DDI’s Talent Management Intelligence

And the most undervalued leadership skill is…

By Mike Hoban

Delegation. Granted, it’s not as sexy or as au courant or as seemingly transformational as other leadership competencies such as vision creation or organizational talent building. In fact, the name itself sounds a bit stodgy and shop-worn, compared to its cousin “empowerment.” When’s the last time you saw a CEO’s picture on the cover of Fortune magazine proclaiming him or her to be best-of-breed delegator? Me neither.

But it’s a foundational skill for leaders and I find in my executive coaching work that it’s a competency many leaders struggle with. That leadership philosopher, Tommy Lasorda, who just happened to make a living coaching in major league baseball, said it so very well: “I believe managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, you kill it; but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it.”  Drucker or Deming never said it so compellingly or so succinctly.

Not delegating well can be a barrier to a leader’s – and the organization’s - success. Decisions get bogged down; staff doesn’t get developed; managers put too much focus on what Juran called the “trivial many” instead of the “vital few;” managers get burned out working too many hours trying to handle everything themselves. Being a poor delegator can also overshadow and contaminate even a good leader’s reputation (“Micromanager!”).

Let’s get specific about what this thing called delegation is. Effective delegation is about defining the “what” but allowing others to have a substantial hand in defining the “how” within established constraints. That is, the manager needs to define what the outcome is, what the “specs” are (cost, timing, quality, satisfaction, etc.) and where the chalk lines are drawn on the field for discretionary and independent action on the part of the delagatee. Technically, that’s called “defining latitude.” When a manager defines both the whats and the hows it’s not delegation – it’s simply a task assignment.

At the same time, Lasorda also said holding the dove too loosely is also a bad thing.  Just providing the “whats” to someone and giving him/her absolute freedom for getting it done without any guidance is not delegation. That’s called abdication and is akin to throwing the non-swimmer into the deep end of the pool.

Seems simple enough, so what’s the deal with not being able to do it effectively? Well, let me count the ways…

Some managers:

• Are unwilling to let go of tasks or activities they like to do and which got them promoted over the years;
• Have a perfectionist type of personality and find it difficult to not do things themselves because ONLY THEY can accomplish it with the excellence that they think is needed;
• Need to always be in control and find relinquishing even the “hows” to be an unnatural act;
• Take on too may things because they believe their own staff is already overworked and they don’t want to further overwhelm them.

In most cases, the above tendencies are “fixable,” assuming the individual has self-awareness and has made the decision that the cost of the fix is less than the cost of continuing down the delegation-free zone. The perfectionist personality is probably the most challenging because those people’s “wiring” contributes to and often drives the behavior.

One final point. Delegation is not about letting go of the appropriate attention to detail. It’s about finding the right balance. Steve Jobs is considered by many to be a spectacular CEO and he has steered Apple to great success in the last 10 years. Yet, Jobs is notoriously hands-on when it comes to product and functional design and he gets very personally involved in many of the decisions about product style, look-and-feel, color, etc.—things you’d expect a CEO to delegate to others. But he also focuses on the big picture – the strategy, cultural caretaking, talent management, alliances, board relationships, etc., and in fact considers his obsession with the product details to be part of his strategic focus.

Come to think of it, this delegation stuff is pretty sexy and transformational after all…

Mike Hoban is a senior consultant for Development Dimensions International (DDI).   

Executive Derailment – It Doesn’t Have to Happen…

By Mike Hoban

Maybe you’ve noticed too - it seems that not a week goes by without a story on the front page or in the business section about a prominent and respected leader who has flamed out, derailed, driven his own bus off the cliff. That is, a smart, capable and seasoned executive in the private or public sector does or says something which puts an end to his/her career and embarrasses the organization. Their choice “derails” what had been theretofore a successful and high profile career.

These situations are not usually about competence. Sure, executives get shown the door all of the time for failure to perform, whether that is rooted in a lack of the right skill sets or a job/role mismatch or just plain bad timing. This is something different. This is more about who they are rather than about what they know or what they can do.

The same personality characteristics and talents which work together to make us effective can also, under certain circumstances (like intense pressure) or when used in excess, lead to our downfall. For example, candor or plain talk can be a personal strength in our business organizations or in government, which seem to thrive on buzzspeak and purposeful ambiguity. But when dialed up too high, extreme candor can become unfiltered disrespect (sometimes public). I think we’ve seen those headlines recently.  Similarly, self-confidence, unquestionably a good thing, when taken to an extreme can become arrogance, which is also a vessel for that extreme candor and a condition that can color judgment.

We humans are complicated creatures and we are more like marble cakes than layer cakes and our motivations, talents, traits and behaviors swirl within us, creating the potential of misusing our strengths in ways that work against us. A healthy attention to detail (a strength) when dialed up too much can hijack a leader’s focus and lead to micromanagement and an emphasis on the tactical instead of the strategic.

Other examples of the overuse of strengths? Decisiveness (a good thing) can become impulsiveness (not such a good thing). Passion can become volatility. Caution and prudence can become risk aversion. Being a team player can morph into approval dependence.

The best leaders are those who know themselves very well and understand their internal “wiring,” both their strengths and their vulnerabilities. Self-knowledge is aided by widely available personality inventories and 360°s and an openness to feedback.  And if a situation arises in which one’s personality defaults might lead to an undesirable outcome, the self-aware will recognize that and employ a behavioral workaround to try to achieve the desirable outcome.

It’s not about trying to change who you are, it’s about choosing wisely what to do about who you are. And making those good choices can help leaders be successful. It’s not as easy as developing a readily learnable skill, such as a problem solving methodology or public speaking, but through self-monitoring and being intentional about our actions, self-aware leaders can mitigate or avoid altogether their potential derailers. That’s good for them and obviously good for their organizations. Hence, the best practice is for organizations to ensure they have an insightful read on their leaders and up-and-coming leaders, so coaching, development, assignments and roles are planned to at least take into account their personal “wiring.”    

Today - yes, this very day - as you read this blog there will be leaders in organizations who are taking actions that will derail their efforts and their careers, perhaps because of the unintended misuse of the very things that got them where they are. Make sure you know thyself and use that insight to choose wisely.

Mike Hoban is a senior consultant for Development Dimensions International (DDI).    

Do Some Leaders “Look” More Competent Than Others? (A study says yes…)

By Mike Hoban

Do some leaders have faces which make them seem more competent? Apparently the answer is yes, at least according to the results of a recent study sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. But don’t recalibrate your senior leader recruitment processes quite yet.

The study, called “A Corporate Beauty Contest” (seriously) looked at several aspects of how a leader’s looks can influence others’ perceptions of their competence or likeability. The researchers found that the faces of CEOs were judged to appear more competent but less likeable then those of non-CEOs (subjects did not know who was who in the faces they observed). And CEOs with “baby faced” features (the researchers’ phrase) were seen as less competent but were seen as being more likeable than their colleagues who had more “mature” facial traits.

Interesting, but “So what?” you might ask. As it turns out, those CEOs judged to be more competent because of their facial features in fact had an average total compensation 7.5% higher than those who looked less competent. Yet, the study found no correlation between the looks-driven perceived competence of the CEOs and the performance of the firms they headed. They just looked more competent. A rather fascinating distribution of the mien…

So it appears there might be such a thing as having facial gravitas. And there is some historical evidence that one’s looks can indeed influence how leader-like they are regarded by others. In the first televised presidential debate for the 1960 election, John Kennedy, with his striking and tanned visage conveyed an energetic world leader look, while opponent Richard Nixon, with his heavy evening shadow and sometimes brooding appearance exuded an image that many viewers found to be far less presidential. Perhaps less “competent?”

The study of physical characteristics to explain or even to predict human behavior goes way back. Phrenology, which posited that personality can be understood as a result of the shape of the skull, was embraced by many in the scientific and medical communities in the 19th century and was used by some advocates for personnel selection decisions. So back then, getting a good job was apparently just a matter of using your head. (Pause here for effect)

And while phrenology was ultimately relegated to the pseudo-science dust bin, last year University of Cambridge researchers suggested a correlation between the success of financial traders and the proportion of length between their ring and index fingers. It looks like the exploration of physical characteristics to explain human behavior will continue to be of interest to researchers and to the general public alike.

What’s the HR lesson here? Perhaps that we need to be careful in making decisions about people based on some unspoken, amorphous and perhaps biased image of what success looks like. But, c’mon, everyone learned that in Personnel 101. Yet, the study found that a certain set of facial traits apparently have helped CEOs cultivate fatter wallets, so there is some sort of halo effect occurring even in high-level personnel decisions. Other research results in the 1990s also found a correlation between employees’ attractiveness and their pay.

And of course, Kennedy went on to win the presidency, aided in part no doubt by his countenance. But was he really more “competent” than Nixon even though he might have looked that way to voters? I’ll let the historians debate that, but the answer is probably no.

But there’s also some caution that needs to be exercised in reading too much into this limited study which used college students (of course) as subjects and which had all male pictures in the CEO/non-CEO image gallery. And with this next new generation of employees in the workforce, it is likely that a more important factor in career success will be Facebook rather than face look.

Mike Hoban is a senior consultant for Development Dimensions International (DDI).    

Is Your Organization Better Than The NFL at Assessing Potential? (You might be surprised…)

By Mike Hoban

What if your company’s rigorous, high profile and well funded talent management system had only a 50% success rate in predicting whether your top five managers—the VERY best in the company—would perform well at the next level up? Well, whoever was in charge of such a system, where predictability is no better than the flip of a coin, would probably be looking for another line of work. Yet, that’s the success rate for one of the most followed and most vaunted talent management systems in the public eye: the NFL draft.

Last June, in this very blogspace, I wrote a piece about the high failure rate of highly drafted college basketball players and the difficulty the professional scouts have in accurately assessing potential for success at the next level up (the pros). Because of some new academic research, we now know that the performance vs. potential conundrum in athletics is not limited to the world of basketball.

Last week, the National Football League held its annual draft drama, where college football players are selected by teams according to their talents. It would seem to be the pinnacle of meritocracy and like in basketball, literally millions of dollars are spent by the professional teams in analyzing and scrutinizing the talent at the collegiate level. Some of the top players have been under the talent scouts’ microscopes since they were in high school.

Yet, all of that due diligence apparently doesn’t pay off for teams. An article in the Wall Street Journal last week described a study conducted by a Yale University School of Management professor which concluded that in the period 1991 – 2004, fully half of the top five drafts (70 players) were either disappointments or actual flops in the professional league. And we’re talking about big money and big stakes here - last year’s top five players in the draft got $168 million in guaranteed money. The shape of the balls might be different in the NBA and the NFL, but the success patterns for star players are nearly the same.

Interesting statistics, but what’s the learning point for those of us not in the world of professional athletics? That replacement planning or succession management doesn’t work and is therefore not worth doing, since the professional talent scouts with their data bases, game films and personal observations don’t get it right any more than random chance?

No, good readers, that is definitely not the leaning point about this news story. While there are several reasons why the “can’t miss” college players often do “miss” at the next level up, I think there are some important differences in the organizational world which explain why corporate efforts at succession management have a higher success rate.

Let’s say “Mary” is a senior executive who is considered a potential successor to the CEO position. Mary’s development plan to make her more “ready” likely includes activities and assignments which give her exposure and experience in CEO-like situations. An important board presentation. A key role in leading the strategic planning session for all of the senior leaders. Leading a high profile turnaround situation. An interview with a national business magazine, perhaps.

Experiences and exposure like that provide the current CEO and the board with information and insights about whether Mary does indeed have the right stuff to become CEO at some point. But there is no equivalent of those “CEO work samples” which can be applied to professional athletics. A hotshot college quarterback can’t play a few sets of downs in the NFL to prove he’s got the goods. And there’s no flight simulator equivalent to indicate how he would perform at the professional level.

All the collegiate all-stars can do for the scouts and the owners is to demonstrate their skills at the same (collegiate) level, again and again. That provides information but it’s not the same as playing in professional game conditions against professional competition, something that aspiring CEO Mary can better approximate in her performance trials. And that means athletes will continue to be judged more on performance (same level) rather than on potential (next level up), because that’s all the data that can be obtained. That makes it more difficult to gauge talent trajectory.

So that’s why the NFL and NBA will continue to rely as much on serendipity as on data-driven judgment: They make draft decisions based more on performance than on potential. And as a result they’ll continue to drop the ball often with regards to talent.

Make sure your organization works the performance/potential issue effectively in order to minimize your talent fumbles.

Mike Hoban is a senior consultant for Development Dimensions International (DDI).

Thomas Keller - Talent Champion

By Mike Hoban

Shout-out worthy talent management is found in many places as we’ve highlighted in this blog over the last few months. Business situations; athletic teams; the military – those are the usual suspects. I recently read an engaging article about talent management in a different and perhaps unexpected milieu, a story that provided much, um, food for thought: the kitchen in a world class restaurant. This is the story of Thomas Keller, entrepreneur, culinary wizard and Talent Manager extraordinaire. 

The article, in the current issue of Wine Spectator (Quick - What’s the difference between a wino and a connoisseur? About 8 bucks a bottle…) highlighted Keller’s success in creating the world renowned French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley and then launching several other eateries across the country that generate rhapsody in foodies and critics alike. 

World class chefs are high achieving performers, and Julia Child notwithstanding, are sometimes thought of as being temperamental artistes, oozing with ego, exactitude and intolerance. That doesn’t seem to be part of Keller’s recipe for success according to the Wine Spectator piece. “Keller has achieved what he has in part because he is a brilliant cook but even more importantly because he realized he had to sublimate his ego to succeed.”  He’s quoted in the article as saying, “I am not the star, the team is the star.”   

“The team.” Might that just be cliché de jour for the master chef?  The story suggests otherwise, that there is steak as well as sizzle in Mr. Keller’s ruminations. Says a colleague and admirer: “He has created a culture in his restaurants that that not only values teamwork but finds and nurtures talent.  That, as much as anything, has made it possible for Keller to step aside from his various kitchens and pass the torch to others.”  A notable quotable about finding and nurturing talent is commonplace in a biz magazine.  But it’s hardly commonplace to read those words in a magazine for food buffs and cork dorks (Full disclosure – I subscribe…).   

So just how does he create this so-called talent management culture?  For one, by treating his underlings as culinary collaborators. When he ran the French Laundry, he involved members of his staff in creating new dishes and new menus. One chef who left to become a star in his own right calls him “inspirational,” someone who led by example and who was never abusive even when the kitchen was in a “crisis situation.”  And he demonstrated an interest in people personally. “People loved him. He has a lot of loyal followers” is how one ex-French Laundry chef describes him.   

Of course, there’s a price to pay for finding and nurturing talent and many of his cooks,  chefs and sommeliers have gone on to great food careers and ownership opportunities elsewhere.  A side article in the magazine lists 48 “protégés” (their word) who have become stars elsewhere. This was not a point being made about his seemingly high turnover, it was a point that one of his signature dishes seems to be talent management - finding and developing people. 

Keller made it a point to promote from within, to provide wing-stretching opportunities for young up-and-comers. And his philosophy about succession management? “Part of every chef and department head’s job is to identify a replacement and train him or her.”  And that POV has allowed him to expand his gastronomic empire to 9 restaurants across the U.S., all of which have enviable reputations.

He doesn’t run the eateries on a day-to-day basis anymore. As a good talent manager, he looks at his job as one of “giving people opportunities.”  He says that “If my presence is needed in the kitchen, I haven’t done my job.”

So good talent management can allow you to have your cake and eat it too. Especially in a restaurant.

Mike Hoban is a senior consultant for Development Dimensions International (DDI).

The Path to Carnegie Hall

By Mike Hoban

“How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” the old joke asks. “Practice, practice, practice” was the rimshot response.  And with the 2010 winter Olympics now over, it’s likely there are many medalists who appreciate the investment of the grueling hours, the physical pain and the sleep deprivation of practice, practice, practice. Talent and determination are necessary bases upon which to build, but it’s practice that creates competency, more practice that creates mastery and even more practice that creates performance that’s not just world class, but the world standard.

Several recent best selling biz books have also echoed the theme about the importance of practice, practice, practice. The Outliers - The Story of Success, by Malcom Gladwell, Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, the popular and ubiquitous Fortune magazine writer, and The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle have all proffered the theme of practice as a key to success. EQ evangelist Daniel Goleman also has written about the topic and a new term “deliberate practice” has become the popularized version of the old “perfect practice makes perfect” aphorism.   

What is “deliberate practice?” Colvin, in one of his Fortune articles, describes it this way:  "It's activity that's explicitly intended improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition." In other words, it’s not just practicing what you are already doing well, it’s practicing those things you don’t do well. One article compiles many of the insightful pieces on this topic from the last several years.

The outcomes of practice permeate our daily lives. Most of us fly commercial airplanes regularly. Can you imagine getting on a flight and finding out the pilots have not been required to have practiced many takeoffs and landings and have never stepped foot into a flight simulator? And would you be able to sleep well at night if you knew our armed forces had never drilled or practiced mock attacks? Practice is a no-brainer for demonstrated and sustainable performance in those and most other arenas. How about in the arena of leadership skills?

Management and leadership training courses are often skill-based, meaning participants need to have more than a cognitive understanding of a skill—they need to demonstrate it. And most managers and leaders in the business world would violently agree that it’s not enough for a pilot to simply understand the principles of executing a safe and smooth takeoff, s/he needs to have the opportunity to practice the procedure prior to trying it with people on board.

Yet, some of those same managers in leadership training sessions display an offputting reaction to finding out there will be a skill practice involved in learning about delegation or coaching or whatever the topic is. “That’s role playing – I can’t role play!” is what we often hear. But if the skill practice has a well crafted and pragmatic design, we find that once they begin, most leadership course participants find the experience useful and almost – cringe – enjoyable. But they have to first get over their often preconceived view that practicing a leadership skill is somehow different and less useful than practicing some other type of skill, be it an athletic skill or learning a language. And they usually do get over it when they get into it.   

So the good news is that there is less resistance to classroom leadership skill practices in the last few years, especially when that practice is positioned as analogous to other types of “real” skills that require practice. Practice, practice, practice in leadership classes won’t get someone on the stage at Carnegie Hall but it would certainly help someone manage the business at Carnegie Hall.

Mike Hoban is a senior consultant for Development Dimensions International (DDI).

A Skill in Short Supply

By Mike Hoban

What do you consider to be the most important leadership trait for a CEO to have? Is it “Influencing Skills” or “strategic decision making?” Or perhaps “business acumen” or “talent management” is at the top of your list of CEO right stuff.   All are likely found on the success profiles or job specs of many Chief Executive positions. How about the proven ability to run a large operation with P&L responsibilities? I think one could make a case for any of the above and I’m certain that there are many senior leaders out there working in assignments to develop those skills because the senior talent review team in the organization has deemed those skills or experiences as “must haves” for aspiring CEOs.   

Indra Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo and Fortune magazine’s #1 Most Powerful Business Woman, has another view.

In an interview published in Fortune magazine a few months back, Ms. Nooyi stated her point of view. Call it interesting. Call it even a little provocative. She said:

“The most overrated skill is ‘running a business.’ To me the single most important skill needed for a CEO is strategic acuity.” 

She went on to say that former PepsiCo CEO Roger Enrico had once said “I can get operating executives to run a business. But I cannot find people to help me reconceptualize PepsiCo.” Agreeing with her one-time mentor, she said. “That skill is in shortest supply.”

“Strategic Acuity” is an interesting coupling of words and it’s the first time I’ve seen it articulated as an executive competency. In the physical world, acuity is about sharpness and clarity of perception or vision.  One definition refers to a capacity to “discriminate fine details of objects.” We can speculate – as Bloggers do - about what it means in relation to a business.

With all of the possibilities and choices available to an organization, Strategic Acuity can mean the ability to clearly see a pathway to success, a pathway that is likely to be not apparent to most others. It’s an intellectual quality (“reconceptualizing”) but it’s more than that. I think there is also an EQ (Emotional Quotient) component that compliments the IQ component in Strategic Acuity. EQ capabilities such as Empathy and Social Skills (Goleman) help focus that clarity of vision to provide meaning and context to the myriad nuances of human interaction involving customers, markets, employees, etc. In the business world, there is no Snellen Chart of different sized letters which help us to gauge visual acuity, so context, insight and measurement become all the more important for executing Strategic Acuity. No wonder Nooyi says it is a skill in short supply.

Of course, that’s not to say that experience running a business is not important…

Mike Hoban is a senior consultant for Development Dimensions International (DDI).

Talent Resolution #2: Quit sacrificing talent

By Mike Hoban

In the world of athletics, only the naive or the uninformed would suggest that the best athletes make the best coaches.  There are different skill sets and motivations involved. Why then, do we in business, on an all too regular basis, make the error of thinking that the best individual contributors - the best accountants, engineers or nurses - will make good managers? Some do, of course, but many don’t, and in fact some make incompetent and unhappy managers, meaning we not only “lose” our best individual contributor (IC), we compound the problem by jeopardizing the performance and the morale of the work group he/she now leads. It’s shooting ourselves in both feet. 

We’ve known for decades about that fallacy, yet like a bad habit we can’t seem to overcome, or that we choose to ignore, the practice remains. And because of limited and plateaued career paths for ICs, many of the promising ones enter the management track because it’s the only game in town. Or they go somewhere else where they feel more appreciated as a highly respected contributor. 

Organizations need to stop assuming their best performers will be their next generation of leaders. Here are some steps they can take instead:

• Expand the IC “Track” - Create extended technical ladders/professional sequences to provide pay and recognition for “mastery level” ICs that are more in parity to those of the managerial track.  In investment firms, the star traders almost always earn more – sometimes far more - than do their managers;
• Don’t Assume…- Before putting a well regarded IC’s name onto the high potential list in a talent review, ensure that someone has had a conversation with him/her to see whether he/she is even interested in a management track.  A recent DDI study found a whopping 61% of ICs surveyed indicated they had no aspirations to become supervisors or managers.  Too often it’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell;  
• Provide trial assignments - Provide temporary management-lite assignments (like handling some quasi-management duties while the supervisor is on vacation) for ICs to give them a taste of what management work feels like; 
• Assess and Test - Provide assessments or simulations to ICs so they can experience management work and so the organization can also identify individuals who score well and have the motivation to explore the management track.

Mike Hoban is a senior consultant for Development Dimensions International (DDI).

Follow the series 10 Talent Resolutions for 2010.

Windows 7 - A Tale of Collaboration

By Mike Hoban

The recent launch of Windows 7 by Microsoft has generated a lot of buzz about its functionality, its acceptance in the marketplace, its impact on the fortunes of Microsoft, etc. There seems to be a story that sparks interest for just about everyone, techie or not.  The story that caught the eye of this Talent Management Blogger was in The Wall Street Journal on October 20 which describes not so much the product but what went on at the company to develop the product. 

Call it the story behind the story about how Microsoft took a different approach to harnessing its considerable talent to create a high stakes product aimed at resuscitating a reputation sullied by its last Operating System effort, the much maligned “Vista.” 

It’s a story that seems to be as much about common sense as it is about bits and bytes. The bold new development approach, according to the Microsoft project leaders quoted in the article?  Collaboration and communication.  Eliminating “silos.”  Talking to customers and hardware partners. Things they apparently did not do enough of when developing Vista, which resulted in many delays and initial defects.   

With the Windows 7 development effort, the company was very intentional about ensuring that different development teams shared their plans with each other.  Maybe common sense, but apparently not common practice. CEO Steve Ballmer also directed that they collaborate more closely with their technology partners, which led to some “brutally honest” conversations about Vista with engineers at H-P and their customers. An H-P executive said Microsoft developers listened and were “much more humble.”    

Communication. Collaboration. Customer focus. Many companies beside Microsoft have sub-optimized the efforts of very bright and talented people by putting insufficient focus on those fundamentals. Some would even suggest that project silos in software development is more the rule than the exception.  Talent in every organization needs to be set up for success with the right systems, processes and strategies.  That’s why sometimes an athletic team with the most raw talent is not the team that prevails in victory. 

So it’s not even enough to attract, develop and retain the best talent. It’s also about getting the “organizational arrangements” right so that those talents can be realized. 

Mike Hoban is a senior consultant for Development Dimensions International (DDI).

Achievement - What’s Luck Got To Do With It? (Apologies to Tina Turner…)

By Mike Hoban

Almost everyone would agree that talent is important for individual and organizational achievement. I say “almost” because a few members of the Flat Earth Society might argue the point. And there are other factors besides talent that contribute to human achievement such as drive or determination, which has recently been popularized as “grit.” 

There’s another factor that most reasonable people regularly identify as an enabler to talent but which receives scant attention in the academic literature: Luck. Right place-right time. You know, like the Beatles (audible gasp).

Granted, implying the Beatles were “lucky” makes for fighting words for many Fab Four fans, especially among Boomers, of which I am one, as well as a Beatles fan. So with credentials presented, let me explain about the Beatles and “luck” and the connection to talent, because there are parallels in the business world.

The Beatles had a great deal of talent, both individually and as a group. But were they the MOST talented individual musicians in England at the time? No. But in the perfect storm of a changing musical genre and the 60s cultural zeitgeist, they were able to leverage their considerable talents to bring the British sound to the world. Meanwhile, it’s almost certain that there were other bands in England composed of more talented musicians who continued to toil in obscurity.

So, something else besides talent helped propel the Beatles to the top of the music world. Most successful people would admit they caught some breaks and the Beatles were no exception - serendipity played a part. And they were definitely in the right place at the right time and also had the aforementioned “grit.” But talent was still the foundation.

So what’s the lesson in this for individuals and organizations? For individuals, other factors besides talent can be important for achievement. The “luck” of being placed on a visible, high-impact project team or turnaround situation, for instance, can boost a career, but like the Beatles example, one doesn’t usually get placed into that type of situation simply because of random chance. It’s more likely that talent was the ticket into that assignment. It’s what gets you invited to the table in the first place.

For organizations, it’s not just identifying potential talent, but to put them into situations where, like the Beatles’ early club performances in Liverpool and Hamburg, they can demonstrate “grit;” they can hone and apply that talent and create for themselves the opportunities for “luck” to occur. As a result, being in the “right place at the right time” becomes more of a logical consequence than an incidental occurrence. 

What role do you think “luck” plays in success and achievement?

Mike Hoban is a senior consultant for Development Dimensions International (DDI).