Debunking the Talent Myth!!!

Categories: Leadership, Careers, Coaching, Change, Goals & Motivation

Everyone’s talking about ways to find opportunity amid economic chaos. Yet there’s something right under our noses that’s being overlooked: Times of crisis present unprecedented opportunities to stretch and develop real leadership capabilities.

What’s needed, specifically?

Hire more executive coaches, step up sessions, and implement more training and development programs.

In tough times, you cannot rely on talent and luck. Even when you have a talented team at the top, people need help in stretching their capabilities to meet the economy’s overwhelming demands. Your leaders can’t go it alone. You can’t, either.

Scientific research on great performance has persuasively shown that key abilities are developed. They don’t occur naturally. In fact, there may be no such thing as natural talent. It’s certainly not something you want to rely upon to help solve current problems.

Great leaders aren’t born; they’re made—and the research to support this is overwhelming. What we previously thought of as innate can often be taught. Leadership capabilities are acquired through constructive practice and developmental opportunities, and today’s business volatility calls for both.

“The key to this development is pushing people—or people pushing themselves—just beyond their current abilities, forcing them to do things that they can’t quite do,” according to Fortune Senior  Editor Geoff Colvin, author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else (Portfolio, 2008).

Crisis or Opportunity?

The upside of a financial crisis and recession is that they offer all of us the opportunity to stretch our skills in our current jobs—and I mean everyone. That means you. But you already know you’re being stretched, don’t you? You feel it. The question is, how are you going to welcome your own particular crises and use them to benefit your personal and professional development?

According to Colvin, managers often redirect people’s careers based on slender evidence that they have talent (or lack thereof). Unfortunately, we don’t give ourselves the same opportunity. We’ll try something new, and if it doesn’t come naturally or we don’t immediately excel, we conclude we have no talent for it.

We abandon pursuit. We never give ourselves the chance to practice and make progress. We don’t like the feeling of discomfort that comes from doing something poorly, so we don’t hang in there. Scientific evidence, however, is beginning to show that our definition of talent is wrong. In fact, “talent” may not mean anything at all.

In studies of accomplished individuals, researchers have found few signs of precocious achievement before their subjects began intensive training. Similar findings have turned up in studies of musicians, tennis players, artists, swimmers, mathematicians and chess players.

Is Talent Irrelevant?

Such findings do not prove that talent doesn’t exist, but they do suggest it may be irrelevant.

The concept of talent is especially troublesome in business. We label people and then assign expectations, some of which are unrealistic. When people are fast-tracked or deemed executive material, we assume they have special gifts. Worse, we fail to adequately emphasize the importance of  continuous training and coaching. Instead, we rely on their “natural gifts.”

Identifying these gifts has been extremely elusive. In fact, some business giants actually gave little early indication that they would become great.

Jack Welch, named by Fortune as the 20th century’s manager of the century, showed no particular passion for business, even into his mid-20s.

Steve Ballmer and Jeffrey Immelt were average employees at Procter & Gamble in the 1970s, with little evidence they would go on to become CEOs of Microsoft and GE before age 50.

In this age of genomic research, there should no longer be any question as to what is—and isn’t—innate. If a talent is innate, scientists should be able to identify the gene for it, and no progress has been made on this front.

Talent or Hard Work?

We can safely draw the conclusion that there’s plenty of opportunity for everyone. Many high-performing executives will tell you they don’t rely on their innate talents as much as their hard-earned skills. 

CEOs like A.G. Lafley of P&G and GE’s Immelt have said that being forced to manage through crises early in their careers enhanced their abilities in ways that were critical to becoming CEOs. They wouldn’t have achieved their status without surviving the storms that gave them hands-on practice.

Certain practices can make our experiences especially productive:

• Coaching helps.
• Receiving feedback allows us to fine-tune our skills.
• Working in a safe learning environment is essential.

Workplaces encourage practice and development, and mistakes should be viewed as learning opportunities. You also need to clearly define and develop a plan for achieving the abilities you wish to hone, including a measurable time frame. This will turbo-charge your performance and improve your chances of success.

10,000 Hours or 10 Years

Malcolm Gladwell makes the case for 10,000 hours of practice to attain expertise in his book Outliers (Little, Brown & Co., 2008):

“The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly 10 years, if you think about four hours a day.”

Almost all child prodigies in music, sports, chess and the arts seem to put in 10,000 hours before they attain expertise and produce significant results.

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, edited by Anders Ericsson, Charness and Feltovich, et al, compiles scientific studies to prove the point in a wide variety of fields. The trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers “whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming” are nearly always made, not born.

Many of us have already put in more than a decade of doing what we do. The question is whether we’re practicing the right things, in the right way. Are we designing deliberate practice that actually develops the specific skills we need to make progress toward specific results? Or, to use a golf analogy, are you going to the driving range and hitting a bucket of balls the wrong way, for hours at a time?

What Is Deliberate Practice?

Anders Ericsson and his scientific colleagues emphasize the importance of deliberate practice, which isn’t what most of us think of when applying the term to sports or music education. In fact, our habitual use of the term in these domains may prevent us from applying it correctly to the business realm.

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements:

• It is an activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with the help of a teacher, coach or expert.
• It can be repeated frequently.
• Feedback on results is continuously available.
• It’s highly demanding mentally.
• It isn’t much fun and entails hard work.

If you think you’ve outgrown the need for a teacher or coach, it’s time to challenge this assumption. A business coach can see things a manager cannot and is trained to deliver feedback in a way that’s inaccessible to most managers.

Without a clear, unbiased view of your performance, you cannot choose the best practice activities.  Most of us lack the knowledge we need to design our own practice programs, and we cannot realistically provide objective observations and feedback to ourselves. As stunt people like to say, “don’t try this at home.” Hire a coach who can properly stretch you beyond your current abilities and help you move out of your comfort zones. Otherwise, human nature dictates that you’re likely to spend your time practicing what you already know how to do.

According to Noel Tichy, PhD, a professor of organizational behavior and human resources management at the University of Michigan School of Business, our progress depends on leaving our comfort zone to enter the learning zone, where skills and abilities are just out of reach. We must force ourselves to stay in the latter, even as we make changes.

Why We Avoid Hard Work

Deliberate practice is, above all else, an effort to focus and concentrate. Recognizing unsatisfactory elements of performance is difficult and uncomfortable. When you try your hardest to perform better, you place enormous strain on your mental abilities.

Deliberate practice, in fact, can be viewed as an antonym to fun. Instead of doing something at which we excel, we intentionally work on areas where we have deficits—over and over again. After each repetition, a coach can tell us exactly where to focus so we can repeat these skills yet again.

Obviously, if the activities that require practice were easy and fun, everyone would do them. But in reality, most people won’t practice or persist long enough to improve. This is good news if you’re willing to do what most people won’t. It’s the reason you’re more likely to keep your job and thrive in this recession.

What About Passion?

Talent is not what determines success at developing high-level capacities. Rather, those who care the most will rise to the top. Exceptional performance depends on what we decide to do with our lives and the passion that drives us.

One of the most purchased articles from the Harvard Business Review is a 1968 piece on motivation that explains our three main drives:

1. Achievement
2. Power
3. A sense of community and desire to help others

No matter your driving force, you have to care deeply enough to work hard to become exceptional.

Nothing can make you endure the pain and sacrifice of deliberate practice for decades unless you’re  carried by an intrinsic compulsion to do so.

But allowing people to follow their intrinsic drives and work on projects of their own choosing is not something most organizations tolerate. In their fervent application of solely extrinsic motivations, organizations may actually prevent people from developing their passionate abilities.

Talent Is Never Enough

In Talent Is Never Enough: Discover the Choices That Will Take You Beyond Your Talent, (Thomas Nelson, 2007), leadership expert John C. Maxwell suggests talent is “often overrated and frequently misunderstood.” He  advises readers to build their strengths to become a “talent-plus person,” defined by the following tenets:

• Belief lifts your talent.
• Initiative activates your talent.
• Focus directs your talent.
• Preparation positions your talent.
• Practice sharpens your talent.
• Perseverance sustains your talent.
• Character protects your talent.

Even if you hold onto the notion that you’ll always survive because of your innate talent, you must still prepare, practice and persist. The scientific research is in, and it’s conclusive. Hard work—not talent—contributes to high performance.

Brian Tracy – Impatience

I posted a blog a few weeks back about impatience. I used the example of how some karate students are always in a hurry to earn their black belt.

Well…here is Brian Tracy, a true mentor of mine. He does a wonderful job on this video about impatience.

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Til Next Time.

Linking Action To Success –> Lane Resources Inc.

Take Two Mentors And Call Me In The Morning.

Two mentors or one? Choosing a mentor or success coach is not like ordering coffee with two sugars. One mentor at a time is the perfect way to get more things done.

As you have heard before…too many cooks spoil the soup. They all have different ways of cooking and different ways of getting things done. Mentors are no different.

How many mentors do you have? I put this question to Kevin Hogan last year and he said, “one mentor at a time” is all people need. Kevin went on to explain that if you played baseball you wouldn’t want 3 of the best coaches trying to coach you. Reason being…they all coach in a different way.

I think of Kevin Hogan as my mentor/coach for the past few years now. I put him right up there with Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy and people that know me will tell you that is saying so much coming from me.

I can relate to what Kevin Hogan was saying. I teach Kenpo Karate and a blend of other martial arts but, I teach my way. I know Instructors that teach the same style and same techniques, but they teach them differently. I see it all the time.

Kevin Hogan’s E-zine “Coffee With Kevin” was on video last week and he addressed the same question with the same answer. (Kevin is consistent.)

I think you should pick your coach/mentor the same way you should pick your martial arts Instructor. Here we go…..

1. Don’t just go for the hype. I had a karate teacher once that said, “ I can kill you 6 times before you hit the ground.” I didn’t study with him very long…his business went under too.

2. Find the people that have a track record that can deliver.

3. Find the mentor or coach that will make you work. You have to put in the work. I coach a group of people that ask me to push them hard every week…that is what they signed on for.

4. Find a coach that cares about people.

Thanks!

R. Lynn Lane

How Long Will It Take To Get My Blackbelt?

If I had a dollar for each time I was asked that question….I’d have a few bucks by now.

Most people are always stuck with how long a thing will take to achieve or to receive.

When I have a new karate student walk in my door 9 out of 10 will ask that question. How long will it take for me to get my blackbelt?

I usually say….. As long as it takes.

Can you imagine if people walked up to Thomas Edison and ask… “How long will it take you to get that light bulb thing worked out?” I’m sure Edison would have responded … Until it is done!

Human nature has a tendency to want things ..NOW.

I can understand that train of thought, we are all wired to do things as fast as we can and to fill our needs as fast as we can.

If you look back through history, humans had times when they didn’t know what to expect day to day. They did know that life was short and they had a need to conserve energy because their needs may not be meet for long periods of time.

Am I saying that people are lazy? For the most part…..Yes. Again…we are wired that way.

But, that is not altogether a bad thing!

If you look at most of the advanced technology over the past 50 years, it came about because we wanted things …Now!

Think about all the things in your life that are now faster, better and bigger and have changed over the past few years.

But, never forget….. some of the things you work toward will take as long as it takes.

That will apply to Business, Relationships, Fitness, Education and many other areas in life.

Learn -> Apply -> Learn -> Apply -> -> -> It Never Ends.

Lane Resources Inc. © 2010

R. Lynn Lane

Your Greatness with Dr. Ike

I recently had the privilege of hearing Dr. Tim Irwin speak at an event where I served as the Master of Ceremony/Speaker. Tim has interviewed over 10,000 people in his career as an organizational psychologist and as an international consultant. He made this amazing statement, “I have never interviewed or talked with anyone who did not have, at their core, a desire to be great.” His observation is that everyone is passionate about something and I would concur.

Each day most Americans get up and go to jobs where they have no passion. As a consequence, they will not achieve greatness. On average, they will spend 60-65% of their waking hours toiling at jobs where they have no sense of engagement. Gallup did a study a few years ago where they interviewed 1.7 million workers representing 77,000 companies and/or divisions. They asked the question, “Are you engaged in your job?” The response was startling in the level of honesty and the state of affairs in American business:

• 55% felt no degree of engagement or sense of passion for their jobs.
• 16% responded that not only were they not engaged in their jobs, they described themselves as actively disengaged. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, calls these people, OBT – On-Board Terrorists. They work for you but they are attempting to blow up the company by disrupting the culture of the organization.

Add up the two statistics and you get a 71% disconnect rate – meaning that only 29% of workers have any degree of passion for their jobs. It is impossible to have greatness when your passion is at room temperature.

So, how can you be great at your job?

1. Find the work where your skills and the world’s needs intersect and you will find passion.
2. If you are in job that you do not like, do your best work anyway and your day will come.
3. Being great in your work means that you have discovered meaning in the work that you do each day.
4. Focus on the meaning of your work and you will operate at your highest and best rather than your lowest and least.
5. Being great at your job happens when you become more concerned about your contributions rather than your rewards.

If you are an employer, remember: People will work harder for meaning than they ever will for money!

Ben Franklin’s 13 Principles Of Success

Ben Franklin’s 13 Principles Of Success

In the year 1723, a seventeen year-old boy arrived in Philadelphia without a penny to his name. At age 42, he retired, wealthy. Few men, before or since have ever been as successful as Benjamin Franklin. He gave credit for his many inventions and business successes to this list of 13 principles. Each of them should be practiced in order, for a week at a time, so that all of them become a habit in your life. They’ll work as well today as they did then.

1. Temperance: Eat not dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself, avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order: Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have it’s time.
4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; waste nothing.
6. Industry: Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity: Use no harmful deceit; think innocently and justly; and if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice: wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation: Avoid extremes; forebear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation.
11. Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, nor at accidents.
12. Chastity: Be chaste in matters with the opposite sex.
13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Lane Resources Inc.