Looking past performance in your star talent: an HBR blog post
30 June 2011
Lane4 Commercial Director Matt Rogan and Managing Director Adrian Moorhouse have collaborated with Dr Mark de Rond (a Cambridge Judge Business School, Cambridge University based ethnographer) in this Harvard Business Review blogpost about talent identification and development.
Tomorrow sees the NBA Draft — since 1950 the means of bringing the cream of college basketball talent into the professional ranks. Pro teams take views and stake fortunes on those college kids most likely to step up successfully. Sports teams under salary caps rely on balancing performance versus potential.
On one level, business is slowly catching on. Well-handled, psychometric tests provide a currency not just for assessing personal traits, but also potential fit within an organization. In theory, we finally have an objective view of who our number one pick should be. In practice, this is no time to be smug. Recent research suggests that 70% of our current crop of high performers in business lack critical attributes essential to success in future roles. We may have all the data in the world, yet we're still not consistently making the right calls.
Why not? Perhaps progress in sports offers a clue. Given that a data-based view of potential versus value is now held by each MLB team, Billy Beane, the brains behind the Moneyball revolution, is thinking differently. He said recently in London, "Data is now only part of the picture. When the competition zigs, I have to zag." While the number crunching still happens, he is also sending his scouts to understand the backgrounds of his prospective draft picks and trades. He wants to meet their parents and their friends, to observe them in the evenings after a defeat. The best soccer managers in England, Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger, do the same. They do so because they don't just want a theoretical view of potential; they also want to find clues as to what lies beneath. They want to discover how resilient each talented individual might be, and how prone they could be to derailment.
Read the Harvard Business Review blogpost in full here.
Lane4 held a breakfast session in June 'Growing World Class Talent' To read a write-up of the event, and Lane4's approach to talent development, please click here.
2011-06-04