“Talent is everywhere” was the title of a talk I gave at TEDx back in 2012. The theme came from a concern after a warm conversation about what it means to be a talent for a certain company. The conversation started after someone said in a meeting that a certain person was no longer a talent, that is, one day he was a talent, the next not anymore, how would that be possible?
What is Talent?
Before analyzing deeper, let’s take a few steps back to understand what talent is. Let’s start with the Michaelis dictionary definition, which says what talent is:
The natural ability to perform something with dexterity
That is, it is a set of intrinsic characteristics and skills that can be perfected using techniques that strengthen certain behaviors that enhance and demonstrate each person’s talent.
I couldn’t understand how one person stopped being a talent for the organization. Where did the talent go? It disappeared. Is it a piece that you can disconnect from the person, and they simply cease to have talent? Examining a little closer, I saw that the analysis contained a gap in understanding. Looking only at the performance, the person can be one day more and one day less productive, and that’s ok.
This fact makes me think that at a certain point, the person is no longer seen as a person and is seen only as a collaborator, without looking at the whole.
Collaborators are the people at work, the total person is a mother, father, son, daughter, boyfriend, girlfriend, etc. A total person has fears, cries, gets discouraged with the arrival of a new leadership, due to a change in the organization, and that’s okay, you don’t need to throw away the prerogative that the person ‘no longer has talent’. That would be thinking that only looks at one side of the equation, and therefore it is selfish thinking.
What drives an organization or talent team to think this way?
I would venture to say that this is due to the absence or the need to restructure the talent management strategy. Talent management cannot just be in the name of the area, it has to happen in practice, and for this to be possible, some questions may be quite relevant, such as the role of leadership in talent management. Is she prepared to manage the ups and downs of the performance of the person she leads? Is the talent team instrumentalizing the leadership and the person being led to manage day-to-day complexities?
It’s no use just saying that the person has no talent and therefore needs to be replaced by someone with more talent. It is necessary to empower people so that they can deal with emotional variations, with this whole framework of feelings that are not static and not possible to balance, but rather a balancing act, a term that refers to the idea of movement, one day for the balance to hang to one side, one day to the other, and this fact needs to be normalized.
Here it is worth saying that motivating is the key for people to put their talents into practice, so taking care of Total Motivation (TOMO) is fundamental. It is necessary to identify what has changed and seek solutions so that the person can return to the balance of their previous performance levels.
In addition, as the title of this article suggests, talent is everywhere, and therefore, it is necessary to rethink which skills and capabilities are considered FIT Culture in the organization so that this filter does not generate biases that segregate the diversity of people and cultures.
What could a person living in the periphery create in a Marketing project?
What look would these people bring to HR?
As I often say, the next Nobel Prize is currently sleeping under an overpass.
It is important, once and for all, to open our eyes to the whole. Because all people have talent, it is enough to step outside the bubble to see the talents that will build the future of organizations and society as a whole, because what brought us here will not necessarily lead us to the future we want.