How many of the people you hired deliver on the potential they showed at interview?
Managers spend a lot of their time recruiting to fill vacancies in their teams. Yet they frequently complain that the highly accomplished people they hired never seem to fulfil their potential. Once in place, they seem to hit the buffers.
The same managers then spend even more time, and money, trying to motivate the team to work together to achieve its goals.
Eventually they settle for a mediocre performance and make up for any performance gap by trying to recruit more people.
Meanwhile the organization tells them they have to do more with the same: achieve greater output next year with the same headcount. The result is a lifetime load of stress.
There’s a better way.
It starts by understanding that everyone’s head contains a power station full of talents. A team is made up of many such human power stations. But these power stations are all different and they won’t work as a team unless they are put in the right places and connected in the right way. Just as there are gas power stations, solar power stations, battery complexes for power storage, wind turbines, pylon networks and other infrastructure that carry the power for a whole country, so in a team there are networkers, deep thinkers and doers, improvers and sellers. But if the networker is given the job of a deep thinker, the whole team falls apart. Productivity plummets. And this problem is very common because our teams are organized by skills, not by talent. The two don’t overlap. When we are forced into a role that runs contrary to the way we were made – our natural talent – we don’t do it very well.
Teams don’t suffer from a poverty of talent. But they suffer from having talents in the wrong roles, just like a wind turbine that is required to produce energy when there is no wind.
When teams are built according to talent (firstly) and skills (secondly) they become teams that work. When that happens, efficiency and productivity shoot up and the team becomes happier and more engaged. No more worries about doing more with the same. It’s already being done.
Say goodbye to poverty. Build teams that work.
