What do Tiger, Yo-Yo, Steve and Jeffery Have In Common?

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER

Title: Why Talent Is Overrated

Competencies: self-development, talent management, performance management

Who benefits: individuals with career aspirations, managers and supervisors of high potential employees, coaches

Consultant Usage: career development, career coaching, executive coaching

What’s it about? Two 22-year olds.  Recent college grads.  Hired by a large company along with a bunch of other guys (it was 1978).  They shared a cubicle, wrote and rewrote memos, and played waste-basket basketball with draft memos.  They did not demonstrate any ambition.  They did not have any visible career aspirations.  So begins this provocative article.

The author asks the question “What is talent?”.  Then the provocation begins: Is talent irrelevant?  Could it be? 

The author’s answer, for the most part, is yes, talent is overrated.  Read the article if you want the details, but his main hypothesis is that the cream rises to the top through a process called “deliberate practice”.  By this he means practice that is deliberately designed to improve performance.

It is something separate from hard work and practice-makes-perfect.  Deliberate practice is designed to push an individual just beyond his or her current capabilities.  It requires dedicated practice, but at a level outside of our comfort zone.  It is not maintaining current levels of performance!

For the cream to rise, certain elements kick in.  First, feedback from the outside is imperative.  Second, focus and concentration at exceptionally high levels are required from the inside – the kind of focus and concentration that can leave one exhausted.  It ain’t fun.  Fun is doing what we can already do well.  If it were fun, everyone would be doing it.  It means insistently seeking out activities that we aren’t good at.  Practice and feedback and practice and ….

There is a good summary of what deliberate practice means in work life: It is the janitor who maintains the building while figuring out how to eventually manage it. 

So what happened to the two 22-year old kids in the cubicle?  One was Steve Ballmer, now CEO of Microsoft; the other was Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric.  At some point they set their stretch goals, developed the self-regulatory skills common to high performers, and sought continuous feedback.  That’s what made them different than everyone else.  As for Tiger and Yo-Yo, you know who they are, you will have to read the article to see where they fit in!

If the article whets your appetite and you want more, the article was taken from the newly released book Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else.

Catch you later.

 

[tags]talent, talent management, deliberate practice, feedback, bill bradley, william bradley,  bradley[/tags]

 

 

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.