, we do it because of our belief that these ratings reliably reveal how well you are actually doing on these competencies. The competency gaps your boss identifies then become the basis for your Individual Development Plan for next year. The same applies to the widespread use of 360 degree surveys. We use these surveys because we believe that other people’s ratings of you will reveal something real about you, something that can be reliably identified, and then improved.

Unfortunately, we are mistaken. The research record reveals that neither you nor any of your peers are reliable raters of anyone. And as a result, virtually all of our people data is fatally flawed.

Over the last fifteen years a significant body of research has demonstrated that each of us is a disturbingly unreliable rater of other people’s performance. The effect that ruins our ability to rate others has a name: the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect, which tells us that my rating of you on a quality such as “potential” is driven not by who you are, but instead by my own idiosyncrasies—how I define “potential,” how much of it I think Ihave, how tough a rater I usually am. This effect is resilient — no amount of training seems able to lessen it. And it is large — on average, 61% of my rating of you is a reflection of me.

In other words, when I rate you, on anything, my rating reveals to the world far more about me than it does about you.  In the world of psychometrics this effect has been well documented. The first large study was published in 1998 in Personnel Psychology;there was a second study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2000; and a third confirmatory analysis appeared in 2010, again in Personnel Psychology. In each of the separate studies, the approach was the same: first ask peers, direct reports, and bosses to rate managers on a number of different performance competencies; and then examine the ratings (more than half a million of them across the three studies) to see what explained why the managers received the ratings they did. They found that more than half of the variation in a manager’s ratings could be explained by the unique rating patterns of the individual doing the rating— in the first study it was 71%, the second 58%, the third 55%.

No other factor in these studies — not the manager’s overall performance, not the source of the rating — explained more than 20% of the variance. Bottom line: when we look at a rating we think it reveals something about the ratee, but it doesn’t, not really. Instead it reveals a lot about the rater.

Despite the repeated documentation of the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect in academic journals, in the world of business we appear unaware of it. Certainly we have yet to grapple with what this effect does to our people practices. Look closely and you realize that it will cause us to dismantle and rebuild virtually all of them.

Fueled by our belief in people as reliable raters, we take their ratings — of performance, of potential, of competencies — and we use them to decide who gets trained on which skill, who gets promoted to which role, who gets paid which level of bonus, and even how our people strategy aligns to our business strategy. All of these decisions are based on the belief these ratings actually reflect the people being rated. After all, if we didn’t believe that, if we thought for one minute that these ratings might be invalid, then we would have to question everything we do to and for our people. How we train, deploy, promote, pay, and reward our people, all of it would be suspect.

And yet, is this really a surprise? You’re sitting in a year‐end meeting discussing a person and you look at their overall performance rating, and their ratings on various competencies, and you think to yourself “Really? Is this person really a ‘5’ on strategic thinking? Says who – and what did they mean by ‘strategic thinking’ anyway?” You look at the behavioral definitions of strategic thinking and you see that a “5” means that the person displayed strategic thinking “constantly” whereas a “4” is only “frequently” but still, you ask yourself, “How much weight should I really put on one manager’s ability to parse the difference between ‘constantly’ and ‘frequently’? Maybe this ‘5’ isn’t really a ‘5’. Maybe this rating isn’t real.”

And so perhaps you begin to suspect that your people data can’t be trusted. If so, these last fifteen years have proven you right. Your suspicions are well founded. And this finding must give us all pause. It means that all of the data we use to decide who should get promoted is bad data; that all of the performance appraisal data we use to determine people’s bonus pay is imprecise; and that the links we try to show between our people strategy and our business strategy — expressed in various competency models — are spurious. It means that, when it comes to our people within our organizations, we are all functionally blind. And it’s the most dangerous sort of blindness, because we are unaware of it. We think we can see.

There are solutions, I’m sure. But I think, before we can even consider those, we must first stop, take stock, and admit to ourselves that the systems we currently use to reveal our people only obscure them. This admission will challenge us. We will have to redesign almost our entire suite of talent management practices. Many of our comfortable rituals — the year-end performance review, the nine-box grid, the consensus meeting, our use of 360’s — will be forever changed. For those of us who want HR to be known as a purveyor of good data — data on which you can actually run a business — these changes cannot come soon enough.

- This article was published in the Harvard Business Review on 9 February 2015. 

Marcus Buckingham is the founder of TMBC, a company that builds strengths-based tools and training for managers. He is the author of several WSJ and NYT bestsellers, including his latest book and accompanying strengths assessment, StandOut: Find your Edge, Win at Work.

Managing your Talent [28] - Activator

By Dries Lombaard

Director:  Strategic Engagement; The Strengths Institute

According to Gallup, the essence of the talent theme of Activator is the following:

“When can we start?” This is a recurring question in your life. You are impatient for action. You may concede that 

analysis has its uses or that debate and discussion can occasionally yield some valuable insights, but deep down you know that only action is real. Only action can make things happen. Only action leads to performance. Once a decision is made, you cannot not act. Others may worry that “there are still some things we don’t know,” but this doesn’t seem to slow you. If the decision has been made to go across town, you know that the fastest way to get there is to go stoplight to stoplight. You are not going to sit around waiting until all the lights have turned green. Besides, in your view, action and thinking are not opposites. In fact, guided by your Activator theme, you believe that action is the best device for learning. You make a decision, you take action, you look at the result, and you learn. This learning informs your next action and your next. How can you grow if you have nothing to react to? Well, you believe you can’t. You must put yourself out there. You must take the next step. It is the only way to keep your thinking fresh and informed. The bottom line is this: You know you will be judged not by what you say, not by what you think, but by what you get done. This does not frighten you. It pleases you."

But a talent like this on itself is quite meaningless unless you develop and manage it. That is why we believe that "a well managed talent becomes a strength, but a mismanaged talent becomes a detriment".

How do you manage the talent of Activator?

Activators are fast, impatient and energetic. They create an energy with people that results in activation, movement and urgency.
I just love the Activators in my space.  Maybe it is because I am high in Ideation, so where for me, the idea is the point, the Activators just cannot let a great idea go. They have this need to turn ideas into action.  But it is more than that....they are probably the best motivators around.  Very much like a Woo or Maximizer, they want to convince you that there is something better if you simply make the move.

Now this energy can just as easily become a detriment.  The urgency and impatience which comes with the Activator talent often cause them to "rush in", make fast and sometimes impulsive decisions and moves, and skip crucial deliberation, strategizing or planning before the move.  And, they take others with remember.  So this detriment of "over-activation" may be quite a frustration to people who, sometimes blindly, follow the Activators.  Thus, this urgency need management....

How?

The solution seems simply to everyone, except to the Activators.  It is simply to "pause".  I know, the mere word probably frustrates the Activators!  But I do not mean you should abandon, delay unnecessarily or give too much time.  I just mean you should have that intentional "pause button" in your behavior that not only give you time to be certain that the move is the right one, but it also respects the need of the deliberators, strategists and planners to "catch up" with you, or even potentially warn you against lurking problems ahead.  Activators should also realize that others may be much more engaged and resilient if they had some time to "buy in" to the idea or prepare for action.
Develop a "pause button". But, still celebrate your urgency and speed!

Ask any Activator, and many will confess that they have lots of start-ups they innitiated ...but not as many finishes. The "finishing energy" of Activators are pretty low. They get bored, and move on.
If this is part of your Activator legacy, you will also know that people around you are pretty frustrated by this tendency.  Maybe they even developed the behavior of not taking your initiatives seriously, as they expect you to let it go and move on pretty soon.
You need to realize that what you do is not wrong.  Starting things, and getting others moving, is what make you strong.  But, you will definitely have to manage this strength.

How?

The very best way for an Activator to overcome this challenge, is to surround yourself with strong finishers.  Not all Talent Themes has the same energy to finish things.  Strong finishing talents includes talents themes like Achiever, Discipline, Responsibility, Focus and Competition - among others.  Making sure that they are assisting you once you've started to drive towards the completion or finish line, is what you need.
Another way of getting some of your brilliant start-ups to end in a complete achievement, is to acquire definite finishing skills or assisting resources. There are unlimited resources available online or an mobile apps which really helps to consciously drive towards a successful finishing. 

Go Activate!! The world needs more of you.

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Feeling weak and drained at work? Fantastic!

By Dries Lombaard
Director, Strategic Engagement, The Strengths Institute


Sometimes, knowing what you resist is easier to recognize than knowing what you really love to do. People may sometimes experience their lives as a recurring search for that illusive "passion", "purpose" or "calling".  You can spend all of your most precious time aiming at what you hope to be the thing that you were made to do, or the person that you were meant to become. Just to miss it.

Here's another perspective:  missing the mark is part of achieving  success.  It is part of exploring your natural strengths.  If you know what it is that weakens you to the point of wanting to give up, you are a lot closer to where you need to be in understanding your natural talents.  Because now you know clearly where you do not belong. You are much more certain of who you are not made to be, or not to become.

Your brain, emotions and body reacts to those activities which drain you most in the same way that your hand will react if you try to keep it above a flame.  Try it...and see how long you last. Even if you do have enough willpower to keep your hand steady, the consequences will have an effect long after your hand is no longer above that burning flame.

I believe in perseverance. I believe in sticking to your goals. I also believe in sometimes just hanging on for dear life.
But, I also believe in quitting.  I believe in quitting wisely, timely and completely - when you know you absolutely should.

Sticking to something you should not be pursuing is just as foolish as not taking steps of action in order to achieve a goal.

My point is this:  knowing your natural strengths is crucial. Focussing them towards your dreams are even more important.  But the reality of life is that with joy also comes sadness...with love, there is also hate...and with strength comes weakness.   It is your ability to discern and manage the difference that makes the journey towards true purposeful living possible.

So, that consistent weakness you feel at work, the draining effect....it is an indicator to do something. Maybe not quit. But definitely make some move.


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Managing Your Talents [21] - Connectedness

According to Gallup, the essence of the talent theme of Consistency is the following:

Things happen for a reason. You are sure of it. You are sure of it because in your soul you know that we are all connected. Yes, we are individuals, responsible for our own judgments and in possession of our own free will, but nonetheless we are part of something larger. Some may call it the collective unconscious. Others may label it spirit or life force. But whatever your word of choice, you gain confidence from knowing that we are not isolated from one another or from the earth and the life on it. This feeling of Connectedness implies certain responsibilities. If we are all part of a larger picture, then we must not harm others because we will be harming ourselves. We must not exploit because we will be exploiting ourselves. Your awareness of these responsibilities creates your value system. You are considerate, caring, and accepting. Certain of the unity of humankind, you are a bridge builder for people of different cultures. Sensitive to the invisible hand, you can give others comfort that there is a purpose beyond our humdrum lives. The exact articles of your faith will depend on your upbringing and your culture, but your faith is strong. It sustains you and your close friends in the face of life’s mysteries.

But a talent like this on itself is quite meaningless unless you develop and manage it. That is why we believe that "a well managed talent becomes a strength, but a mismanaged talent becomes a detriment".

How do you manage the talent of Connectedness?
 

You are an expert at seeing the big picture and the patterns within it. You understand connection and interaction. This is great, but it can also become a problem if not managed well. With Connectedness you know intuitively how different elements in any system connect together, impact on each other and relate. Your intuition is very finely developed and sometimes you just “know” the potential consequences of actions or circumstances. You love to connect the dots, drawing conclusions from seemingly unrelated facts or sensing information that is not obvious. You may have learned to play with combining concepts to produce very creative results and depending on your other talents may be very good at facilitating highly productive connections between people. You are a systems thinker and it is difficult for you to look at anything in isolation from that which surrounds it. This needs to be well-managed.

How?

You need to create boundaries within the systems which are so comfortable and familiar to you. It is very easy for someone who has not learned to manage it to become overwhelmed by the complexity of the systems in their world. Having Connectedness presents you with a lot of choices unless you find a way to limit them. You may be able to use your other talents to assist you with this or you must become master of the playing field, learning to identify and apply strict criteria for making choices which will limit the options. Your awareness of the interdependence of the variables in any system may also paralyze you with how often the answer to a question is, “It depends.” This makes it difficult for you to commit. Manage your imagination and your emotion to ensure that you are not allowing fear to master you. 

Connectedness as a talent needs to explore new avenues. You should actively feed this need.  Bear in mind that Connectedness is a “chameleon talent”. It is highly influenced by your other talents. If you enjoy learning, then Connectedness will feed you with a never-ending source of things to learn – with one thing inevitably leading to another and so on. If you are highly relational, then Connectedness will show up with a hunger to explore more about people and how to facilitate their interaction. If you are a planner and thinker then Connectedness will enable you to explore and consider all the variables and learning to organise them will make you highly effective. If you value spiritual development then Connectedness will cause you to explore connections between spiritual concepts and other elements of life.

How?

A critical skill for someone with Connectedness to learn is the ability to do safe fail experimentation. Try things – small things, often. See what works and what doesn’t. Build on what works, abandon what doesn’t. Another skill which may be very useful to you is the ability to network effectively. You innately see potential in inter-relationships and when you learn to connect people, great possibilities can be unleashed. Explore creativity techniques to enhance your ability to conceive really great ideas and then find others with whom to partner to make them a reality. Become a master of systems thinking. Learn about how different systems work and how to work well within them. Feed yourself with good information. Your highly-tuned intuition works with the information at its disposal and the better this information is, the more likely you are to make good decisions.

- by Janet du Preez, Executive Strengths Coach within the TalentMosaic Network.

Janet du Preez is a strategic maximiser; uniquely qualified with masters level studies in health sciences, psychology and business, to understand the psychological and practical systems which underlie behaviour and outcomes. Also an Africanmosaic trained strengths-performance consultant, she inspires and supports leaders who create great organisations where people choose to invest their best assets in a complex, changing competitive world. She is recognized as an experienced coach and masterful facilitator who utilizes creative techniques to craft enjoyable, interactive and participative transformational and collaborative thinking experiences for individuals, teams and organisations. She is the Managing Director of Tools of Greatness, the originator of the Dynamic Engagement Framework and of the TalentID processes and is on the academic board of the Worldsview Academy.

www.toolsofgreatness.co.za  


Important note when reading this: in this series, I simply focus on the specific talent in isolation. I do not take the crucial element of Talent Dynamics (two or more talent themes combining) into consideration. This is very important as any Coach should take that into consideration when coaching people in their talents. But you need to understand the challenges that the talent theme on its own might hold. Therefor the challenges in managing the talent as explained below might not be applicable to everyone, as the dynamics with some of their other talent themes might override the specific challenge and "make up for it". But, knowledge of the most common management challenges in every talent theme still is crucial in talent development and when turning the talent into a strength.  All information is my own, acquired by years of Strengths Coaching experience, and not verified or scientifically tested by Gallup. The definition at the beginning is the intellectual property of Gallup, and well researched.