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the-talent-delusion

The Talent Delusion by Tomas Chamorro Premuzic

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:

  1. Minority of people responsible for the majority of output 
  2. Talent gauged when trying your best
  3. Talented person can achieve the same result with less effort than untalented individual
  4. Personality in the right place – context matters
  5. Talent cannot be observed directly 

Talent is important because:

  1. people’s behaviour is not random  – their probability to behave in certain ways is different to other people’s
  2. High stake decisions about people’s careers cannot be left to chance, ending up with less talented people is a disadvantage
  3. 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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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)
  4. 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:

  1. humans have always lived in groups
  2. Those groups have hierarchies
  3. 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

Previous Post: « 95: Fair pay – addressing pay scales and fairness at work with Aoife O’Brien
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