• You can achieve anything you set your mind to.
• A manager should try to help a person overcome his weaknesses.
• When hiring, look for skills and experience.
• The best employees stay with a company because of the benefits the company offers.
• A manager should treat everyone the same.
• There is one best way to manage.

What the authors found was that the best managers do not try to help people overcome weaknesses. Instead, they want to build on strengths. When staffing, the best managers look for personal attributes in the candidates that match their requirements and that vary among candidates independently of skills and experience. The authors call these attributes talents; they define talent as “a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied.” They go on to assert that every job, at an excellent level of performance requires talent because an excellent level of performance requires the recurring application of some patterns of thought, feeling or behavior.
 

Examples of Talents

Striving Talents Achiever A drive that is internal, constant, and self-imposed Kinesthetic A need to expend physical energy Stamina Capacity for physical endurance Competition A need to gauge your success comparatively Desire A need to claim significance through independence, excellence, risk, and recognition Competence A need for expertise or mastery Belief A need to orient your life around certain prevailing values Mission A drive to put your beliefs into action Service A drive to be of service to others Ethics A clear understanding of right and wrong which guides your actions Vision A drive to paint value-based word pictures about the future

Thinking Talents Focus An ability to set goals and to use them every day to guide actions Discipline A need to impose structure onto life and work Arranger: An ability to orchestrate Work Orientation A need to mentally rehearse and review Gestalt A need to see order and accuracy Responsibility A need to assume personal accountability for your work Concept An ability to develop a framework by which to make sense of things Performance Orientation A need to be objective and to measure performance Strategic Thinking An ability to play out alternative scenarios in the future Business Thinking The financial application of the strategic thinking talent Problem Solving An ability to think things through with incomplete data Formulation An ability to find coherent patterns within incoherent data sets Numerical An affinity for numbers Creativity An ability to break existing configurations in favor of more effective/appealing ones

Relating Talents Woo A need to gain the approval of others Empathy An ability to identify the feelings and perspectives of others Relator A need to build bonds that last Multirelator An ability to build an extensive network of acquaintances Interpersonal An ability to purposely capitalize upon relationships Individualized Perception An awareness of and attentiveness to individual differences Developer A need to invest in others and to derive satisfaction in so doing Stimulator An ability to create enthusiasm and drama Team A need to build feelings of mutual support Positivity A need to look on the bright side Persuasion An ability to persuade others logically Command An ability to take charge Activator An impatience to move others to action Courage An ability to use emotion to overcome resistance

From First, Break All the Rules, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, Appendix C

Moreover, Messrs. Buckingham and Coffman maintain that talent cannot be taught. Instead, the staffing manager must select people who already have the required talents in order to have an organizational unit that will be capable of excellence.

So If It Can’t Be Taught, …?

This means that I own the development of my talent. If talent cannot be taught, it has to be learned.

If, for example, I want to build a career in sales, I have two choices:

1. I can take whatever package of talents I currently have out into the sales world and hope for the best;
2. I can think about what talents I do and do not have, compare them to what excellence in sales requires, and construct and implement a self-development plan that will remediate my shortages in any talents that are essential to sales.

Using the first plan above, he might be able to be successful for a while, particularly in a good economic climate. Or he might get lucky and find a company whose product basically sells itself, like Xerox copiers in 1970. Or he might find a manager who makes a personal project out of him. But it is foolhardy to depend on any of these events, akin to the lotto retirement plan (i.e., “I play lotto and will use my future winnings as a retirement fund.”).

Using the second plan above, he has to identify the fact that he is weak in empathy and, knowing this, create and execute a plan to improve his abilities to an effective level. It won’t be easy, but it is the most probable path to a sustainable successful outcome.

The list of talents reproduced above is by no means complete, but it provides a starting point. Use it to think about what you have and what you want to do. Identify any missing talents in your own inventory and attack the problem.

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Last modified Monday, 14-Jul-2014 16:38:18 EDT

All contents not otherwise identified copyright © 2001 Stephen Rojak. All rights reserved.
 

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