Working with your Natural Talents

December 06, 2011 at 2:28 PM

Working with your Natural Talents

When writing this blog I was inspired to go back to my initial impetus for starting the company and naming it Natural Talents.

It was a book by Marcus Buckingham called ‘First Break all the Rules’ and if you haven’t read it, I warmly recommend it.

First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham

Permalink: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1416502661

What I believe this book says in a nutshell is that we should concentrate less on overcoming our shortcomings and concentrate more on the unique abilities we each have. The greatest managers know how to do this and to’ Recruit for Talent and focus on Strengths’ two underpinning philosophies which I strongly believe in.

What is a Natural Talent? As defined by Buckingham it is ‘a recurring pattern of thought feeling or behaviour that can be productively applied.’

This gives great clue to what to look for in ourselves and others when selecting for and working with talent. Many of the things we are naturally drawn to and feel at ease doing are indicators of where a talent lies. At school we all have favorite subjects which seem to be easy to engage with. We may be inclined to create lists and be highly organised or we may be naturally artistic and create vibrant and interesting living spaces around ourselves.

Every role performed at a level of excellence will involve natural and repeated patterns of behaviours. Compare a data entry clerk with a high performing sales person.

An excellent data entry inputter will be happy to sit in the same office in the same place on a daily basis and systematically enter data accurately and steadily. They will become unsettled by rapid changes to their routine and unclear and changing goals.

A top sales person will naturally enjoy travelling to a variety of venues and meeting different people They will enjoy a role where no day is potentially the same as the next, and it is quite likely they will resist having to fill in the feedback forms and other methods of measurement imposed upon them. They will become demotivated if stuck in an office with little people contact and a routine to perform on a daily basis. The excellent thing is that there are people naturally suited to each of these jobs and if selected well they have the potentially to be outstandingly good at them. I will tackle how to recruit for talent in my next blog.

When I first read this book some years ago it resonated strongly because it referred to a lot of the things I was seeing in the recruitment market and reflected many of the reasons I had trained to be a career coach.

Firstly I had begun to see a pattern with many of the people we were recruiting into senior management positions. As part of our recruitment process we use DISC profiling and began to notice that, even though coming from different companies and backgrounds, the candidates shortlisted for key roles often shared the same personality profiles and key strengths. We began to try to predict what someone’s DISC profile might look like and what DISC profile would suit a role well, with increasing levels of accuracy.

The other indicator of interest was that excellent performance in one environment was not necessarily replicated when people moved- which promoted the career coaching and on-boarding work that we do.