Positive Leadership: Talent Management by Doug Conant

Positive Leadership: Talent Management by Doug Conant

Positive Leadership: Essential Aspects of Leadership

General (Ret.) Stanley McChrystal speaks to Stanford Graduate School of Business students about essential aspects of leadership such as trust, purpose, and adaptability. 

"Talent alone doesn't make a great team. You need faith in your colleagues and alignment behind a common goal," shared McChrystal. 

Positive Leadership: Essential Aspects of Leadership

Positive Leadership: What is Talent?

Talent is a set of personal characteristics that enhance one’s ability to achieve expertise in an accelerated manner.  

These traits allow one to improve at quicker rates than others in their field that are at the same level of expertise/fitness/skill, etc.  This is because talent is one’s ability to adapt to training and develop skills in their specialized field.  

Talent exists when strong genetics and a desire to practice come together to create superior ability for a specific activity.  It can only exist along with a deliberate interest.  Because of this, talent will often only become apparent after a moderate amount of practice as this is when one’s ability to adapt and improve is more clearly visible.  

Positive Leadership: What is Talent?

Positive Leadership: Attracting Talent

Talented people used to want high salaries and stable career paths, but now they want work with purpose. 

Here’s how your company can offer candidates meaningful and attractive roles:

Get serious about impact. Determine the positive impact your organisation seeks to make in the world. You don’t have to be a social enterprise to do good.

Tell that story well. Call it marketing or storytelling, but make sure you're communicating how much you care about your mission and how you're working toward it.

Design roles for their future, not just yours. Many people see a job as one of many stepping-stones they'll visit over the course of a career. Focus on making your stone as attractive and inviting as possible. Decent pay, rewarding perks, and large doses of autonomy demonstrate that you take professional development seriously.

Positive Leadership: Attracting Talent

Positive Leadership: Three Keys to Acquiring and Turning Around a Poorly Performing Business

Which distressed firms are worth trying to turn around?

Focus on those companies with an iconic brand name, one that people remember even if the company is down and out; a credible product, or at least the prospect of a credible product; and finally, talent or the prospect that a talented team can be hired. Talent is the key.

How do you motivate talent?

Down-and-out companies don’t have much money to spend. This means you have to build a team of people who are willing to work for the end game. You need people who have the passion, the perseverance and the courage to really walk in the darkness every day, one foot in front of the other, until they see the light.

How do you determine whether people stay?

If something is deeply distressed, the chances are there is some fault with the people on the ground. Sometimes it’s the culture, further crippled by an exogenous force. You never want to eradicate all history and prior knowledge, so at least give people a chance. But if they are not capable of self-reflection, if they can’t take any responsibility for where they are, they will never be the team to succeed. The one thing about this world is that truth is cold and hard, but it’s the first point on the path to hope and salvation: If you don’t want to hear the truth, then there is no future for you in the company.

Positive Leadership: Three Keys to Acquiring and Turning Around a Poorly Performing Business

Positive Leadership

Positive Leadership

Positive Leadership : Talent is Everywhere

You should watch this short clip — not because it’s a remarkable story (which it is) or because it will make your eyes well up (which it might), but because it’s a good reminder of two basic facts we tend to overlook:

1) Respecting and caring for the tools of your skill — what some educators call “the enchantment of everyday objects” — ignites powerful motivation

2) Talent is everywhere.

Positive Leadership : Talent is Everywhere

Positive Leadership: What to look for in a CV

Vinod Khosla, the Sun Microsystems co-founder, now a venture capitalist, talks about his obsession with hiring the right people.

"A high school dropout who's done a lot is better than a Stanford PhD who has done a similar amount, because he's driven further" with fewer credentials, says Khosla. He does think schooling really helped him, but mostly because he explored different disciplines rather than sticking with the same field.

An interesting sit-down with an interesting man that quickly skates on to other topics.

Positive Leadership: What to look for in a CV

Positive Leadership: Allow Talent to Flourish

Former General Electric ceo, Jack Welch talks here about the lessons from the Jeremy Lin story - 'Every company is filled with young talent just waiting to explode. Don’t let the bureaucracy keep them on the bench.' 

For more, see: http://blogs.reuters.com/jack-and-suzy-welch/2012/02/24/jeremy-lin-lessons-from-the-linsanity

 

Positive Leadership: Allow Talent to Flourish

Positive Leadership: Everyone Can Learn

Do you know people who talk about children who can learn and ones who can’t? Or, children who can be helped and ones who can’t? Well, they are wrong, and we will tell you why.

Some 30-odd years ago, the great Japanese teacher, Dr. Suzuki, who taught over 20,000 children to understand and play the violin like virtuosi, had some words of wisdom to share with us. He said, “People today are like gardeners who look sadly at ruined saplings and shake their heads, saying the seeds must have been bad to start with – not realising that the seed was all right, and that it was their method of cultivation that was wrong. They go on their mistaken way, ruining plant after plant. It is imperative that the human race escape from this vicious circle.” These words have value even today.

You see, Dr. Suzuki did not believe that some children were gifted while others were not. He believed that every child could be superior, and that every child could be educated. Talent, he believed, was no accident of birth, but a purposeful effort, a powerful creation.

Let’s teach our children to understand that when they see someone of ability, they see a person who has been carefully taught, and who has worked hard to realize their unlimited potential. Let’s teach them that they have the same unlimited potential. And let’s teach them to believe in sustained effort, self-discipline and self-determination.

We have the opportunity and the ability to raise an entire generation of superstars every day. Why would we settle for less?

Positive Leadership: Everyone Can Learn

Positive Leadership: Why Top Talent Leave Their Jobs

Positive Leadership: Why Top Talent Leave Their Jobs

Positive Leadership: Talent is Not Everything

Do you know people who talk about children who can learn and ones who can’t? Or, children who can be helped and ones who can’t? Well, they are wrong, and we will tell you why.

Some 30-odd years ago, the great Japanese teacher, Dr. Suzuki, who taught over 20,000 children to understand and play the violin like virtuosi, had some words of wisdom to share with us. He said, “People today are like gardeners who look sadly at ruined saplings and shake their heads, saying the seeds must have been bad to start with – not realising that the seed was all right, and that it was their method of cultivation that was wrong. They go on their mistaken way, ruining plant after plant. It is imperative that the human race escape from this vicious circle.” These words have value even today.

You see, Dr. Suzuki did not believe that some children were gifted while others were not. He believed that every child could be superior, and that every child could be educated. Talent, he believed, was no accident of birth, but a purposeful effort, a powerful creation.

Let’s teach our children to understand that when they see someone of ability, they see a person who has been carefully taught, and who has worked hard to realise their unlimited potential. Let’s teach them that they have the same unlimited potential. And let’s teach them to believe in sustained effort, self-discipline and self-determination.

We have the opportunity and the ability to raise an entire generation of superstars every day. Why would we settle for less?

Positive Leadership: Talent is Not Everything

Positive Leadership: High Potentials

Today’s organisations find it challenging to locate and put in place a new generation of leadership that is both proactive and pragmatic. 

Disproportionately this new generation of leaders will come from the pool of people within an organisation, often referred to as, “high potentials.” But there’s the rub. By what criteria do we decide whether somebody is a high potential suited for a leadership position?

Face it, not everyone is a high-potential. Some have reached their potential and others are quite comfortable where they are. They are good, if not great, performers who are satisfied with their accomplishments and focused on doing what they do best.

So what are the criteria by which you evaluate whether someone can be a high-potential leader?

Here are five suggested criteria:

1. Knowledge

They know their business. Simply put, high-potential leaders are those individuals who have displayed a certain amount of accumulated expertise. This expertise may be technical or it may be based in networks, but it’s invaluable for an organisation. More importantly, they understand how their activities, their sector, and their realm of knowledge, is related to the wider organisational agenda.

2. Reputation

They have legitimacy in the eyes of others. Others in the organisation must appreciate the relevance of the knowledge base that a high-potential possesses. It’s a simple reality that having expertise or a skill base isn’t enough to make one a high-potential leader. High-potential leaders must also have the ability to garner the professional respect of others.

3. Ambition

They have a strong career mindset. We want our high potentials to be ambitious—but we want them to be ambitious in a very focused way. And the best way to get a sense of their ambition is to evaluate their commitment to their career progression. High potentials need to be committed to accumulating new responsibilities, new successes, acquiring additional knowledge, and, for better or worse, achieving additional recognition.

4. Partnering

They understand the importance of working with others. While a strong career mindset is important, high-potentials must also have a deep appreciation of partnership. A high-potential leader’s partnering ability shouldn’t be a politically correct exercise, but rather a pragmatic, tactical skill that will allow them to make better, more informed decisions. Lone-rangers and lone-wolves may be creative and ambitious, but they may not be suitable for the next leadership rung in the organisational ladder. 

5. Courage

They are bounded risk takers. High-potential leaders must understand that no matter how good they think a decision may be—they are making it under conditions of uncertainty. No matter how much information you have, no matter how many cost-benefit analyses you have done, no matter how many market surveys you have completed, a high-potential leader will know all information is limited. They’ll know that some decisions are inevitable, but they’ll also have the courage to take risks.

Identifying high-potential leaders requires an appreciation of what it is we want from our leaders. We want our leaders to know their business, and therefore knowledge is critical. We want others to accept their expertise, and therefore reputation is critical. We want them to be personally driven, and therefore ambition is essential. We want them to understand that nothing can be done alone, and therefore partnering is critical. And finally, we want them to know that nothing is guaranteed, and therefore courage is fundamental.

These five criteria, when identified appropriately—be it through skill matrixes, interviews, delineated questionnaires or peer review–will go a long way toward identifying high-potential leaders.

Positive Leadership: High Potentials

Positive Leadership: Talent Development

Some very interesting thoughts on talent development from Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How.

'If you distilled all the new science about talent development into two words of advice, they would be “practice better.”

That’s it. Practice. Better.

Forget everything else about your genes, your potential — it’s all just noise. The most basic truth is that if you practice better, you’ll develop your talent — and you won’t develop your talent unless you practice better. Period.

For most of us, that’s precisely where we bump into a common problem: how? Specifically, which practice method to choose? Do we focus on repeating a skill we’ve got, or do we work on new skills? What kinds of drills work best? What’s the best way to spend the limited time we’ve got?

When it comes to figuring out how to practice better, we often feel like we’re standing in the cereal aisle of the grocery store. There are lots of seemingly attractive choices. But how do we pick the ones that have the most nutrition, and avoid the ones that are empty calories?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’d like to use this blog as a test drive for a new gauge for comparing practice methods. I’m calling it the R.E.P.S. Gauge.

(Okay, acronyms are cheesy, I know. But they’ve been around for a long time because they work.)

R stands for Reaching/Repeating.

E stands for Engagment.

P stands for Purposefulness

S stands for Strong, Direct, Immediate Feedback.

The idea behind the gauge is simple: you should practice methods that contain these key elements, and avoid methods that don’t. Below, you’ll find a description of each element along with a sample choice to illustrate how it works.

Element 1: Reaching and Repeating. Does the practice have you operating on the edge of your ability, reaching and repeating? How many reaches are you making each minute? Each hour?

Scenario: a math teacher trying to teach multiplication tables to 30 students.

• Teacher A selects a single student to write the tables on the board.

• Teacher B creates a “game show” format where a math question is posed verbally to the entire class, then calls on a single student to answer.

Result: Teacher B chose the better option because it creates 30 reaches in the same amount of time. In Classroom A, only one student had to truly stretch — everybody else could lean back and observe. In Classroom B, however, every single member of the class has to stretch (picture the wires of their brains, reaching) in case their name is called. Not a small difference.

Element 2: Engagement. Is the practice immersive? Does it command your attention? Does it use emotion to propel you toward a goal?

Scenario: a violin student trying to perfect a short, tough passage in a song.

• Student A plays the passage 20 times.

• Student B tries to play the passage perfectly — with zero mistakes — five times in a row. If they make any mistake, the count goes back to zero and they start over.

Result: Student B made the better choice, because the method is more engaging. Playing a passage 20 times in a row is boring, a chore where you’re simply counting the reps until you’re done. But playing 5 perfectly, where any mistake sends you back to zero, is intensively engaging. It’s a juicy little game.

Element 3: Purposefulness. Does the task directly connect to the skill you want to build?

Scenario: a basketball team keeps losing games because they’re missing late free-throws.

•  Team A practices free throws at the end of a practice, with each player shooting 50 free throws.

• Team B practices free throws during a scrimmage, so each player has to shoot them while exhausted, under pressure.

Result: Team B made the better choice, because their practice connects to the skill you want to build: the ability to make free throws under pressure, while exhausted. (No player ever gets to shoot 50 straight in a game.)

The fourth element: Strong, Direct, Immediate Feedback. In other words, the learner always knows how they’re doing — where they’re making mistakes, where they’re doing well — because the practice is telling them in real time. They don’t need anybody to explain that they need to do X or Y, because it’s clear as a bell.

Scenario: a high school student trying to improve her SAT score.

•  Student A spends a Saturday taking a mock version of the entire SAT test, receiving results back one week later.

• Student B spends a Saturday taking a mini-version of each section, self-grading and reviewing each test in detail as soon as it’s completed.

Result: Student B made the better choice, because the feedback is direct and immediate. Learning immediately where she went wrong (and where she went right) will tend to stick, while learning about it in a week will have little effect.

The idea of this gauge is simple: practices that contain all four of these core elements (R.E.P.S.) are the ones you want to choose, because those are the ones that will produce the most progress in the shortest amount of time. Audit your practices and get rid of the methods that have fewer R.E.P.S. and replace them with methods that have lots.

The other takeaway here is that small, strategic changes in practice can produce huge benefits in learning. Making a little tweak to the learning space — for instance, teaching multiplication through a little juicy game that keeps 30 people on their toes — can have big effects on learning velocity. Spending time strategizing your practice is one of the most effective investments you can make in developing talent.'

But as I said at the start, this idea is still in the experimental phase. What other elements should we consider including? How do you achieve your best practices? What else should we add here?

Positive Leadership: Talent Development

Positive Leadership: Will Smith on Leadership and Other Inspiring Thoughts

Positive Leadership: Will Smith on Leadership and Other Inspiring Thoughts

Positive Leadership: Malcolm Gladwell on Talent

In his latest work, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of Outliers: The Story of Success—the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful people and asks the question: Why are high achievers different from regular people? Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, the cultural forces that make Asians so successful at math and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

Positive Leadership: Malcolm Gladwell on Talent

Positive Leadership: Training Talent

NVIDIA Co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang believes it is essential to train talent to effectively control a different product line, a new geography, or even to take his place. Succession planning of a closed set of hand-picked individuals is a toxic process, says Huang. It's best to treat all employees as a next generation of leaders to build a better environment and long term stability.

Positive Leadership: Training Talent

Talent Showdown

Boasting about rigorous recruiting policies has been sport at the city’s premier financial firms for decades. Even Oxbridge graduates aren’t guaranteed a job interview at blue-ribbon institutions. Instead HR departments pore over cv's for signs that a candidate is preternaturally gifted. Why trust your money to just some clock puncher when you could have a young Einstein instead?

Wrong, says a growing chorus of naysayers, who consider that approach as obsolete as analog TV. If you want somebody who will accomplish great things, they say, don’t waste your time searching for God-given ability. Because “talent” as we’ve traditionally understood it is a myth — and one we’re better off without.

For more, read: The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong ; Outliers: The Story of Success ; The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How. ; Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else ; Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

Talent Showdown

Gifted Children No More Likely To Succeed

Well hurrah, let’s trample on the Non-Verbal Reasoning test papers immediately, mes enfants. And while we’re at it, please stop all those silly French mornings when our children have to do le badinage. And can we can the violin practice before school, and all the other preposterous hurdles we expect our children to vault. 

Because the news is that hot-housing your child and encouraging them to walk the path of mathematics, musical or linguistic genius doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to their future success, happiness or material gains.

Prof. Joan Freeman, who studied the adult careers of 210 child prodigies for her book Gifted Lives: What Happens When Gifted Children Grow Up, has discovered that not every child who is labeled an infant Mozart will necessarily become one. Far from it: of the 210, only six became incredibly successful in later life. 

Indeed, the book reveals that the old schoolboy riposte “Winston Churchill failed his exams at school and he didn’t do too badly, did he?” might have something in it after all. Apparently, fate, personality and good old-fashioned drive are just as important to adult success and fulfillment as the ability to describe Shape A after twisting it by 90 degrees, or describe Pi to 60 decimal points. Probably more, in fact. 

For more, see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8028543/Gifted-children-no-more-likely-to-succeed.html

Gifted Children No More Likely To Succeed

What Motivates Us?

Several years ago, in A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, Daniel Pink argued that American professions have been dominated by analytical thinkers, but soon these left-brained MBA number crunchers would be replaced by a different kind of worker, the right-brained designer, storyteller and big picture thinker. These new workers would offer a new skill set to their employers — creativity, empathy, joyfulness and meaning.

In his new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Pink picks up the related theme of motivation. He argues that the incentive plans used by most organisations do not work. Even worse, there is scientific evidence that money acts as a de-motivator. Pink advises managers to pay people fairly and adequately to take money off the table, but he shows that the most effective reward is intrinsic — performance of the task itself.

Pink describes successful people as hard working and persistent. They possess an internal desire to control their lives, to learn about their world and to accomplish something that endures. They work hard to grow and develop, and to connect to a larger purpose. These workers have higher self-esteem and better interpersonal relationships than those who are extrinsically motivated. Every organisation needs to retain and cultivate these creative, problem-solving, big picture people.

What Motivates Us?