The Talent Trap

By Frank J. Rich

Let’s join to cheer that grand old tradition that mends alcoholics and gimped horses, broken tree branches, the forlorn, and not least, errant economies. “Recovery” is peeping through a still clouded marketplace, as though in step with the anticipated glory attending pent-up demand, and unabashedly the rite of spring. Let’s hear it for a stronger market and the simple joy in employment. Even small gains can get us into work earlier and to local shops for the things we really needed these past years of belt tightening.

As the economy soars, and jobs grow, the supply of candidates is likely to put pressure on employers to shorten their hiring cycles and beef up their requires more singular effort since collaborating is often called “cheating, as Richard Wagner, FSU psychologist, points out. However, the real world requires skills necessary to working with other people. Despite the obvious appeal of intellectual performance, the correlation between IQ and marketplace performance is “low-middle” on the scale of high from considerably more than smarts. slow sales and missed quotas the past year. There are no glaring your group into topnotch selling shape. Short-term results are expected. Rate the order of importance in the following strategies. with good attitude and good education. Usually the characteristics that round the balanced ball above, a closer look at the soil in which each is raised also raises some questions. sides. The model works well for the brief encounter that is a game of “stickball,” but to marshal teams to play daily might require a lesser talent than required to push players around the bases by hitting a rubber ball well. They that have the relationships to gather players from other involvements or out of bed on summer mornings, and who make sure there is always a ball, bases, and a stick to play with are just as vital to the game. Such people may not be the “superstars,” but the game seldom takes place without their special skills. They possess the tacit knowledge that equips a person to manage himself and others, and to negotiate complex social situations in realizing the goal, according to Robert Sternberg of Yale University, who developed tests of this practical component. The Yankees, and now the Miami Heat may be examples of the “talent mindset” struggling

An example of a test question Wagner and Sternberg might ask elucidates the point.

• Push all sales decisions down to the least tenured people who can be trusted with them.

“recovery” usually forms. To grow a quality workforce starts with through the door and better able to grow their contribution by an attitudinal ethic uncommon to most.

The “talent mindset,” much like spending, downsizing, custombalance of a seal to achieve its goals under the pressure of a changing market environment. If this is the caution, what is the trap? Simply, all is not what it appears to be.

To accumulate only top students from the best schools may look like an obvious way to build a workforce that outperforms the competition. That is, until we consider that to be a good student individuals accomplish great things. The creative process is largely an individual genius. But organizations are formed to do something the work of many, execute against planned goals, and compete with others. A good design engineering tool in the hands of a gifted engineer may increase his productivity manifold, but the tool will have little affect on the design team if the organization is not gifted organization must become the “star.” The “talent trap” assumes that smart people make smart organizations. More frequently, it is smart organizations that make smart people.

• Provide frequent progress reports to sales people and managers.

• Rank and yank sales people, eliminating the dead wood.

• Spend more time on organizational development and less time on task completion.

• Install a system of accountability, giving sales people direct task responsibility.

According to Wagner and Sternberg, good managers would choose that tacit knowledge produces better results, there is no clear understanding of the link between this kind of knowledge and other forms of knowledge and experience such as academic achievement. We may hire for what a person might do for us (his potential performance), excellence (before the fact) is much trickier. Ultimately, we end up assessing one’s actual performance.

In the end, successful organizations are not all-star teams, though they are endowed of star performers. They have a more inclusive the best interests of the whole.

Frank Rich is founder and CEO of Encore Príst International, an organizational development company that helps individualsand or ganizations reach their full potential through the practice of effective business fundamentals. You may reach him atfjrepi@gmail.com, or by phone at 866/858-4EPI.