Creating Leadership Opportunity

"Developing other people's talent is the whole company at the end of the day."

These are the words of Aglient's Electronic Measurement Group President Ron Nersesian, one of the talent leaders featured in Bill Conaty and Ram Charan's book, The Talent Masters: Why smart leaders put people before numbers. His experience - and commitment to developing people - is one of a number of individual and organisational stories described by the authors as they make their case for focusing on talent. 

Their provocative opening to the book - "if business managed their money as carelessly as they manage their people, most would be bankrupt" - is a deliberate attempt to compare talent management with financial management.

As they observe: "The great majority of companies that control their finances masterfully don't have any comparable processes for developing their leaders or even pinpointing which ones to develop. How did this come to be? After all, it's clear enough that people make the decisions and take the actions that produce the numbers. Talent is the leading indicator of whether a business is headed up or down. Everyone agrees it's the company's most important resource. But a spreadsheet full of numbers is a lot easier to parse than the characteristics unique to a human being."

The authors argue that talent is the one competitive advantage that can be relied upon to differentiate companies.

"Our products are all time-perishable", says Nersesian. "The only thing that stays is the institutional learning and the development of the skills and the capabilities we have of our people." 

And that commitment to ongoing learning and development, he says, relies upon a commitment to providing and creating opportunities that allow and enable people to develop. 

Talent is attracted to opportunity. And that's the leadership opportunity - the opportunity that we as leaders can offer to create growth and development opportunities for others. And when those opportunities create learning and unlock capability it's the opportunity-creating leader, the team and the organisation who all benefit.

Consider these three principles for creating opportunities to allow others to develop: 

1. Identify high-value development needs
   
   Everyone has development potential. Whether it's technical, interpersonal or procedural, the important thing is that we get the intervention, direction and support required for our development.
   
   For example, I was recently told about some young, talented specialists who don't like - and aren't very good at - writing up reports or proposals for clients. As a result, that work is too often poorly done, must be re-done or is "delegated up" to more senior people. This is a clear development need that is in the interest of both the specialists and the organisation. It's a development need that is aligned directly to business performance as well as individual effectiveness. (It's interesting to note how often someone's discomfort or lack of confidence with a task is related to a lack of training - and therefore competence - with the task.)
   
   Development needs - whether technical, interpersonal or procedural - can and should be identified through ongoing conversation, listening and observation. And it's particularly important to evaluate the impact of behaviours on business - whether that business is external or internal. 
   
   Once the high-value development need is identified, the leader's role is to discuss the commitment to ongoing development, describe the development need (aka "constructive feedback"), determine how the development can be facilitated (eg, training, coaching, mentoring), and then deliver the opportunity. 
   
2. Identify strengths
   
   Working in our areas of strength, and being given opportunities to develop them, energises, satisfies and rewards us. Growing into our strengths sustains a sense of personal mission and authenticity. Former Gallup researcher Marcus Buckingham says that a manager's responsibility is to "Discover what is unique about each person and capitalise on it".
   
   The reason, he says, is because when you capitalise on what is unique about each person you stimulate individual excellence. In the same way as development needs can be observed, so too can strengths. In fact, observing, acknowledging and developing someone's strengths is a practical and productive way of leveraging resources and tapping into discretionary effort - all the while providing positive reinforcement.
   
   It seems kind of obvious to tap people's strengths, and yet Buckingham's research (analysing the results of interviews conducted by Gallup with over 1.7 million employees from 101 companies across 63 countries) indicates that only 20 percent of employees have the opportunity to use their strengths everyday. That's a development opportunity!
   
3. Identify stretch opportunities
   
   Recently I was discussing the strengths based approach, and it was observed that focusing on strengths can sound like complaceny - just settling into a comfort zone of operation. It's a fair concern. But it's not what working in our areas of strength is about.
   
   Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the psychology and sociology professor whose work on happiness and creativity led to the concept of "flow" - that optimal state of productivity through immersion and engagement in an activity. To achieve a flow state, Csikszentmihalyi said a balance must be struck between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur.
   
   Both skill level and challenge level must be matched - and high. In other words, we need to be given the opportunity to work in our areas of strength and we need the opportunity to have those skills stretched and challenged so we increase our skill. Growth occurs at the edges. No one wants to be left "spinning their wheels" in unchallenging work.
   
   "Stretch opportunities" generally create a desire to learn, as well as communicating a practical sense of reward and recognition. The challenges of stretch situations tend to stimulate rather than stress us. And again, when stretch opportunities align individual strengths and organisational needs, the benefits can be compounded.  

What opportunities can you create this week? 

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