Tapping into talent

Stop what you are doing. Take a very slow look around the room and consider what it would be like if every person you can see could contribute more of their talent to their work and their lives? How many people in your organisation are really in their element in what they are doing and how they are doing it? Prevailing practice is to recruit people to posts created in terms of the assessed needs of the organisation. By approaching recruitment in this way we inadvertently filter out what the whole person may bring: often we don’t even look for it. We ‘performance manage’ people on the basis of what they are not doing well rather than what they could do more of, or what they love and are good at. I often work with people who come to coaching because their true potential is not being tapped. They become de-motivated and over time this leads to frustration at best, most often stress and legal cases at worst. Everyone loses.

In his book ‘The Element’, Ken Robinson describes organisations as organisms, made up of people who are driven by feelings, motives and relationships. They are complex communities where people spend more than half their lives. For our organisations to really succeed in tapping into talent we need to become alchemists, matching individual interests and capability with organisational need, and for that to be a shared process. This is central to building resilience, effectiveness, performance and motivation. Someone working from this place of strength works harder, delivers better for longer and is happier to boot.

So let’s go back to looking around the room. Imagine what it would be like in your work environment if you changed your standard working practices and took a more ‘Google-like’ approach with an attitude of flexibility, open to possibility. What we would get is a problem-solving culture where learning is accelerated and individuals take greater personal responsibility. This also has the potential to create a ‘viral’ effect, with knowledge and learning shared within teams, contributing to positive cultures, improved relationships, fewer performance-related incidents and less stress and work related illness. We are all better served.

Relationships are central to tapping into talent and creating success. A core task for leaders and managers is therefore to build relationships and understanding, and facilitate others to get closer to their own intrinsic capability. By gaining more detailed insight into those we work with – who they are, what are their drivers, their learning styles, their specific interests and their ways of working – we unlock their contribution. Rather than letting the choices we make at a leadership level permeate the whole organisation and become the default way of working, we need to mimic nature by modelling and encouraging behavioural flexibility to match the outcome we want.

Some learning styles make it harder to think, plan and create sat at a computer. Yet in most organisations banks of computers dominate almost silent offices, devoid of atmosphere. We have to be freer with our ways of working, including encouraging kinaesthetic learners to draw and fiddle, mapping thinking visually, encouraging the practice of walk and talk meetings in the fresh air whilst oxygenating our bloodstreams and stimulating our creative brains. Effectiveness depends on being able to utilise both sides of the brain and to tap into knowledge and experience: it is this duality and interdependency which creates better solutions to problems and can be found in every department if we create the right conditions in which to access it.

Discretionary effort is the life blood of our sector. It is a rare thing to see people working to their contractual hours. Supporting our organisation fulfils our intrinsic need to contribute. Despite the sector’s tradition of low wages, a client said to me recently: “My job is not just a job. It is really my reason for being as well. This has an enormously motivating impact on the way I live.” She is typical of the arts workforce: there is no tangible boundary between the individual in the workplace and their identity. On the surface, we benefit from the dedication and extra hours put in. However, overworking is still rife in many of our organisations and in perpetuating this we fundamentally undermine resilience. It is a short-term strategy which depletes talent and not one for meeting long-term needs.

Tapping into talent also depends on a clear vision that is nourished, tended and modelled. We have a shared responsibility to develop people, ourselves and others at whatever level. In today’s financial climate training is one of the first budgets to go. Re-visioned to be a central organisational tool, I would argue it should be the last. We need to change, to challenge our thinking and practices and facilitate the difference that individuals can make. It is time to question our hard-wired behaviours and ask to what extent they are serving us. Does the way we currently manage talent in our organisations actually achieve the outcomes we are seeking? In doing what we have always done, we get what we have always got. Are we brave enough to try something different?