Trilogy of 3-Min Reads on Talent Part 3: How do you find talent?

Past achievements, accolades, or even qualifications do not necessarily indicate the presence of talent, any more than a good friend’s friend is necessarily going to become your good friend. These things might hint at a likelihood or a potential, but there is nothing that can be put down in black and white that can guarantee the talent will surface where you want it to.

Talent is not a steady-state phenomenon just waiting to be identified. It is entirely contextual. The same talent will come out in certain environments, but not in others. It needs to be unlocked by providing the circumstances that will evoke and sustain it. ?

Talent is not even under the control of the individual who possesses it. At least 95% of our cognitive function takes place unconsciously. The unconscious brain serves up bits of its workings to the conscious mind, which then sends them out into the world without us really realizing where it’s all come from. This perhaps explains why so much language around what our brains do is passive: thoughts come to us, things strike us, it dawns on us, an idea pops into our heads.

Much of what we think doesn’t come from considered analysis. Psychologist and Noble Laureate in Economics, Daniel Kahneman, uses the metaphor of two systems in Thinking Fast and Slow. Most of the time, we are thinking quickly in a way that feels instinctive and automatic, but we have the ability to switch gears and think more deliberatively when conditions demand it.

Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist uses a different metaphor in The Master and his Emissary. He sees the brain as a convolution of feelings and intuitions, which ultimately govern the way we make sense of the world and interact with it. It’s the emotional processing that shapes our rationalizations. Feelings drive what we think, do, and say.

It all boils down to how we evolved. The brain is not concerned with being right, it is concerned with allowing its owner to survive. This requires it to come to the best conclusions efficiently, which often means quickly. It uses its cortical maps to identify the best course. In the survival game, prediction generally beats reaction, and there’s rarely time to stop and think.

What we now call talent is a refinement of brain function that used to be deployed to keep us alive. It now finds different, sometimes more ponderous, outlets in the culturally sophisticated and technologically enabled era of the 21st century. But it is still about leveraging and developing a natural advantage to enhance likelihood of success in whatever we are endeavoring to achieve. ?

The fact that we are alive today is itself proof that we and our forebears have some version of these talents. Everyone has the potential to be good at something, and nobody is good at everything. The world doesn’t divide into the talented and untalented; individuals are divided into things for which they have talent and things for which they don’t.

An unfortunate corollary of talent not being under conscious control is that many people possess talents they don’t know they have. These talents just never find the right context in which to be brought out. And the most brilliant people may not necessarily be that inherently superior, they may just be maximumly evoked.

Employers looking to identify people with certain talents may be able to provide the opportunity for them to flourish, but just being presented with the chance to shine is not enough. The individual in question needs to be made to feel positively disposed to the situation. The awakening of the talent involves a two-way street, a reciprocation between the enabler and the enabled in which both parties are active.

Modern organizations increasingly appreciate the importance of an emotional contract that makes work more than just a transactional exchange of money for labor. Many of them use psychometric testing to evaluate incoming employees and then survey their existing people to measure levels of engagement. But these often fail to make the hoped-for difference. Large numbers continue to be unhappy at work and many places are seeing average terms of tenure plummet, despite the millions being outlaid on trying to address these ills.

Talent needs to be teased out, not tested. This has to involve the participation of the individual, not an evaluation of them as an object. Any methodology has to appreciate that it is probing what Kahneman would call System 1 cognition, so it shouldn’t be using direct questions or scoring systems that only work with System 2 thinking. Feelings can only be assessed impressionistically, not deliberatively.

People don’t always know how to put into words how they feel. Just because someone likes to describe themselves as “intelligent” or “maverick”, or even “a bit mad”, doesn’t mean that they are. Just because they never take off their hat, or wear odd shoes, or put their trousers on back-to-front doesn’t connote any particular specialness. It may be just a contrived eccentricity that’s protesting a bit too much.

People who possess the right talent for a particular situation often don’t have any way of describing what makes them special, but they are not always the first to barge forward and say “What about me?”. They often don’t recognize their own talent, let alone understand it sufficiently to be able to explain it.

If you want to be able to identify the people with the talent you need, and then you want to unlock that potential, and make them want to stay working with you, then understanding and managing their core feelings about what really matters to them is critical. Without that, even the greatest potential can be lost.