Talent, Title & Nurturing Leadership

In the early 90s, there was a Randall’s grocery store on the Northgate of Texas A&M. During the day it was buzzing with activity, but at night? It was a ghost town populated by a few tired grad students and a single checker. The checker though was unique, exuding an aura of calm authority that belied his title.

Years later I would learn the checker had been a SVP at a big financial services firm. He’d hit a wall and left the corporate world behind. Rather than retire, he took a job that kept him active, and every day people passed through his line never considering the wisdom and experience across from them.

That’s stuck with me and serves as a constant reminder of why we should always look beyond title to recognize talent and consider our role in others' career progression.

What do I mean by that, and how can it help you? Let’s look at 3 key things.

Point 1: Remember Title Doesn’t Always Dictate Talent

One thing we should all know is that the type of talent you need changes as you advance in leadership titles. At a high level, the progression looks a little like this:

• Domain Talent: The first rungs of leadership typically require you to understand a topic & function so you can help staff improve their acumen / show your impact to executives.
• Operational / Strategic Talent: Advancing further requires talent in transforming domain expertise into the design of strategies and operational structures that support success.
• Negotiation & Inspirational Talent: At higher levels, domain knowledge is still important, but the focus shifts to building relationships, inspiring teams and recruiting others to a vision.
• People Management Talent: Every leader should be able to recruit and grow people, but some leaders aren’t asked to demonstrate this skill until higher titles, if ever. Think IQ vs. EQ hiring.

If you can navigate that evolution of talent / skill, you’ll continue to rise up. But there is an x-factor to consider (beyond opportunity of course):

• Desire: If your desire isn’t to lead, or you haven’t been inspired to lead, then you won’t. And if a company treats you poorly? Desire may fade like a cool breeze in a Texas summer. ?

Our friend the night checker is a perfect example of how desire affects title. And it raises 2 areas where we can all help ensure we build up future leaders / keep exising leaders growing in their career path:

1. Nurture desire: Take the time to do career planning with your staff. Nurture talented individuals that could be leaders (when they have the desire) and shepherd those with desire today so they grow vs being shut down. Don’t buy into the narrative that it’s the individual’s responsibility to pursue their own leadership advancement. You’re the expert. Help them.
2. Watch For Warnings That Desire Is Waning: It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind of work or push too hard on people because deadlines / resources are tight. But do that for too long and your best – today and for the future – will walk. Individuals can also raise the warning flag if a manager is over-committed. It may sound odd, but consider: do you want a new boss?

Point 2: Communication is Key to Accelerating Talent

Without getting into examples, I think we can all agree that we’ve seen leaders rush to judgement on the talent / capabilities of individuals. Similarly, we’ve seen individual’s rush to judgement on their leaders.

When that judgement is negative, it’s usually followed by ‘they don’t get it.’ But here’s the problem.

• Did the leader explain the request / what a good output looks like?
• Did the individual – diplomatically – ask why a request was given?
• Did the leader or individual discuss how to prioritize efforts?

In my experience the answer to these questions is almost always ‘no.’ Right or wrong, individuals and leaders often assume there is no room for discussion, and we lose the opportunity explain things in a way that grooms the next generation of leaders / help existing managers be better leaders. So:

1. Communicate the Why. The bulk of responsibility here lies with leadership, but so does the reward. If a leader can explain why they are asking for something, staff will perform better and faster while learning to act like leaders. This makes them more self-sufficient and frees up the leader’s time. Of course, staff do have a responsibility to ASK, otherwise the leader won’t know that there is a desire to learn / if they – the leader – can improve.

I can’t tie this directly to our night checker, but I will tell you that whenever I think about desire, I immediately think about what caused that desire to falter. Sometimes it’s a change in life priorities, but more often it’s because a breakdown in communications drove someone to look for a new opportunity.

Point 3: Validate Before You Alienate

One more point to close this out. It’s probably obvious but, it’s important to not jump to conclusions. Make an initial observation / assumption based on direct observations or input from a trusted 3rd party, but do a little digging before you:

• Reassign projects from an individual or call them out
• Disparage a leader and ‘poison the well’ about their capabilities
• Bring in a 3rd party / create the need for a 3rd party to evaluate performance

All of these are akin to throwing a live grenade into a room. The damage may not be irrecoverable, but it will leave a lasting mark. One likely to have consequences for both the judged and the one passing judgement.

1. So validate before taking action. Because if you wrongly judge the talent of a good individual or a good leader, others are likely to think less of you if there is a ‘boomerang affect.’

I know this was a little longer than my usual posts, but I think it’s an important topic. I hope it inspires you, the leader, to take the time to nurture those with talent; explain things so staff can grow; pause before taking actions that could cause you to lose a valued asset / future leader. And for you, the employee, I hope this encourages you to take a moment to consider what ‘good’ looks like in a leader, learn from them and maybe – just maybe – help them grow too.

We all have something we can learn from one another.