PREFACE:
I spent 34 years in public education. During those 34 years I taught 7th grade science, High School Biology, High School Chemistry, and Advanced Placement Biology. I also served as a Science Department Chair, and Assistant Principal, a Principal, an Assistant Superintendent, and a Superintendent. Plus, I coached Basketball, Baseball, and Football for several of those years. I had the opportunity to observe 10s of thousands of students over those years and I know how the concept of talent played out both in the classroom and the athletic fields.
We Americans have this notion of talent that drives our thought processes and creates biases towards people. We say that person is really talented and that person lacks talent. We then begin to behave in a way that we deem as appropriate based on those perceived levels of talent. In 1968 Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen conducted an experiment involving teachers and students at an elementary school in California. In this experiment they led teachers to believe that certain students were particularly talented and could be expected to have an intellectual spurt during the school year. In reality these students were no different in their intellectual capacity than were the other groups of students in the school yet at the end of the year these so-called “spurt” students achieved significantly more than did the “non-spurt” students.
This affect has been dubbed the Pygmalion Affect. It is the affect that higher expectations have on the performance of people who have not had this level of expectation placed on them before. The opposite of this is generally known as the Golem Affect, which suggests that when we expect little from an individual, that individual will generally achieve little. When we expect achievement to be more easily attained by those we deem as talented, what we are doing is setting higher standards for such people who the generally rise to our higher expectations. And when those we deem to be less talented do not match up; we tend to say “see what I mean?” But, every once in a while one who is deemed to be talented does not live up to our expectations. In these cases we commonly refer to these people as underachievers and conversely, when people we’ve identified as less talented achieve great things, we call them overachievers.
Over many, many years of research, numerous researchers have had great difficulty nailing down this thing called talent. What continuously surfaces as the most fundamental components of success appear to be experience and effort. The more experiences a person has and the more effort they put into an activity the more success they tend to have. Of course there are physical and mental aspects of every action and thought. It is definitely easier for a 7 foot tall person to become a center in the NBA than it is for a 5’4” in person. And it would be very difficult for a child with Down’s syndrome to earn a doctorate degree in nuclear physics. But being 5’4 does not preclude an individual from achieving great athletic notoriety nor does having Down’s syndrome prevent an individual from achieving academic and creative success.
Mary Lou Retton was only 4’9’’ tall when she won a Gold Medal in the Olympics and Gene Sarazen, the winner of Golf’s Grand Slam, was only 5’4” tall. And now that we’ve begun to stop placing limitations on people with Down’s syndrome we are seeing them achieve as well. Judith Scott was born with Down’s syndrome in 1943. She was treated horribly as were all Down’s kids back then. But her fraternal twin sister got custody of her in 1985 and enrolled her in art classes. Today some of her Fabric Art pieces sell for as much as $15,000. And Karen Gaffney graduated from Portland Community College in 2001 with an Associate’s Degree and a Teacher’s Aid Certificate. This may be just the beginning of what can be accomplished now that we’ve stopped discriminating against Down’s people by having such low expectations for what they can do. I truly believe that Talent is Overrated!
The Role of Talent in Leadership:
In the book, Talent is Overrated, it is noted that… “A number of researchers now argue that giftedness or talent means nothing like what we think it means, if indeed it means anything at all. A few contend that the very existence of talent is not, as they carefully put it, supported by evidence.
“Their argument is stronger than we might at first imagine. Many studies of accomplished individuals have tried to figure out the key elements of their achievements, in part by interviewing the individuals and their parents, as in (an) English music study… In these studies, all the subjects are people of whom we’d say, ‘They’re very talented.’ Yet over and over, the researchers found few signs of precocious achievement before the individuals started intensive training. Such signs did occur occasionally, but in the large majority of cases they didn’t. We can all think of examples of people who seemed to be highly talented, but when researchers have looked at large numbers of high achievers, at least in certain fields, most of the people who became extremely good in their field did not show early evidence of gifts. Similar findings have turned up in studies of musicians, tennis players, artists, swimmers, and mathematicians. Of course such findings do not prove that talent doesn’t exist. But they suggest an intriguing possibility: that if it does, it may be irrelevant.” (Colvin, Geoff (2008-10-04). Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (p. 23). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.)
Whether talent truly exists or not is not the issue. If talent does exist, what is done with the talent with respect to skill development is the crux of the matter. Through years and years of coaching and observation of athletes, both amateur and professional, it is amazing the number of supposedly highly talented athletes that never measure up. They never seem to acquire the skills needed to rise to heights everyone expected them to attain. I won’t name names but most sports enthusiasts are very aware of individuals that were “can’t miss athletes” who did, indeed, miss. I’m sure you can name a few yourself! The same can be said for leaders. There are people that everyone expects to become a great business or community leader but they fall flat on their faces. And whether talent exists or not, there are abilities these people have that they never fully access.
Why don’t we access all of the abilities we have? Here are a few of the reasons I see. We don’t deliberately practice in a way that will fully develop the skills we need and we don’t practice enough. We don’t pay attention to feedback that will help us understand how well we are doing on the development of critical skills. We become biased towards some skills and against others so we tend to use our favorite skills even when the circumstance dictates that we should use another skill. We accept OK when what we really hoped for was excellence. Next week I’ll look a little deeper into these four factors.
SUMMATION:
We have, for many, many years been relegating some very competent people to lives of mediocrity because we have undervalued their capacity to achieve. We have wrongly identified countless people as being short on talent. Similarly, we have looked at the body types of people and deemed them talented in one area or another. This person should be a great basketball player and that one should be a great football player while this other one is a brainiac! Occasionally our predictions are correct and we applaud ourselves for our insight into “talent.” But reality tells us that we are more often wrong than we are right. The movie Moneyball addresses this phenomenon in professional baseball. It correctly identifies the fallacy of traditional scouting practices based on subjective evaluations of ball players rooted in such things as “their look” and even how their girl friend looks rather than objective evaluations of actual performance in key areas like getting on base, scoring runs, and the ability to make others make mistakes.
When we put too much stock in our perceptions of what people ought to be able to accomplish based on our own biases as opposed to collected data and objective observation, we run the risk of wrongly deploying the “skills” of our team. I saw this first hand in a school district I worked with that was working to pass a bond election so they could make much needed renovations to their schools. Based on some very traditional biases, basically that men would be better persuaders than women and that the tallest, best looking man would be better than shorter not so good looking men, the district had floundered for years and had lost many, many bond elections. Once they brought me in to help them figure out what to do, we took a careful look at the unique skills of everyone on the leadership team. We discovered that the taller, good looking man was a very dominating person with little patience for people who did not see things his way. We also found that one of the female administrators was very displayed very good influencing skills, was very patient with others and had a capacity to be able to argue both sides of every issue and do it well. This allowed the team to anticipate almost every objection before it was ever voiced by the opposition. That school district, by redeploying the skill sets available to them, won their election handily. It had been many years in the making but it took a new perspective to make this success possible.
When we get stuck in the talent jungle we sometimes cannot find our way out. When we put too much emphasis on talent and not enough on attitude, skill, and access to whatever talent we do possess, we very often miss the mark. The most highly successful businesses in the world are learning a valuable lesson. That lesson is, don’t rely on your traditional methods of determining who can and cannot do the job. What an Ernst and Young study published in 2012 tells us is that to gain a competitive advantage, you need to assess the talent of people before you hire or promote them. Know the capacity of these people with regards to decision-making, insight into problem situations, people and relationship skills, how they are most likely to behave under various conditions, what motivates them, and who they will best get along with and who will they have the most difficulty with. When these pieces of data are collected leaders can make informed decisions about hiring, training, promoting, and deploying the array of skills available for the team.
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