This book was on the reading list for now of my modules on the MSc in Organisational Behaviour at DCU. I found it a short, relatively easy read, with lots of great insights about talent management. ‘Top talent’ being the people who are best at what they do, the stars in an organisation.
Most people are unhappy in their jobs, companies find it hard to fill roles with the ‘best’ people
Talent – inmate abilities – context specific eg Roger Federer in tennis
Talent explains exceptional achievement, over and above luck/ effort
Higher education is ubiquitous and doesn’t differentiate people the way it used to. It shows you are trainable, if you continue to develop yourself
Only loosely related to the expertises required to perform on the job
Most organisations repel rather than attract talent – people are disengaged at work/ disenchantment
Passive job seeking (hoping for a new job/ open to opportunities)
Self-employment and entrepreneurship – people quitting to work for themselves, despite the limited odds of success
Engagement as a driver of performance
But over-supply of disengaged people
Disengagement and turnover intentions, and counterproductive work behaviours such as abuse and theft
Companies are no longer willing/ able to offer lifelong employment and can’t expect employees to manage their own careers – employees are therefore less committed to them
Relationship between organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB – when people do good things at work)/ performance and tenure
The more choice we have, the harder it is to be happy with what we have chosen (the grass is always greener), sites like Tinder & LinkedIn make it all to easy to find “better” alternatives, or at least to see what we are missing out on (see more on this on The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz)
Working for yourself as a way to get away from bad boss/ inept leadership
Mismanagement of talent – highly qualified but no jobs for them (country level)
Talent defined:
- Minority of people responsible for the majority of output
- Talent gauged when trying your best
- Talented person can achieve the same result with less effort than untalented individual
- Personality in the right place – context matters
- Talent cannot be observed directly
Talent is important because:
- people’s behaviour is not random – their probability to behave in certain ways is different to other people’s
- High stake decisions about people’s careers cannot be left to chance, ending up with less talented people is a disadvantage
- You need to know what you’re good at/ not good at in order to develop
It’s hypocritical to ignore talent differences, we need to know how talented people are, and so do they
- rule of vital few – pareto’s law. 80/20, but usually 90/10. Top 20% contribute to 80% of output. Next 30% =10%, bottom 50% = 10%. Ensure your top 20% can perform at their best and are better than competitors. And the bottom 80% are also better and perform better than competitors. majority of people contribute very little to the organisation’s success (even cumulatively), but it’s politically incorrect to say this.
- Maximum performance rule. Typical behaviour vs optimal behaviour / typical do vs can do. Talent is a key differentiator between people’s performance when they are highly motivated to do well; motivation is the key differentiator when they are similarly talented. Maximum performance: a) asked to do your best, b) know your performance is being evaluated, c) duration of performance should be sufficiently long for a reliable measure to be obtained, but not too long to produce a drop in performance (fatigue, boredom, difficulty). Under typical performance conditions, motivation is usually lower. Maximum and typical performance differ less for conscientious and open employees. Social loafing in teamwork. Inability to perform at maximum under pressure, eg interviews. Managers judge employees based on maximum performance. Max and typical are weakly correlated (20%) – forecast what people could do rather than will do. Max performance is related to talent, typical performance is related to motivation.
- Effortless performance rule. Talent is performance minus effort. When 2 people exert the same effort, the more talented will perform to a higher level. When 2 people perform to the same level, the more talented individual has exerted less effort. Work ethic and drive are largely dispositional; you can’t just become a high achieving person. Most people want to ‘have achieved’, not achieve (similar to the concept of what we want vs what we like in The Paradox of Choice)
- Personality in the right place. Skills and attributes. Person-job fit, employee engagement & culture fit.
Measuring talent
RAW – rewarding, able, willing
Likeability, ability, drive
Talent is measurable and predictable; the problem is how infrequently it is applied to real-world work settings. Few organisations are good at measuring job performance – but individual job performance is ‘the basic building block on which the economy is based’ – usually rely on supervisors & individuals to rate themselves – biased. Also not a great predictor of future performance (when they get it right). Good performers think they deserve a promotion, people with potential could be ignored as they’re not performing. Peter principle – promoted beyond your capabilities, particularly prevalent among manager level
Holland’s theory of professional vocations [RIASEC] – there are 6 types of vocations: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional
RAW model – rewarding, able, willing.
R – how likeable you are, easy to get along with, OCB, EQ (managing yourself, managing others) People skills are a key ingredient in job performance
A – expertise (domain/job-related knowledge, experience, skills), intelligence (learning ability, reasoning potential, both are key determinants of expertise acquisition)
W – ambition, drive, conscientiousness… work ethic, willingness to work hard (talent accelerator) Potential = talent + effort
People work better with others who have a similar level of intelligence – high, medium, low
Even when IQ tests fail to measure intelligence correctly (eg choking under pressure) they can capture other facets such as being driven (take test again) or rule out those who tend to choke under real world pressure
“It matters not what people think, but what they actually do”
Impression management is a job-relevant skill (dealing with others, colleagues, clients etc)
Use 360s to measure self-awareness – how do the ‘self’ results compare with the ‘other’ results
Engaging talent
Treated fairly, challenged, have freedom to meet those challenges
People will love their jobs more if they are given the chance to perform highly and feel proud of what they’ve achieved
Interests & values are congruent with the role and values of the organisation
Job satisfaction – what you think. Engagement – what you feel and therefore what you do (behavioural element)
Leadership is one of the leading causes of variability in engagement in the workplace (leaders shape culture)
Values = people’s psychological drivers
Anthropology:
- humans have always lived in groups
- Those groups have hierarchies
- Humans crave meaning – a system that makes sense of the world
- get along
- Get ahead
- Find and impose meaning
Master motives…
Too much getting ahead, we won’t get along and vice versa
- affiliation
- Achievement
- Meaning
We have the same needs, but not in the same amount or same way
Values: get ahead – recognition, power, commerce; get along – hedonism, affiliation, altruism, tradition; meaning – security, aesthetics, science
High score in the value means the person has a strong desire to fulfil that value and will feel frustrated/ empty if it cannot be fulfilled
Low scores imply they want to fulfil the opposite
People score highly on 2-3 values, people who score highly on many values are hard to please/ satisfy
Leaders’ values shape the culture
Culture determines the type of psychological rewards provided by a person’s work environment and whether they will match a person’s values, drivers and motives
Schein’s 3 dimensions of culture: cultural artefacts (habits, language, dress code, urban legends), espoused values (represent the ideal self), underlying assumptions (secret life… most influential, actual self) interviews with employees are needed to assess this level of culture
Cultures: hierarchical, market, ad-hoc racies, clan culture
Organisational ‘climate’ survey to measure the reality of the culture
Culture is dynamic – it never ceases to evolve
Kahn – engagement is a strong psychological association with work. Role playing to the extent you forget you’re playing a role
Flow is an extreme manifestation of engagement
Situational causes of engagement: job resources, feedback, leadership (drives the first two)
Job performance drives engagement as well as the other way around
Personal drivers of engagement: extroversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness
Situational & personal factors are interdependent
Extraversion – better networks, job resources
Openness – learning, mastery, expertise
Impact of personally on others – reports, bosses, colleagues
Leaders can engage people through a compelling vision and strategy, pushing employees to perform to a higher level, holding them accountable and forming a culture of achievement
Great leaders excel at developing their own and other people’s talents
Developing talent
People mostly don’t change. Change requires self-awareness, effort and persistence
Coaching, especially for weak areas, helps improve performance
Coaching for reputation management – be perceived more favourably by management and coworkers
Uncoachable – failing to accept mistakes, being immune to negative feedback
Organisations spend much more money on training than on selection. But selecting the right people to begin with would require a lower investment in training
Intelligence and the will to improve/ get better
Most people would like to change their personality to some degree
Even when we behave in an irrational way, it is still predictable
Nature AND nurture
We all become aggregated versions of ourselves
Coaching: results oriented, specific goals
Coaching to enhance EQ
Use a CBT approach
Enhance psychological flexibility – capacity to accept and deal with (as opposed to avoid) unpleasant situations
Interventions designed to enhance self-esteem or confidence are rarely effective, often counter-productive
Coach’s personality is best predictor of coaching success (rather than the coaching method used) – similar in therapy
Tools to assess the personality of your coach
The closer the bond, the more the client will progress
Some people are more coachable – high level of self-awareness and open to feedback
When leaders improve (through coaching) this trickles down to the rest of the organisation
Increase in self-awareness correlates with improved job performance
Coaching for:
People who are valuable to the Org
High potentials
New hires/ promotion
Expats
Strengths-based coaching – but not grounded in science, leaders must learn to develop new strengths, need to be compared to other people, not just their own strengths (normative feedback is required)
Highest ROI comes from developing high performers and hi-potentials
Strengths can become your weakness, career disadvantages (perfectionism, procrastination, overconfidence)
Disproportionate focus on positivity – in contrast to the realities of work
Self-awareness – knowledge about how you affect others (social psychology states that others are a major source of meaning and identity for the self)
Our egos must reflect our reputation
Others are better able to observe your behaviours than you are
EQ is a major marker of self-awareness, but self and other ratings do not tend to correlate – people don’t know their level of self-awareness
Coaching is enhanced when more regular and accurate feedback is given
Unclear and inaccurate feedback can do more harm than good
Not seeking feedback makes us seem more competent – we can get ahead in our careers
Older, more established people will be less likely to seek feedback. Curious and open individuals with a strong motivation for learning will be more likely to seek feedback
Some people are naturally better able to understand how others see them
Steps: (Hogan development framework)
- Build awareness
- Target behaviours
- Change behaviours
- Sustain changes
- Modify reputation
What others think of us is much more consequential than what we think of ourselves (reputation management), even when inaccurate
Dark side of talent
When people are stressed and don’t have the resources to manage impression, and when people are relaxed they let their guard down
Dark triad
Future of talent
Using tech to make the employment market more efficient
Generational increases in narcissism will harm our ability to work in teams
Overcome this with self-awareness, curiosity, entrepreneurship
Self-awareness is the most sought-after competency in executive coaching
Curious people are addicted to learning but the downside is slower decision-making
Ignoring information may be as adaptive as paying attention to it NB VALUABLE knowledge
Entrepreneurs qualities – contributing to growth and innovation
Creativity – quantity leads to quality
Opportunism – spot gaps/ opportunities
Proactivity – follow through/ execute, drive, persistence
Vision – understand the big picture, desire to change the status quo and create a better world
Talent identification tools
Robust & informative reputation score to represent talent or potential
Privacy concerns vs fairer outcomes (eg email scraping)
Internal big data
Using apps on your phone to track your movements/ identify your network – in and out of work
Real-time, ongoing feedback on interactions with work colleagues
Opportunity for gamification pre-hiring
Publish Lumosity scores
[log in with Facebook – scrape Facebook data]
Companies are less concerned with accuracy, more concerned with cost, use face validity – opportunity to share costs. Make assessments more enjoyable for test-takers.
Roughly 40 million Assessments taken annually for HR or talent development
Too many people end up in the wrong job or career which leads to underperformance, disengagement, alienation and massive productivity losses
Refine accuracy & ethicality of new tools
Can we move to a scenario where most people have been profiled already? Eg of Fiverr but for leaders
Final thoughts
What matters is not companies’ ability to make their employees happy, but rather to enable them to perform at a level that surpassed their expectations
Paradox of coaching – people who are already self-aware and open to feedback need coaching less than those who are not self-aware and not interested in coaching
Most people think they are ‘better than average’ and when told about this, think it does not apply to them. All facets of life – management, relationships, IQ scores
Over-confidence leads to delusion of competence, in ourselves but also as others see us
Happiness -> productivity, performance, organisational effectiveness
To think that every worker in the world can be engaged and that there are enough fulfilling roles for everyone is absurd
People have been led to believe that they should be happy at work, and when they’re not they should leave
- vehicle for self-actualisation puts a lot of pressure on people to find the ‘perfect’ job – purpose/ meaning/ spiritual fulfilment
The benefits of happiness are for the individual rather than for the collective
Why would we expect people to make the right career choices if they don’t know what their skills are?
Too many people advance their careers without helping their organisations to advance
