#HRTechChat: Four Harsh Truths and Finding Your Brilliance

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Welcome to Podcast 6 of The Five Talents that Really Matter.

Over the last 5 podcasts, I have wondered — “What happens if you do not possess the talents that really matter?” It goes without saying that there are people in leadership positions today that do not possess those talents. So, we arrive at the Four harsh Truths:

  1. Not everyone is or can be a leader. If you go into any organization, you can quickly see those that are leaders versus those in leadership positions that do not have the natural talents to effectively lead. In earlier podcasts, we talked about the fact that talents are innate. They are consistent over time and resistant to change. They are pervasive—present in our daily work and personal lives. In a world of nature versus nurture—innate talents are nature. Barry makes the point in this episode that organizations must stop lying to their employees and telling them that everyone can be a leader. Everyone has their level – and people can still make significant contributions to their organization without occupying a leadership role that doesn’t suit their natural dispositions.
  2. We might never solve the lack of workplace diversity. Organizations have disproportionately hired in favor of a privileged group. We know that the biases that cause discriminatory hiring do not change through training programs. Your organization does not need a Chief Diversity Officer to take the right actions, but you should be well-versed in psychometric assessment as an important step toward mitigating unchecked biases that disadvantage talented candidates.
  3. Leadership characteristics are hard to develop. Leadership cannot be taught to those who do not possess the natural talents to succeed. Barry and Sarah remind us that if everyone could learn leadership, we would not see such a dearth of Talent at the top of companies.
  4. Personalities and Talents aren’t the same thing. Here is the takeaway that is significant—If you want to use assessments that matter, predictability is the key—results should be stable over time, and they should be valid predictors of performance. Talent assessments are not the same thing as a personality inventory. Talent assessments that are built to measure potential and predict success are more reliable, valid, and fair.

Join Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton for the discussion on the Four Harsh Truths—and learn about how you can be brilliant and contribute even if you do not possess the Five Talents that Matter.

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The Five Talents That Really Matter: How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance: Conchie, Barry, Dalton, Sarah: 9780306833403: Amazon.com: Books

 

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Transcript:

Pamela Stroko 00:00
Hi everyone, and thank you for joining us for the sixth podcast in our five talents that really matter, podcast series, as with the other podcast, we’re joined by the authors, Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton, and today, we’re going to be talking about four harsh truths. And it those of you that are following along. This follows with the book, and we’re going to be talking about the things that are maybe difficult, about the five talents that really matter, and what you do about those in organizations. But before we do that, I want to talk about the news. This morning, I get up really early and I scroll to see what happened. And one of the first things I saw that happened was that Starbucks has a new CEO. And I was really curious about this, because the CEO that had been there had only been there, like since March of last year. So if I think about we’ve been talking about five talents. We’ve been talking about what it takes to be a leader. I started wondering about, how is it that a company like Starbucks goes out to the market, finds Laxman? There was current CEO till this morning, someone who came out of McKinsey, someone who came out of Pepsi, and all of a sudden, a little over a year later, it’s not working. And I have to assume, since they had another CEO ready to announce today, that they probably knew it wasn’t working months ago. It’s not that they have this thought last week. So Barry, I’m gonna, I’m gonna ask you about this. So by the way, this is not the first time these things happen. These things happen all the time. So I think this is the very issue the book is trying to solve for, and I just would love for you to address it, because, you know, we see companies make these bold changes pretty frequently.

Barry Conchie 01:59
Pamela, when you say that, it’s not the first time that we’ve seen this. It’s a really common feature of business that we see these standout CEOs like Laxman getting appointed to all the acclaim, and then they flame out in a relatively short space of time. And I can say a number of things about what’s likely to happen here, but the only thing I can say with certainty is that they didn’t figure out whether Laxman had the talents that really mattered. But when you look at Laxman, so

Pamela Stroko 02:35
I love that

Barry Conchie 02:38
here’s what’s likely to have happened, and this is we’ve really got to address this issue. Shine a light on it. Blacksman will have come top of a search firm’s recommendation, so he didn’t come out of the blue. Much more likely that he was the top of a search firm’s recommendation, likely that he had fantastic references, people who said, This guy’s a great leader. You know, we’ve seen him over X number of years, do X, Y and Z, brilliantly. But all the things that we say in the book cast questions on these kinds of judgments or putting emphasis on these kinds of things. So on our earlier podcast, we said, look, experience is not what is cracked up to be great. You might be seen to have a phenomenal amount of experience is backwards looking, not forwards looking. It enables you to check these boxes, but it doesn’t make a prediction about the future. Every candidate that’s in a leadership position who’s failed gets excellent references, somebody’s prepared to put their career on the line to vouch for these people, and yet they fail. So this doesn’t surprise us, but it’s got to stop. I mean, how many times are we going to have to go through this merry go round where, you know, it runs for a year, and then one group of people jump off, another group of people jump on, and then not assessing the right kinds of things and putting the emphasis in the right areas. So it’s sad. I feel sorry for Starbucks, although I gather it’s shares picked up a couple of percent on the announcement. So clearly Great. Having been excited about Laxman a year ago when he was appointed, when the shares went up 8% on the first day after he was appointed, have now gone up 2% with the new guy being appointed. I think from early September, we got to stop this. It’s utterly ridiculous. We’re measuring the wrong things

Pamela Stroko 04:46
with that measuring the wrong things. I want to talk about the hard truths, because the first hard truth, I think, really addresses what you just said, which is actually a couple of the hard truths. The first. First one being not everybody is a leader. It’s not to say not everyone has talent, but that not everyone has those leadership talents.

Barry Conchie 05:13
We’ve we won’t we want to encourage organizations to stop lying to their own employees, stop the pretense that hard work, a great work attitude, great work ethic, will lead to success in the future, because it’s not true, and we’ve got to stop pretending that it is true. The truth of the matter is that some people could be phenomenal leaders in the future, but not everybody can be but although that might sound a dispiriting and discouraging message to give to people at a fundamental level, it isn’t, and I’ll explain why we fundamentally believe people have got a job for them in in which they could excel and be brilliant, but it might not be a leadership job. And you know, one of the things that I’ll say on this podcast, Pamela and I, I don’t feel any embarrassment at all in saying this, I was an atrocious manager of people. Don’t let that just say, let, let’s let that sink in just for a second. So here I am admitting publicly I was probably an atrocious manager of people, but earlier in my career, that’s not how I thought about myself. And I knew earlier in my career that in order to climb the ladder, if that’s what I wanted to do, I needed to manage people, so I applied for those kinds of jobs, and because I could talk well in an interview, people assume that because I could talk well in an interview, I must be a good manager. And I got promoted into those positions, but it didn’t bring out the best in me, and I don’t think there’s any shame in admitting that. Now we know from looking at data on manager quality as measured by employee engagement statistics, there are about 80% of people in manager roles that shouldn’t be there, and there are too few people like me prepared to admit it. So we think it’s the truth to say to people that not everybody can be a leader, but what we’ve got to be smarter at doing is trying to figure out how their talents might match to a different role, because if they pursue a leadership objective and climb into a role that doesn’t fit them, doesn’t bring out the best in them. What value is that to them to be miserable for the rest of their lives? By the way, when they get into that role, if they do fail, they can’t exactly climb backwards. There’s no ladder back down. No, that’s true. You know, where they can save face? There isn’t. So what happens is they’ve got to shift and go to another organization where they inflict their weak leadership on a whole group of other unsuspecting subjects. So we’ve got to change the conversation. We’ve got to make it okay for people not to see leadership. There’s an objective for everybody

Pamela Stroko 08:19
that actually leads really to the next hard truth, Sarah, which is that leadership characteristics are really hard to develop. You know, that goes back to, I think what was in the in the book, much earlier, is it nature versus nurture? Do you have these characteristics? How much can you develop them? And I know that you you coach and assess a number of leaders, and have to have those card conversations sometimes,

Sarah Dalton 08:49
I think we need to recognize that there are some elements of ourselves that we that we cannot change, and not everybody likes to hear that. You know, it’s why the training and development industry exists. Too many people like to think that we can be anything that we want to be, and we’ve got this funny question that we always ask. And you know, for the people that have spouses, significant others, if you have kids, How successful have you been at changing them? If you think about all those annoying quirks and kinks that people just naturally have, they’re so resistant to change. So you know, we’ve talked at multiple points in this podcast series about just the idea that there there are unchanging elements about people, and if at the point we hire and appoint them, we’re already rationalizing their deficiencies, and if we just put more effort and energy into coaching those things up, that that we can change them as a person, and it just never plays out to be the case. So sure, you know, people can develop skills and expertise in areas we can. Increase our knowledge, but it doesn’t always change who we are as people. So the idea with a talent based approach is, let’s get people who are naturally wired with the talents that we know predict success in a role, and then the question is, How good could they be? Yeah, but without those characteristics, they are just incredibly hard to develop. So there is that kind of nature, nurture component to this argument, where people always ask, Scar leaders born or are they made? Yes, that’s true, right? That’s true. And Barry, you might have way more to say on this subject than than I do, but we’ve got a whole section on the book on this very topic, and it’s going to be fascinating to see the response on this,

Barry Conchie 10:43
yeah. The data shows, if you look at, if you look at the genetic basis, the traits, characteristics and dispositions in people, about 75% of them are determined by genes. Yeah. And this leaves an ever shrinking section that’s going to be influenced by the development industry. And even, you know, we don’t fully have all the research done on the extent to which genes play out in the nature nurture debate. But it’s not likely to be less than 75% and it could be even more. And we’ve just got to be honest about this. Now let me, let me explain some colloquial evidence that I think people will understand. The Office for personnel management started in I think 1983 and this organization has been the primary means for developing management curriculum, management and leadership curriculum, largely in the government, but also in associated industries. A lot of organizations take OPM programs, put their people through them, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right now, 80% of managers shouldn’t be in their jobs. So we’ve spent billions of dollars over 40 years educating managers and leaders, and we’ve reached the point where 80% of them aren’t fit for the position that they’re in. What success has the training and development route got to show for itself? Now maybe they’ll turn around and say, Hey, 20% of them are pretty good, right? We’ve spent billions of dollars achieving a result that I could achieve by dragging 20 random people off the street. So we’ve got to stop pretending that we can train people to success, you know? And I’ve said, I’ve said before on multiple occasions, that if you want to, if you want to pick nuts, you better hire a squirrel rather than a tortoise. Now, it’s not that I can’t teach a tortoise to gather nuts, it’s that they’re not very good at it, and they’re not very quick and they’re not very efficient, and the death rate of tortoises will increase significantly as they tree branches. Donkeys are brilliant. Squirrels are fantastic. But you get my point? Yeah. So what we’ve done is we’ve treated leadership and management as a training ground, and it is, you know, the data is there, am I? I mean, somebody, give me a good argument as to what the value of billions of dollars of investment in manager and leader education has given us in 40 years. Give me the argument.

Pamela Stroko 13:40
I can’t give you the argument, but I can give you one really funny snippet example, because in my career, I’ve actually done leadership development. I’ve worked with CEOs and built leadership teams and help them assess talent and who should be in what role, and in one particular organization, they were really pushing that everyone should have a 360 assessment. It didn’t matter, you know, what level of leadership you were coming into, but everyone should have a 360 assessment. And for the most senior people, I was someone who would give the feedback or the 360 the absolute best feedback session I ever had, because it was totally making your point. Was I was talking to an executive, really senior operations person. And you know, one of the one of the components was, Does this person listen? Is this person a good listener? Do they take all points of view into consideration? And he came back, he got his assessment results, and he came back to talk to me, and he said, you know, it was really eye opening, what you told me? And I said, Well, what about It was eye opening. He said, The minute I left your office, I called. My wife, and I said, Honey, apparently I don’t listen to anybody. It’s not just you. And so he proceeded to tell me that that was like the core of their relationship. He didn’t listen. And he said he was somewhat comforted by the fact that everyone around him said he didn’t listen, so he said it actually kind of helped his relationship with his wife, because he wasn’t singling her out. And I had to laugh at that, because you know, you can, by the time you put hundreds of people through these assessments, they’re very costly. And to your point, does it actually get at the talents that would that you need for leadership. But I love that story because, you know, it was Honey, I don’t listen to anybody, but so perfect.

Barry Conchie 15:50
Finally, do you know? Do you know the people who benefit the most from training and development, people, people with the potential to be brilliant leaders. So if you really want to create an impact, help people with measurable potential to realize that potential, yes, give them education. You know, if you want to, if you want to expand the mind of a leader, pick a leader who’s already curious. Pick a leader who’s already challenging themselves in multiple different ways, and give them 10 books or 10 websites to visit, and they’ll just devour it. And they’ll devour it in order to try to improve themselves and to figure out a pathway where their learning can impact their performance, picking on people without that potential is largely wasting your time,

Pamela Stroko 16:47
isn’t that, though, what the five talents can tell an organization or an individual that you want to make investments in the right people and you want to make sure that they’re going to have you know that they have the right chemistry to succeed at this. They have the right talents to succeed. And so you’re going to make those investments. You want to make wise investments in those people.

Barry Conchie 17:10
Teach them to be teach them to be wise in the way that they manage their own capabilities and deficiencies. And it’s okay to have deficiencies, you know, the it’s just that the solution isn’t you solving that problem yourself. It might be picking the right people to go around you. It might be, you know, bringing a person from lower down the organization up temporarily onto your executive team, because they’ve got phenomenal capacity in this particular way of thinking or operating, and it’s been open to that as a way of working and not trying to be all things to all people, because if you try to be that, you will fail.

Pamela Stroko 17:54
Yeah, Sarah, I wanted, I wanted to go back to the the four harsh truths, and I wanted to ask you about personality and talents aren’t the same things, and I think sometimes people think that they are. And so can you help us understand that a little bit better?

Sarah Dalton 18:14
It’s funny, because everyone going through our assessments always tells me, Oh, well, I’ve, I’ve been through plenty of personality assessments in the past, and I always have to wind that back and say, Okay, well, this is going to be a little bit different than that right now. In in psychology, we’ve kind of landed on the Big Five personality traits, right? And that’s where you get things like introversion, extroversion, sure, agree. Blah, blah, blah, uh, here’s the difference I try and I try and paint for people, is that personality isn’t so black and white that you are only one thing all of the time. So Pamela, if I were to ask you to say, if I were to ask you to describe an an extrovert, right, do that really easily, without much thought. I think you can rattle off about 15 different ways of characterizing what an extrovert looks like, but you won’t be that all of the time. Sometimes we change the circumstances or some of the variables in a situation, and you might behave in ways that are contradictory to what we would assume of that type of, that trait, extroversion, is exactly, exactly. It’s not so black and white that I can always predict how you’re going to behave in every single situation. And it’s, it’s that failure where personality becomes not helpful in predicting higher levels of performance and really specific jobs. So the difference with talents is we’re looking at more narrowly defined pathways in terms of how people think that are. When we get really strong evidence of those talents, they are highly predictive of behavior, and they’re incredibly difficult to shut off. So an example of that. Be something like discipline and detail orientation, where you get someone who is highly process oriented, very organized, there’s a way of doing things. Everything has its place, right? When we get really strong evidence of that talent, people can’t shut that off in themselves. You can’t just tell someone who’s incredibly rigid and structured to just wing it. Don’t worry about the details. Just get it. Just get done. We’ll figure it out along the way,

Pamela Stroko 20:28
right? I have met those people, and I’ve tried that advice, so don’t worry about the details. Well, we’ve got to do this now. Yeah, don’t worry that we’ve got that covered. Somewhere along the way, we’ve got that covered. We just started. It could literally, like, drive them over the edge totally.

Sarah Dalton 20:45
So sometimes talents like that could be the difference between someone who’s mediocre in their role and someone who’s just world class. Yeah, right. So it’s looking at characteristics that are way more stable in terms of how people think and highly predictive of how they’re going to behave, and it’s all the research that we do and figuring out what talents and people drive higher levels of performance, which ones really matter. Let’s measure those. And then The annoying thing is, people will never be perfect and good at everything that we want them to be, but they need to have enough of the characteristics that we know matter right,

Barry Conchie 21:24
just on one point on personality, Pam or the there are, there are, there is positive evidence that measures of personality can predict work outcomes, but they tend to be in Lower Level roles, and the effect sizes are extremely small. And, you know, so there are, there are plenty of assessments out there, personality assessments that will claim to improve the performance in the organization, right? I’ve not, I’ve not seen a credible one at a leadership level make that prediction. And you know, when you’re looking at the effect sizes, they are tiny because, you know, they are measuring things like openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness. And you know, those broad buckets are too generalized for us to be able to make any meaningful findings out of them. What we do with talents, to Sarah’s point is, we specify them to a particular role, and we do the research that says within this role, this particular talent is going to be important for personality assessments. They start with the construct, but then try to fit it to the role. Yeah, and it’s no surprise therefore that the you know that the effect sizes are so small.

Sarah Dalton 22:44
So I was thinking when I heard you describe that Barry, because how I’ve seen too many personality inventories used as people just cherry pick the aspects of that profile that they like, and then they rationalize. Well, this person has these things. Of course, they’re going to be a good fit for the role, of course,

Pamela Stroko 23:00
of course, right, but, but this brings up a really good point, which is, Barry, to your point, it does matter what kind of assessment you use. And the great thing about the five talents that really matter is you can take the assessment in the book there, there is direction and taking the assessment. And the one question, actually, I lost questions, but the one question we have time for is, what if I take the assessment and I don’t have the five talents that really matter, maybe I only have one or two. And what do I do with that? What if I’m a leader? What if I take the assessment and I find my results disappointing. What do I do with that?

Barry Conchie 23:48
Well, it’s a little what like what I said before, and that is, we need to be honest with you about about your future career, and say, Look, maybe top level leadership isn’t right for you, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the road, and it doesn’t mean the curtain comes down on your career. It might be there’s an incredibly exciting, different route for you to follow here, but a lot of companies are getting smarter about specialist roles and individual contributor roles, I think so too. Yes, you know you’re able to pursue a career that isn’t, isn’t dragged down by the need to manage a large, complex organization, but you drive a technical specialism that you know you’re brilliant at, you really enjoy doing, and has a really essential contribution to make to the future of the company. Well, let’s encourage companies to do that. Let’s build these individual contributor tracks. Let’s make it valuable, and let’s stop pretending that in order to get more money, more. Status or feel better about yourself, that it invariably leads to the need to manage more and more people, because I do not want leaders who are not cut out for the job inflicting poor management and poor leadership or large numbers of people.

Pamela Stroko 25:17
That’s a great point, because what you do find is and just in the years I’ve had in leadership development, you have people who really want to manage people and enjoy it, and then you have people that are managing people because it goes with the job. It’s what they have to do to be at that level. And and I have to say, the situation where somebody really wants to do that and they’re good at it is much better for the team that they’re leading. It’s much better for them and and I, I’ve met lots of people who said, you know, I took this job because it was the next thing I had to do this to get promoted. So, you know, I think it’s just great to take a step back and say, what is it that you’re really great at? And how do we get you to a place where you can do that? So we are at the end of our time, nearly at the end of our time, and I wanted to thank Barry and Sarah for being on this podcast journey and telling us about the five talents that really matter. I encourage all of you to get the book. You can take the assessment when you get the book, and it’ll give you information about where you are, Visa, Visa, five talents, and it will help you, I think, find where you’re brilliant. And that’s what we all want. We all want to be happy. We all want to do the things that help us contribute and help us actually make a difference in the world. And so for writing the book that tells us about how to make a difference, for writing the book about how to be brilliant, on behalf of your readership, on behalf of everyone who’s going to buy this book on Amazon, everyone who’s going to buy this book going through an airport and read it on a plane. Thank you so much for your work, your time, your research and the brilliance that you shared with us, your audience and your marketplace.

Barry Conchie 27:08
Thank you, Pamela,

Sarah Dalton 27:09
thank you.

Pamela Stroko 27:11
Take care. Bye.

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