Why Your Most Talented Employees Aren’t Your Best Performers – And One Thing CEOs Need to Look For To Cultivate High-Performance

By Phil Liebman, Founder & CEO ALPS Leadership

We must stop placing such a high premium on talent when cultivating a high-performance workplace, and instead evaluate the potential value of our people’s contributions to the performance of the organization on the attributes that really matter most.

While talent may very well matter, the one thing that matters most is competence – or how we use our talent and other key competences to accomplish things that are meaningful and significant. In the absence of such accomplishment there is no competence, and talent alone is never what causes any meaningful and significant accomplishment.

Our focus on performance needs to look more broadly at the full-range of attributes that drive human performance and will realize the accomplishment of the things we aim for.

Notions about the value of talent have been romanticized out of proportion by the commercial success of entertainment. The entire entertainment industry – from live-stage acting, to professional sports and the movies – is dependent on talent as a product. But even in the realm of athletes, actors – or successful artists in any medium, talent alone is never the determinate of success – commercial or otherwise.

Talent is just one of four component competencies of human performance. These are

1.    Knowledge

2.    Skill

3.    Talent, and

4.    Credentials (which amounts to experience).

Competencies are the developable tools we use to accomplish all meaningful and significant things. Competencies are things that we can measure and manage.

Knowledge is acquired and can be tested. Skills are developed through practice and can be demonstrated. But talent is more difficult to measure, but it shows up in personal development. Finally, credentials are the combined experience of formal education and training and what we have done and accomplished.

Talent is a competency in that we can develop it. Some people have what seems to be more natural or innate talent in certain areas. Sometimes it is genetic – we have the natural body-strength required for certain activities, or the intellectual acumen that makes math or music more attractive to us – or the learning easier.

Talent is what amplifies our knowledge and skills. Talent makes it easier for some to learn faster – or to excel at certain skills. A mathematical genius still must learn to do math. No one is born capable of playing the piano – they must practice and learn the instrument. With this talent, we can still develop our skills and expand our knowledge of things. It may be harder and take us longer, but limited talent does not limit our ability to develop ourselves into competent human beings.

Excessive talent, in fact, tends to be more of a functional restraint than having little talent – when other conditions exist.

Competence is a result of learning to apply our competencies in a way that we can contribute value to the world around us. That value may either be self-directed or by the direction of others. We therefor must understand how to apply what we can do – in such a way that it serves some objective purpose – whether that means digging ditch or composing a symphony.

When our sense of purpose is clear – there are still two critical drivers that distinguish those who cause themselves to become fully competent – and the rest of us. These are purely factors of leadership that must either be intrinsic – or guided by an outside influence that inspires the level of our performance.

The two drivers of Competent Performance are: Conscientiousness and Grit

Conscientiousness is the understanding that what we are aiming to accomplish serves something beyond our own personal needs and interests. There is some sense of serving “the greater good.” The word itself is derived from conscience and is a function of how our values shape our actions.

Grit simply describes the ability to push ourselves beyond where we might otherwise remain comfortable. In order to become competent, you must get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Grit builds conscientiousness and conscientiousness informs grit. People generally need a sense of high-purpose in order to work their hardest and still want to work harder. And being fully purpose-driven, staying focused on ideal and resisting distraction requires hard work. Grit is a component of conscientiousness and visa-versa.

It is with this in mind – that it is easy to see why people who are observed to be extremely talented might remain incompetent. In some cases – it is because of their talent that this is the case.

When I was coaching youth soccer, every once in a while I would be introduced to a tremendously talented child. They demonstrated exceptional skill, showed strong instincts about the sport and could literally run-circles around most of the other children their age.

It was their parent that would point all of this out. Typically that parent would summon their child to perform for me. But more often than not these children either seemed anxious about their performance – where most the other children were just having fun. And these super-talented kids rarely developed into the top performers in the league. Why?

In many cases – they were already convinced they were special – and believed they deserved special treatment. They were less inclined to work hard – they were already good. They were less willing to be generous with their talents – and often hogged attention on the field. They had knowledge and skill – and some credentials based on past playing experience – but their motivation was off track. They had a hard time seeing that winning was a matter of how they contributed to the team – rather than how they alone performed.

Making matters worse – some parents actually taught their kids to feel that the team’s role was to make their child shine – and that the team was letting them down.

And this speaks to the real crux of the matter: leadership. The challenge for me as a coach – was that the leadership for these children needed to come from their parents. When a parent understood the dynamics of good sportsmanship and refused to inflate the egos of their children – those kids became stars that were admired by their peers. And those stars tended to be generous and show genuine humility.

This is why great coaches in professional sports tend to be great leaders. They have access to extreme talent as a matter of their status quo – but understand that all that talent is meaningless unless it can be harnessed to serve a single, highly focused shared purpose. One team, one dream.

We might call these coaches talented leaders – but what they actually are is competent.

To develop competence in others, you must first make yourself competent in your role. If you are a talented leader – it may be easier – but that doesn’t mean you have any better chance of being successful. In the end – it’s the hard work of making yourself into a competent leader that inspires others to do the same.

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Phil Liebman is the Founder and CEO at ALPS Leadership – We Guide CEO’s and Their Leadership Teams to Become Exceptionally Competent Leaders and High-Performance Organizations