order to operate at a consistently high level you must understand some fundamental aspects of your personality, including your intrinsic motivation or purpose, your favoured patterns of behaviour for meeting those needs, and how you sabotage yourself under pressure. When you understand this framework you can finally take charge of your performance, success and happiness by ensuring fit!
PART I
CHAPTER 1
TALENT IS NOT THE ANSWER
Over the last few decades we have become increasingly obsessed with high performance, in the sporting arena and in business. We've needed to be, because competition is fierce. In business customers are much more discerning; in sport there is considerably more money involved. As a result it's become necessary to squeeze every last drop of value from every resource and to find a way to elevate performance across the board. Not only is breakthrough development harder and harder to come by but the information, knowledge and insights around those breakthroughs are also becoming harder and harder to protect. We live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, and this drive for elevated performance is not going to subside. If anything, it will accelerate.
The problem is that, so far, all the solutions put forward to address performance have focused on what someone does. When it comes to securing high performance, conventional wisdom tells us that talent is the answer.
Our collective obsession with talent was largely started by McKinsey & Company. Of course, when one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the world talks, people listen. During the dotcom boom of the 1990s McKinsey launched an initiative called the War for Talent. The objective was to find out what made top-performing American companies different when it came to hiring, firing and promotion. They distributed thousands of questionnaires to businesses across the US and 18 companies were singled out. McKinsey interviewed leaders in those companies, from the CEO down, and concluded that the very best companies had leaders who were obsessed with talent. They focused on attracting and recruiting star performers, often with disproportionate reward, and constantly pushed them into more and more senior roles.
McKinsey is a highly respected organisation and the argument is plausible. As a result, talent was positioned as the key to long-term success and high performance. Today companies like AT&T, Pfizer and Deloitte all have a Chief Talent Officer on the payroll. IT giant Cisco has created a talent centre in India to achieve a sixfold increase in recruitment of Indian engineering talent. Even governments are taking the talent solution seriously. The Chinese, South Korean and Singapore governments have all started nationwide talent strategies to ensure long-term performance and competitiveness.
There is no doubt that talent plays a part in high performance. You absolutely need to have the skills and abilities to do what you need to do. But to imply that it's all you need is simplistic and unhelpful. Besides, is 18 companies from a pool of thousands really a statistically significant sample from which to create a theory that has shaped the last two decades? Perhaps more importantly, what of the countless people who possess blistering talent but never quite deliver? Everyone who has been in business or coached a sports team for more than, say, five years will have witnessed ‘talent' disappear or implode precisely because it is pushed into more and more senior roles that don't fit. In business there is even a name for it: the Peter Principle.
The Peter Principle was formulated in 1969 by Dr Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their humorous book of the same name, and states that eventually everyone is promoted to their ‘position of incompetence'. In a typically hierarchical organisation, individuals are promoted on the basis of perceived talent, ability or performance they display in their current role. The argument goes that as long as someone demonstrates talent and ability they will continue to be promoted until they stop being promoted – which would indicate that they are no longer competent in that role. Sooner or later everyone is therefore promoted to their own position of incompetence!
The reason the book is considered funny is because everyone knows someone who has clearly reached their position of incompetence. And they reach that level regardless of whatever perceived or real talent that they may have displayed. Promoting someone to a new role on the basis of their ability in their current role doesn't take adequate account of the skills and experience the new role will require.
TALENT AND POTENTIAL
I was recently working with a general manager in a large financial services organisation. He was talking about unleashing the potential of one his state managers. I asked him how long he had been expecting to see a change in her ability. Was it a recent aspiration, or developmental, or longer term? He thought for a moment and said, ‘Oh probably for about 18 months'.
My response was that she is highly likely to be performing at her potential, and I suggested he not confuse potential with self-promotion and talking a good game. My point was that if they had been developing her for 18 months and she had been genuinely working on it, and there was limited or no change, then she was at her potential!
The mismatch between current talent and the requirements of a new role is often evident in sport where it's just assumed that a great player will be a great coach. Take Wayne Gretzky, Magic Johnson or Diego Maradona.
Gretzky (also known as ‘The Great One') is widely considered the best ice hockey player of all time. He was nine-time Most Valuable Player (MVP), four-time Stanley Cup champion and the leading scorer in NHL history. But he sucked as a coach.
As a Hall of Fame player Magic Johnson won five NBA titles, earned three league MVPs and was a 12-time All-Star with the Lakers, but he too sucked as a coach. (Under his charge the Lakers won only five out of 16 games in the 1993–94 season.)
Diego Maradona, who starred for the Argentinian team that won the 1986 World Cup, is widely regarded as one of the best football players ever. His ability on the pitch, however, was never paralleled off the pitch: his coaching record was abysmal.
Talent alone is never enough, and it will never be enough.
Although McKinsey were not the only ones advocating the prime importance of talent, their standing in the business community undoubtedly helped convert the theory from an idea into the new corporate religion, which was then used as intellectual justification for lavish compensation packages.
And it's not a coincidence that this approach led to one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in US history – Enron.
Enron took McKinsey's advice to heart. In his book What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell notes that prior to the meltdown McKinsey billed in excess of $10 million a year across 20 separate projects with Enron. A McKinsey director regularly attended board meetings and Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling had been one of the youngest partners in McKinsey history – so to say McKinsey had an influence on Enron would be a gross understatement.
Enron was famous for hiring smart, ‘talented' people who thought they deserved to be paid a great deal of money, and then paying them more than they thought they were worth! As a business it lived and eventually died by its obsession with talent. They scoured Ivy League universities and top-tier business schools to recruit the cream of the crop. They paid outrageous salaries and bonuses and allowed their talent free and unquestioned rein. And in the end it was the business's undoing.
It is so easy to look at exceptional performance and put it down to luck or talent. It's much more romantic to assume that some people are just born special. It's also much more convenient to subscribe to the ‘divine spark' theory, because it allows us to abdicate responsibility for performance. After all, if talent is the result of some unfathomable and uncontrollable genetic lottery we can't really be blamed for not being at the front of the queue when the gods were dishing out talent!
And to be fair, the argument seems logical! It just didn't quite stack up. McKinsey certainly made talent sexy, but talent-fuelled corporate collapse after talent-fuelled corporate collapse raised serious questions about the approach.
THE WAR AGAINST TALENT
In the inevitable backlash against talent we were told that talent was not only nowhere near as important as McKinsey and others were leading us to believe, but that it didn't even exist.
Malcolm