#HRTechChat: Four Harsh Truths and Finding Your Brilliance

[00:00:00] Hi everyone and thank you for joining us for the sixth podcast in our Five Talents That Really Matter podcast series.

[00:00:08] As with the other podcasts, we're joined by the authors Barry Conchy and Sarah Dalton.

[00:00:14] And today we're going to be talking about Four Harsh Truths.

[00:00:19] And 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 and organizations.

[00:00:33] But before we do that, I want to talk about the news this morning.

[00:00:37] I get up really early and I scroll to see what happened.

[00:00:41] And one of the first things I saw that happened was that Starbucks has a new CEO.

[00:00:46] And I was really curious about this because the CEO had been there, had only been there like since March of last year.

[00:00:55] So if I think about we've been talking about Five Talents, we've been talking about what it takes to be a leader.

[00:01:02] I started wondering about how is it that a company like Starbucks goes out to the market, finds Lachman, their current CEO till this morning,

[00:01:14] someone who came out of McKenzie, someone who came out of Pepsi.

[00:01:18] And all of a sudden, a little over a year later, it's not working.

[00:01:24] And I have to assume since they had another CEO ready to announce today that they probably knew it wasn't working months ago.

[00:01:32] It's not that they had this thought last week.

[00:01:35] So Barry, I'm going to ask you about this.

[00:01:39] So by the way, this is not the first time these things happen. These things happen all the time.

[00:01:45] So I think this is the very issue the book is trying to solve for.

[00:01:50] And I just would love for you to address it because we see companies make these bold changes pretty frequently.

[00:01:59] Pamela, when you say that it's not the first time that we've seen this.

[00:02:03] It's a really common feature of business that we see these standout CEOs like Lachman getting appointed to all the acclaim and then they flame out in a relatively short space of time.

[00:02:20] And I can say a number of things about what's likely to happen here.

[00:02:24] But the only thing I can say with certainty is that they didn't figure out whether Lachman had the talents that really mattered.

[00:02:33] But when you look at Lachman, so he's like that baby.

[00:02:36] I love that.

[00:02:38] He's what's likely to have happened and this is we've really got to address this issue.

[00:02:44] Shine a light on it.

[00:02:46] Lachman will have come top of a search firms recommendation.

[00:02:52] So he didn't come out of the blue much more likely that he was the top of a search firms recommendation.

[00:02:59] Likely that he had fantastic references, people who said this guy's a great leader.

[00:03:06] You know, we've seen him over X number of years do XYZ brilliantly.

[00:03:11] But all the things that we say in the book cast questions on these kinds of judgments or putting in some of these kinds of things.

[00:03:19] So on our earlier podcast, we said, look, experience is not what it's cracked up to be.

[00:03:24] Right.

[00:03:25] You might be seen to have a phenomenal amount of experiences backwards looking, not forwards looking.

[00:03:32] It enables you to check these boxes, but it doesn't make a prediction about the future.

[00:03:37] Every candidate that's in a leadership position who's failed gets excellent references.

[00:03:43] So but he's prepared to put their career on the line to vouch for these people and yet they fail.

[00:03:50] So this doesn't surprise us, but it's got to stop.

[00:03:54] 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

[00:04:06] and the other group of people jump on and then not assessing the right kinds of things and put in the emphasis in the right areas.

[00:04:14] So it's sad.

[00:04:15] I feel sorry for Starbucks, although I gather it's shares picked up a couple of percent on the announcement.

[00:04:21] So yeah, having been excited about Lacksman a year ago when he was appointed,

[00:04:27] 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.

[00:04:34] I think from early September, we got to stop this.

[00:04:38] It's utterly ridiculous.

[00:04:41] We're measuring the wrong things.

[00:04:46] With that, measuring the wrong things, I want to talk about the hard truths because the first hard truth,

[00:04:53] I think really addresses what you just said, which is actually a couple of the hard truths.

[00:04:59] The first one being not everybody is a leader.

[00:05:02] It's not to say now that everyone has talent, but that not everyone has those leadership talents.

[00:05:13] We want to encourage organizations to stop lying to their own employees.

[00:05:20] Stop the pretence that hard work, a great work attitude, great work ethic will lead to success in the future.

[00:05:30] Because it's not true.

[00:05:32] And we've got to stop pretending that it is true.

[00:05:36] The truth of the matter is that some people could be phenomenal leaders in the future, but not everybody can be.

[00:05:45] And although that might sound a dispiriting and discouraging message to give to people,

[00:05:50] but at a fundamental level it isn't.

[00:05:52] And I'll explain why.

[00:05:55] We fundamentally believe people have got a job for them in which they could excel and be brilliant,

[00:06:03] but it might not be a leadership job.

[00:06:06] And you know, one of the things that I'll say on this podcast, Pamela,

[00:06:10] and I don't feel any embarrassment at all in saying this.

[00:06:16] I was an atrocious manager of people.

[00:06:21] Now let that just sink in just for a second.

[00:06:25] So here I am admitting publicly, I was probably an atrocious manager of people.

[00:06:31] But earlier in my career, that's not how I thought about myself.

[00:06:35] And I knew earlier in my career that in order to climb the ladder, if that's what I wanted to do,

[00:06:40] I needed to manage people.

[00:06:42] So I applied for those kinds of jobs and because I could talk well in an interview,

[00:06:48] people assumed that because I could talk well in an interview, I must be a good manager.

[00:06:53] Then I got promoted into those positions, but it didn't bring out the best in me.

[00:06:58] And I don't think there's any shame in admitting that.

[00:07:02] Now we know from looking at data on manager quality as measured by employee engagement statistics,

[00:07:11] there are about 80% of people in manager roles that shouldn't be there.

[00:07:16] And there are too few people like me prepared to admit it.

[00:07:20] So we think it's the truth to say to people that not everybody can be a leader.

[00:07:26] But what we've got to be smarter at doing is trying to figure out how their talents might match to a different role.

[00:07:34] Because if they pursue a leadership objective and climb into a role that doesn't fit them,

[00:07:41] doesn't bring out the best in them, what value is that to them to be miserable for the rest of their lives?

[00:07:48] By the way, when they get into that role, if they do fail, they can't exactly climb backwards.

[00:07:54] There's no ladder back down.

[00:07:55] No, that's true.

[00:07:57] Where they can save face. There isn't.

[00:08:00] 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.

[00:08:11] So we've got to change the conversation.

[00:08:14] We've got to make it okay for people not to see leadership as an objective for everybody.

[00:08:20] That actually leads really to the next hard truth, Sarah, which is that leadership characteristics are really hard to develop.

[00:08:28] You know, it goes back to I think what was in the book much earlier is that nature versus nurture.

[00:08:35] Do you have these characteristics? How much can you develop them?

[00:08:39] And I know that you coach and assess a number of leaders and have to have those hard conversations sometimes.

[00:08:49] I think we need to recognize that there are some elements of ourselves that we cannot change.

[00:08:57] And not everybody likes to hear that, you know, it's why the training and development industry exists.

[00:09:04] Too many people like to think that we can be anything that we want to be.

[00:09:08] And we've got this funny question that we always ask it, you know, for the people that have spouses, significant others, if you have kids, how successful have you been at changing them?

[00:09:19] You think about all those annoying quirks and kinks that people just naturally have. They're so resistant to change.

[00:09:27] So, you know, we've talked at multiple points in this podcast series about just the idea that there are unchanging elements about people.

[00:09:38] And if at the point we hire and appoint them, we're already rationalizing their deficiencies.

[00:09:45] And if we just put more effort and energy into coaching those things up that we can change them as a person and it just never plays out to be the case.

[00:09:54] 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.

[00:10:04] So the idea with a talent based approaches, let's get people who are naturally wired with the talents that we know predict success in a role.

[00:10:14] And then the question is how good could they be?

[00:10:16] Yeah.

[00:10:16] But without those characteristics, they are just incredibly hard to develop.

[00:10:23] So there is that kind of nature nurture component to this argument where people always ask our leaders born, or are they made?

[00:10:32] That's true.

[00:10:33] And Barry, you might have way more to say on this subject than I do, but we've got a whole section on the book on this very topic.

[00:10:40] And it's going to be fascinating to see the response on this.

[00:10:43] Yeah, the data shows.

[00:10:46] 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.

[00:10:56] Yeah.

[00:10:57] And this leaves an ever shrinking section that's going to be influenced by the development industry.

[00:11:04] 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 event.

[00:11:14] But it's not likely to be less than 75%.

[00:11:17] And it could be even more.

[00:11:19] And we're just going to be honest about this.

[00:11:21] Now, let me let me explain some colloquial evidence that I think people will understand.

[00:11:27] The Office for Personal Management started in, I think 1983.

[00:11:32] And this organization has been the primary means for developing management curriculum, management leadership curriculum.

[00:11:42] 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.

[00:11:52] Right now, 80% of managers shouldn't be in their jobs.

[00:11:57] So we've spent billions of dollars over 40 years educating managers and leaders.

[00:12:09] And we've reached the point where 80% of them are fit for the position that they're in.

[00:12:15] What success does the training and development round got to show for itself?

[00:12:21] Now maybe they'll turn around and say, hey, 20% of them are pretty good.

[00:12:25] Right.

[00:12:25] We've spent billions of dollars.

[00:12:30] Achieving a result that I could achieve by dragging 20 random people off the street.

[00:12:36] So we've got to stop pretending that we can train people to success.

[00:12:42] 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.

[00:12:54] Now it's not that I can't teach a tortoise to gather nuts.

[00:12:58] 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.

[00:13:08] The monkeys are brilliant. Squirrels are fantastic, but you get my point.

[00:13:14] 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.

[00:13:24] 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.

[00:13:37] Give me the argument.

[00:13:38] 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.

[00:13:49] I worked with CEOs and built leadership teams and help them assess talent and who should be in what role.

[00:13:57] And in one particular organization, they were really pushing that everyone should have a 360 assessment.

[00:14:05] It didn't matter, you know, what level of leadership you were coming into, but everyone should have a 360 assessment.

[00:14:13] And for the most senior people, I was someone who would give the feedback or the 360.

[00:14:20] 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.

[00:14:32] And, you know, one of the components was does this person listen?

[00:14:39] Is this person a good listener? Do they take all points of view into consideration?

[00:14:44] And he came back, you know, 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.

[00:14:54] And I said, well, what about it was eye-opening?

[00:14:56] 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.

[00:15:09] And so he receded to tell me that that was like the core of their relationship.

[00:15:14] He didn't listen.

[00:15:15] And he said he was somewhat comforted by the fact that everyone around him said he didn't listen.

[00:15:21] So he said it actually kind of helped his relationship with his wife because he wasn't singling her out.

[00:15:28] And I had to laugh at that because, you know, you can by the time you put hundreds of people through these assessments very costly and to your point does it actually get at the talents that you need for leadership.

[00:15:43] But I love that story because, you know, it was a honey, I don't listen to anybody. It was so perfect.

[00:15:50] Pamela, do you know the people who benefit the most from training and development?

[00:15:57] Tell me.

[00:15:58] People with the potential to be brilliant leaders.

[00:16:03] So if you really want to create an impact, help people with measurable potential to realize that potential.

[00:16:11] Yes.

[00:16:11] If they're education, you know, if you were 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.

[00:16:28] And they'll just devour it.

[00:16:32] 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.

[00:16:41] Picking on people without that potential is largely wasting your time.

[00:16:47] Isn't that 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.

[00:17:02] 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.

[00:17:10] Teach them to be teach them to be wise in the way that they manage their own capabilities and deficiencies.

[00:17:18] And it's okay to have deficiencies. You know, it's just that the solution isn't you solving that problem yourself. It might be picking the right people to go around you.

[00:17:29] 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 this operating.

[00:17:44] 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.

[00:17:52] So I think that's a good point.

[00:17:54] Yes, there I wanted 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.

[00:18:06] And I think sometimes people think that they are. And so can you help us understand that a little bit better.

[00:18:14] It's funny because everyone going through our assessments always tells me, oh well 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.

[00:18:28] Right now in psychology we've kind of landed on the big five personality traits right and that's where you get things like introversion extroversion.

[00:18:36] Sure.

[00:18:38] Agree blah blah blah.

[00:18:40] Here's a difference I try and I try and paint for people is that personality isn't so black and white that you're only one thing all of the time.

[00:18:51] So, Pamela if I were to ask you to say if I were to ask you to describe it in an extrovert right do that really easily without much thought I think you could rattle off about 15 different ways of characterizing what an extrovert looks like.

[00:19:06] 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 or that trait.

[00:19:21] Extroversion is exactly.

[00:19:22] 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 that failure where personality becomes not helpful in predicting higher levels of performance and really specific jobs.

[00:19:41] 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.

[00:19:57] So an example of that would 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.

[00:20:18] You can't just tell someone who is 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.

[00:20:28] 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. Yeah, don't worry that we've got that covered somewhere along the way we've got that covered.

[00:20:38] If we just started it could literally like drive them over the edge.

[00:20:45] So sometimes talents like that could be the difference between someone who's mediocre in their role and someone who's just world class.

[00:20:53] Yeah, right.

[00:20:53] 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.

[00:21:03] 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.

[00:21:11] Let's measure those and then 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.

[00:21:23] Just a one point on personality panel of 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 smart.

[00:21:42] 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.

[00:21:54] I've not, I've not seen a credible water a leadership level make that prediction.

[00:21:59] 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.

[00:22:18] What we do with talents to Sarah's point is we specify them to a particular role.

[00:22:24] 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 and then try to fit it to the role.

[00:22:38] Yeah.

[00:22:38] And it's no surprise therefore that the, you know, that the effect sizes are so small.

[00:22:44] So I was thinking when I heard you describe that very 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 these person is these things.

[00:22:58] Of course they're going to be a good fit for the role.

[00:23:00] Of course.

[00:23:01] Right.

[00:23:03] But this brings up a really good point which is very 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 is direction and taking the assessment.

[00:23:20] And the one question actually have 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.

[00:23:36] 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.

[00:23:48] 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.

[00:24:04] 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.

[00:24:15] And a lot of companies are getting smarter about specialist roles and individual contributor roles.

[00:24:23] I think so too.

[00:24:24] Yes, you know you're able to pursue a career that isn't isn't dragged down by the need to manage your large complex organization.

[00:24:34] 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.

[00:24:47] Well, let's encourage companies to do that let's build these individual contributor tracks let's make it valuable.

[00:24:55] 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 or management and poor leadership on large numbers of people.

[00:25:17] 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.

[00:25:32] It's what they have to do to be at that level.

[00:25:35] 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.

[00:25:45] And, and I 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.

[00:25:52] So, you know, I think it's just great to start 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.

[00:26:04] 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.

[00:26:15] I encourage all of you to get the book, you can take the assessment when you get the book and give you information about where you are vis-a-vis the five talents and it will help you I think find where you're brilliant.

[00:26:30] 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.

[00:26:39] 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

[00:26:57] 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 in your marketplace.

[00:27:08] Thank you, Pamela.

[00:27:10] Thank you, Pamela.

[00:27:12] Take care. Bye-bye.