We have simple definitions that fit in nicely with the popular idea of talent, like the one from Ana Herradon, Airport Systems Manager, who states that talent “implies posessing the information, knowledge and the capability for developing a particular function within a company.”

If we want to be more academic, Armando Asensi, Head of Quality and Processes at Access Gestión Integral de Empleo, recalls a definition from Dave Ulrich, from the University of Michigan, who said that “talent is the capacity for commitment. Capacity can be both aptitude, such as knowledge and skills, as well as attitude, behaviour.  Commitment is already hard to get: it means involvement and special motivation to throw oneself into a project and give one’s best, just like energy itself.”

We can also go for something more abstract, Monica Stevens, a cross-cultural trainer and consultant, states talent is “the combination of intellectual IQ with emotional IQ”.

Personally I like the definition offered by David Rodriguez, training consultant at CEOE, “Talent is the ability to put ideas into practice…. transform them into things…transgress and innovate” That bit about transgressing I like. I suppose if you are creative in an communications agency, the ability to transgress is a plus.

Walter Villar, Talent Attraction & Retention Head, made a reflexion I also thought interesting; first define when there is talent (when capacity has been combined with a record for high achievement together with motivation and desire) and then think about how to manage that talent. Tools are needed for each of these components:
- capacity and results with out desire, doesn’t last long
- capacity and desire without results, just a bunch of good intentions
- desire and results without capacity, a miracle”

Just like Walter Villar, Monica Stevens also ventures into motivation, something that Human Resources departments have overlooked for many years, but now this has taken on a critical role in employee performance.  Monica has put forward some thought-provoking questions, “However intelligent someone may be, without motivation he or she will not develop to the best. This is where emotional intelligence comes to the fore. Is this person emotionally suited to the job? Does he feel it is too much responsibility? Is he bored by the work?…” 

Reading all these different responses on what is talent, we can’t help but ask ourselves whether you are born with talent or you develop it.  I’d say both. You can be born with a natural predispositon for certain subjects and none for others. In my case, despite all the preparation I had and my childhood dreams of becoming an astronaut, I never had any ability for physics.  It’s not that I didn’t try, but I failed it roundly in high school, and had to switch from a science curriculum to a mixed science and arts one. That’s life. Some are good for some things, and others for others. So I focused on trying to discover new disciplines where I could become good, and I forgot about my desire to touch the stars.

But let’s have a look at the opinions I found in the LinkedIn debate. For instance, for Ana Herradon, “a person who has the required capacity and motivation to acquire the knowledge for a particular task. From my point of view the self-taught are people with this innate talent.”

Luis Salazar Cuellar, Buyer, Key Account Manager entered into the debate; he believes that “talent is the capacity, the skill or potential that a person has in an area of human activity. Generally talent shines in specific areas like mathematics, or in activities like creative, verbal, social, artistic, musical or physical ones.”

Loli Faro, Human Resources Manager, surprised me with her succinct response, “Talent is the innate ability manifested, while at the same time, a differentiator.” According to Loli, talent has something innate. I agree whole-heartedly. My past experience, my innate abilities for physics were zero.

Continuing along this line of innateness bordering on magical, Manuel Bosh, IT Manager at Univeg, defends “talent as that thing that flows effortlessly from the mind of each one of us and which develops with a minimum of effort. Talent is excelling in something, whatever it happens to be, because it is not difficult for you to manifest it time again without you being aware of it. It’s something magical…The idea of talent based on continual and methodical learning (like university education) is not talent, its merely achieving a specific level of knowledge based on study or years of experience doing the same thing.”

Daniela Mena, Organizational Communicator, takes the debate further with her ideas on how to evaluate talent, “Talent comes from the Greek word “talanton” which implies a pair of scales for measuring the weight of money or talent. This is very suggestive because it takes us to the idea of balance. How many people do we see who do have innate and acquired knowledge and abilities, but are not balanced or do not have “talanton”. In short, a human being in full control of all his gifts, capacities and emotions represents true human capital. The question really is whether this  human capital is valued properly?”

I suppose that the response to this question would have to be no, well at least not in all cases. I am tired of seeing people performing tasks they are mediocre in, when they could be excelling in others. Why? More often than not, companies are not capable of recognizing this. Instead of “relocating” these people, they wait for the demotivation to set in and convert them into machines that do the same thing over again, until they can’t stand it anymore and leave. Worse still, they walk into an office which is downsizing and laying off a few colleagues, they are simply reminded just how sad their lives are day by day.

After writing all this, Carlos Alberto Manrique Hernandez, IT Management Executive, seems to have answered my question, “the right person in the right job at the right time shows talent… it ties in with the behaviour, the motivation and the skills of the person. It isn’t necessarily something that manifests (previous experience) but rather what could be a potential talent. Our challenge is to discover it and know how to use it in the work environment of an organization.”

And now to wrap up, Emma Salamanca, HR collaborator, leaves us more food for thought with another question, “how do we measure talent?”

While surfing Steve Boese’s blog, which I strongly recommend, I came across a very interesting and rather ingenious post. It is surprising just how people who are passionate about their work are capable of reflecting on ordinary or even mundane deeds and convert them into something of great value.

In his post “Employee Scouting Reports” published yesterday, Steve mulls over an article from Sport Illustrated which presented the NBA season. According to him, the most interesting part was the small section on each team’s page which contained anonymous comments from opposing teams about some of their players. The comments there were really candid like “Mehmet Okur will make you pay in the low block if you don’t respect him’ and ‘Kevin Love is more of a beefy loper.”

That’s what “Scouts in Professional Sports” write about.  Not in vain is “headhunter” translated as “talent scout”. These strange people spend their time observing and analyzing players on opposing teams, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, their tendencies, and assessing their potential for further development or sometimes even predicting their downfall. 

Just as Steve points out, just observing performance, documenting and studying behaviours, and predicting future success or failure all seems rather like employee performance management and coaching.

In fact, Steve Boese encourages us to forget the boring and outdated performance management templates  and instead explore the reports done by scouts.

Then Steve outlines the key elements of a typical report of this kind.  And here I take liberty to reproduce what I call Steve’s 10 commandments: 

1. Have a plan

The scout needs a process and template to follow, to be sure players are assessed on the same standard, making comparisons easier.

2. Pros and cons

Every scouting report has sections titled ’strengths’ and ‘weaknesses’. Even the best player has weaknesses.  And even the last player on the bench has strengths. The same with employees.

3. Having the ball is important

Every player knows that. What players do when they have the ball is critical in basketball.  When a player has the ball, he has control over the game, and the tremendous influence on the team success. But some players only want the ball early in the game and avoid it late in the 4th quarter, when the game is usually decided.

At work, what employees do when they have the spotlight and responsibility is a great measuring stick. Some employees want to step it up when the pressure is on, make the big client presentation or take on the toughest technical problems.

4. Find the sweet spot

Almost all players have a spot on the court they prefer to shoot from, or a ‘go-to move’ they rely on. Scouts use this information to prepare defensive strategies. Coaches often work with players to help them develop additional moves, that can enhance their overall game and make them more versatile, and tougher to defend.

Many employees have a sweet-spot as well, a particular kind of assignment or project they gravitate towards, or a tendency to work best in team settings with certain other individuals. If you as a manager understand the employee’s sweet spot, you can better position them for continued success, and also have a better feel for what stretch assignment might help the employee develop some additional ‘low post moves’.

5. Shooting skills

Arguably the most important single skill in basketball is shooting ability. Players that can shoot well, can overcome many other deficiencies, and survive in the league for a long time.

In your organization there is likely one type of skill that is critically important to overall success, or a core principle or value you live by and assessing every employee against that crucial skill or value may be warranted. You may have some employees that do that one critical thing so well that it may make sense to alter job descriptions to allow them and you to exploit this skill. 

6. Team focus

Does the player make his teammates better? Does he put team goals and objectives first? Is he checking his stat line at halftime?

At the office if the work keys on team performance, what do his co-workers say about him? Are there other employees that always want to work with him? If the work is more individually based, does he at least seek opportunities to informally share information and knowledge with others?

7. Defense

Defensive skills are of course important, but also the willingness to play good defense usually suggests the type of player that will do the unsung things, the little things that might not result in making the Sportscenter highlights, but are really critical to team success.

At work not all assignments are glamorous, or get the employee visible recognition with the higher-ups. How does he react when asked to do some grunt work? Will he pitch in and sustain a good attitude?  Or does he mope and whine and bring down the energy of everyone else around?

8. Hustle and Heart

Does the player give his all? Does he dive on the floor for loose balls? Players that exhibit these traits consistently for one of two reasons, they either are not as skilled or athletically gifted as their opponents, or they care more about winning the game than their own stats or bodies.

At work, this most closely translates to engagement, giving that extra effort above and beyond ‘normal’ job requirements to deliver superior results. Not everyone is willing to give like this, at least not regularly. But the ones that are can really drive results. From a management perspective, a manager that can seem to instill this kind of engagement may need to be questioned, just like the coach of a team who’s players don’t show much hustle on the court.

9. The tape

In basketball, height, weight, speed, jumping ability are all important, but they are not the game itself. You have to measure them, but not rely on them completely. In the workplace, you may need to track things like formal education and certifications, but they are not the game either. There are lots of MBAs not worth a darn out there. Obviously in the NBA there are some minimum physical requirements, but beyond those actual performance on the court is the final barometer.  At work, you posted that new job and said ‘MBA required’ but is it really required? Or is that just a cop-out to try and mask some deficiencies in your interviewing and assessment process?

10. Attitude toward authority

Does the player spend the entire game barking at the refs, and rolling his eyes in the time-out huddle? Or is he respectful and willing to receive coaching? Some players are shocked, shocked that they have ever committed a foul.

In the workplace this translates directly, does the employee take direction, can they be coached when they are in need of correction, or performance improvement, or do they push back at all times, even where they clearly are in the wrong?

By way of a conclusion, Steve Boese puts a question to us: do we think the scouting report, its focus on observed recent performance and with its brutal honesty in predicting future potential something we could use in our organization?

He also asks whether we wouldn’t just love to jazz up some performance reviews with comments like, ‘Jane has strong technical skills; if the IT staff does not respect that, she will make them pay in the data center’, or ‘Brian has not been completing his maintenance jobs on time, he is skilled with the tools, but he is more of a beefy loper’.

Brian bets more employees would actually read those kind of comments. I don’t doubt it either, and certainly I’d like to see the faces of those reading such criticism, so scathing that the first thing they are likely to want to do is to find Jane and throw her out of the window. Should we describe the performance of our employees in….er….. um… such sarcastic tones? Would that do them any good?

Or perhaps we should be looking elsewhere…. Why do we always soften up the criticisms? Personally I think I take them well and I believe I can graciously accept any “advice” that helps me improve on the job. But it is certainly true that there are many people who take work-related criticisms way too much to heart. As if you were stabbing right in the very core of their hearts. A person like that, how will they take this kind of criticism? Quite clearly, they’d spiral into a depression, reporting their boss for mobbing or end up in a psychiartic clinic.

I don’t think everyone is ready for such candor like Brian says. We should separate our “hearts” from the pitch, the office…. I can only say that NBA players are made of other stuff….

They have just sent me this photo and after a good laugh, I couldn’t help but wonder the chaos that social networks trigger off in our “inner self”, or in terms of Web 2.0, in our “profile”. Or to be really precise, in our multiple profiles circulating in hyperspace. If we were only to have just one, what has been so far the simple task of “identifying” ourselves would be even simpler. But as we have so many profiles, and all so different, things get rather complicated. So much so that I think we’ll soon have for instance, a new dysfunction in psychology labelled, “inability to identify oneself in the net”, filling the waiting rooms at psychiatric clinics.

And the problem isn’t just the social networks we belong to, in each one we are someone else. And of course, we have a different profile. The serious professional with a double degree, a couple of Master’s degrees and a brilliant career under the belt in Linkedin, or the wacky friend, a compulsive lager lout, a Rolling Stones groupie and fan of extreme sports like some of those Play·3 games where you get killed several times a minute…

Actually I think it is “almost” not even necessary to mention just how unwise and dangerous it would be to “mix” both profiles. Especially as companies have started to do the detective work on their “future” talent, surfing through all the social networks that have ever existed or have yet to emerge, looking for the dirt, our dirt, like many American companies for whom a Facebook photo of a candidate  caught smoking is already cause for “dumping”….

The Web is going crazy, the users are going nuts, and the companies too. Who are we? What sort of image should we portray of ourselves to others? And in the social networks should we “touch up” our profiles according to the social circle we find ourselves? And what about the companies….how legal is it for them to search every little detail of our lives in Facebook, Twitter, Tuenti, Picasa, Flickr, YouTube, Linkedin, Xing, Delicious, Digg…?

Well, my dear friends, I don’t have the answer….

“The price of greatness is responsibility.”

Winston Churchill

Today Randstad published a survey which has surprised me enormously. It asked workers what they thought of their managers in terms of talent management. More than 52% of those surveyed felt that their managers in the company were not apt enough.

That more than half the people thought their boss was ill equipped comes as no surprise to me, especially in a country like Spain. But what did surprise me is that almost half (around 49%) of the people who had enough experience to convert into managers would not accept a promotion.

Some 50% of those over 45 would choose to say no to becoming managers. Why? Increased stress (for some 82%). In the18 to 29 year-old age group, things are somewhat different, although not the decision to refuse to become managers. In this group, the key reason is concern that they would have to deal with difficult employees. Other reasons include increased administrative paperwork (some 63%) or having to fire other workers (63%).

SO THEN, WHERE ON EARTH DO WE GET BOSSES?

This data reveals a rather unpromising reality for companies. Finding and training future managers is becoming an overwhelming task in the short term, and an Achilles heel in the mid and long term.

According to this survey, 45% of the employees feel there will be a dearth of managers who are sufficiently capable of addressing the needs of the business world of the future.

Rather curious to say the least… it seems that the pros and contras of being a manager are at loggerheads when it comes to pondering on whether to accept a promotion of this kind or not. A salary raise for instance does not appear to be sufficiently motivating when other “increases” like that of escalated responsibility or stress. Other reasons that make employees pull back from becoming managers is working under pressure, or finding it difficult to be in charge of a group.

In contrast, there are other incentives that are gathering weight. For instance, the capacity for sharing knowledge and experience (rated as the prime reason for 98%) or to share some of the responsibility for success in the company and being able to take decisions (for 85%).

Undoubtedly these reasons will need be factored in by companies who are well aware of the issues in talent hunt and capture for managers…

“There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.”

Henry Ford

Just where did the spirit of Henry Ford go? How on earth did we get to “Make an acceptable quality of goods at the lowest cost possible, paying the lowest possible salaries?”

“When you hire people that are smarter than you are, you prove you are smarter than they are”

R. H. Grant

“The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”

Theodore Roosevelt

Much has been said of the fear some managers have of hiring people who are far more intelligent than themselves… But perhaps this is a thing of the past now. Surely for a company, isn’t it more important to select the right people for the existing vacancies?

Obviously this isn’t such a simple task, and even less so for people who not only are the right ones but also intelligent. And if they are smarter than their bosses, where’s the problem? The boss only has to exert sufficient self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do the work, as Roosevelt put it. 

In Silicon Valley, a simple rule says :A people hire other A people. B people hire C people.

If A people are smart people, B people are less smart people and C people are not so smart, then we have some interesting suppositions.

In the first case, smart bosses will surround themselves with equally smart employees. They will not feel intimidated by them and they will encourage their potential and creativity to the maximum.

In the second case, the not-so-smart bosses are intimidated by their smart employees, so they will avoid hiring this sort of people. And all because of a few basic reasons, like the fear of loosing their job due to an A type subordinate, the fear of not being capable of managing their team (of A people), and needing to appear like an A type, when in fact they are nothing but a B type.

The danger lies in not-so-smart managers who provoke a chain reaction by only hiring less smart people or rather dumb people. 

The real problem we face today in the talent crisis we find ourselves in and aggravated by the global recession, is how to identify A people. And not just identify them, but also how to make our company sufficiently attractive for these people to want to form a part of it.

But it’s a foregone conclusion that the global recession will pass, and with it, part of the talent crisis; there is no question that the longer we worry about finding these A people, the harder it will be for us to get ahead.

Thank God, I am one of the few people who still hasn’t gone on holiday…. A hard summer of work, but with its sweet reward—when all the others have returned from their yearned for but short holidays where they weren’t quite unplugged, I will be off far far away, right out in the boondocks where there will be no human way to find me…

Within exactly one month my holidays will start. In fact at this very time in a month’s time, I shall be winging my way over Russia, while all my colleagues will be fighting the dreaded post-vacation  blues or syndrome. It is not even necessary to wait a month to feel the effects. Today the motorway was already clogging up just like the worst day in October, when schools, universities, etc, are in full swing.

Barely a few years ago, the “post-vacation syndrome” didn’t even exist, and now it is such a hot topic…. But how are we not going to go crazy, after waiting all year to enjoy these days—which always seem too few, and always, but always come to an end—only to catapult us back at break-neck speed into our crude day to day reality?

According to the University of Navarra, however strange it may sound this syndrome which has us in its grips summer after summer is caused by our “internal clock”. I always thought that we only had one biological clock just for women to warn us of the point of no return for making our contribution to perpetuating the species. Apparently we have another.

To explain it in simple terms for all of us to grasp, me included, supposedly for people to be at ease, they need a routine that matches their unique “biorhythm”—in other words, a series of activities that are synchronized with this internal clock which defines the state of our organism. These routines together with a set of incentives drive us to get ahead throughout our lives, and convert into protective shields that allow us to overcome adversities. A glitch in our regular biorhythm, like the absence of our motivations, as in the context of our return to daily life after a vacation, leads to this syndrome or attack of blues we experience summer after summer.

Over the holiday period, oh poor crazy humans, what are we thinking of? We are making the hands of our crazed internal clock go awry. We rest more, we take our siestas, we are night birds, we eat and not eat, and we shove our hated alarm clocks into a drawer.  This almost total lack of routine and chaos in our habits totally spins our biorhythm out of sync, and that is if we are even able to detect its mere presence.

Our return from holidays, or put in another way, our return to our routine, converts into a brusque change for our organism. If we don’t rapidly synchronise with this new (or old, depending on how you look at it) pace of life, total chaos ensues. Coupled with the lack of motivation that goes hand in hand with the return to work of any self-respecting human being, we view with horror the rest of the year until the next holiday break.

Whoever can pretty much identify with all these factors is guaranteed to suffer from post-vacation blues marked by general weakness, asthenia, night-time insomnia, day-time sleepiness, difficulties in concentration, apathy, boredom, and in more serious cases, depression.

So, in the face of our total inability to “self-heal” ourselves of this malaise, the best would be “prevention”. Listening to the experts in these areas, we have to follow certain guidelines such as returning to the routine gradually, as the holiday break comes to a close. Or rapidly return to our hobbies, like the gym, playing a game of pétanque, or whatever takes our fancy, undoubtedly this will give us a dose of motivation. Tidying up our desk or organizing our agenda, the first day back at school is yet another of the golden recommendations.

Although, if we were to be honest, I don’t think any of these pieces of advice can help our minds stop drifting towards our holiday destination, while our bodies organize their agendas or wipe away the dust on our computer monitors. I don’t see it happening… but one this is sure. Something is horribly wrong if this year we have 63% of people “suffering” from this malaise; last year it was barely 50%.

We yearn for the days we spend outside the office with too much strength, for the hours to while away quickly, and more often than not this time is not enjoyed 100%. All thanks to the thoughts that threaten us and remind us “its over and its time to get back…”. My advice is take it easy and just think of the now. There’s always time to go back.

In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter

I wonder whether Laurence J. Peter (Peter Principle) and Scott Adams (Dilbert Principle) ever met and ever discussed their visionary ideas about the way organizations work. Given the difference in age between these two, I doubt it, although Peter’s theories clearly made their mark in Scott, who knew how to express them at their best in his famous comic strip starring Dilbert.

In a nutshell, the Peter Principle (1969) says that in a company or organization, the people who do their work well are promoted to positions of increased responsibility, until they attain their level of incompetence.

There’s no doubt that this principle has be proven on many occasions when a top management position has been filled by an “incompetent” professional. Not intrinsically incompetent as he has already undertaken previous projects with surprising efficiency, but incompetent at this very moment in this particular job.

Peter deduced several rules of the thumb from his theory which are very interesting and revealing. The first one states “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties”. The second one indicates that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”. So if you do your work well, be glad. You are not an incompetent employee yet, but it will come.

Getting as far as here, we need to examine under a magnifying glass the recruitment and selection processes in organization. Mistaken logic can make you think that if a person does his work well, he will be just as efficient in a new position. That’s a big error that Peter tries to warn us of. Never favour the efficiency of an employee doing his work over the validity of his previous position.

If you don’t heed this piece of advice, you can find yourself without the ideal person for the position and with the wrong and inefficient person in another. There is still a ray of hope though… This principle only holds in very hierarchical organizational structures, so if that is not our case, then we need not worry about the Peter Principle.

Although the Peter Principle has always been attractive to me because of its overwhelming logic, I must say that I have a weakenss for Dilbert, the hero of the satirical nineties comic strip created by  Adams. In my opinion, Scott Adams has brilliantly turned the Peter Principle on its head by stating that “companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management, in order to limit the amount of damage they’re capable of doing”.

Something happened with the Dilbert Principle that Peter was lucky enough not to have suffered. Academically it was rejected because it contradicted the classical techniques in human resources management, although it was applauded by people in the business world, namely analysts and managers. Just as Guy Kawasaki, of Apple Computer, said “There are only two kinds of companies, those that recognize they’re just like ‘Dilbert’ and those that are also like ‘Dilbert’ but don’t know it yet.”

Both theories are similar and in truth they complement each other. Peter thought that companies use promotions to compensate efficient employees until they attained a position where they were incompetent—and what is worse, remain there. On the contrary, Dilbert believed that the employees who had already shown incompetence were intentionally promoted to avoid wreaking more damage in the company. Evidently both principles can be seen in the same organization. What disquiets me the most is the latter. To think that the real work, the productive work is done by the people in the lower part of the pecking order does not surprise me. But to think that management positions may have very little relevance, at least in the eyes of whoever decides who to promote and who not. Yes, that is cause for considerable concern. It has to be said that neither Peter nor Adams reinvented the wheel. Already back in 1910, José Ortega y Gasset, a well known Spanish philosopher,  said when visiting Argentina that “all public employees should be demoted to the next level down, because they have been promoted until they became incompetent.” That is a perfect synthesis of the two principles together…

I can’t explain why or how, the human resources “gurus” insist on rescuing words from other disciplines, which have nothing to do with ours, to explain phenomena that occurs in companies, and more so in their employees.

The latest buzzword is the term resilience, which according to Wikipedia is “in psychology is the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and catastrophe.” When a subject or an animal group is capable of overcoming distress of this kind, it is said that they have the right resilience and can resist negative events, or even emerge strengthened by them.

To understand how this new concept is used in human resources, Wikipedia can serve us as a reference, but it doesn’t clarify things well. After searching again and again in forums and dictionaries, I have begun to see some things a little more coherently…

We can say that resilience also means “the capacity to survive in spite of the problems or damage, but without involving or requiring effort of any kind. Another definition might be “the capacity to recover, recoup, over come the negative or harmful influences”.

After reading a plethora of varied definitions, I’m inclined to think that in the human resources world, the term resilience refers to “resistance to change”, or better said, the natural resistance that sets the oldest workforce against the new processes, partners, colleagues, systems, activities or tasks.

We can also twist this around and talk of resilience as the capacity of the workforce to adapt to these changes without any resistance. This is something that companies are beginning to carefully consider in these uncertain and difficult times.

It is not surprising that with so many mass layoffs, redundancies, workforce restructuring, etc., we hear of new buzzwords that talk of the change in organizations and how employees deal with it.

In a little while, we might read in job offers something like “people with a high degree of resilience required”  Not all together bad, so long as the candidates do not confuse it with the “capacity to change residence”…