IDL110 Season 3: The Science of Talent with Scott Whiteford
Why should you focus on talents? Which commonly solved limitations do many leaders and organizations get held back by? How can you understand and develop your team by working with their individual strengths?
I’m glad to be sharing my conversation with Scott Whiteford with you. He is the Director of Leadership Analytics at Talent+ - and organization which focusses on assessing and empowering talent within businesses. Today we’re talking about talent - and how focussing on talent can change your work environment, and help you as a leader.
Meet Scott Whiteford
As Director of Leadership Analytics, Scott is a leading authority on The Science of Talent and has coached over 1,700 leaders on how to develop talent. His primary analytical focus is on utilizing Talent Plus’ Executive Interview to help companies select and coach leaders and their teams based on their strengths. He thoughtfully uses talent solutions such as the Team Retreat, TeamView, Leadership 360s, Collaborative Coaching, and Progression & Succession Planning to develop leaders and build effective teams through a strengths-management approach.
Visit Talent+ and connect with them on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Connect with Scott on LinkedIn.
FOR LISTENERS: Make It A Great Day: 8 Benchmarkable Ideas You Can Implement Today For A More Engaged Culture
IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:
You need to work with strengths - 03:19
Talent versus strengths - 06:52
How to hire for (and because of) talent - 10:41
The limits of leaders today - 17:40
Redefine your definition of promotion - 33:18
You need to work with strengths
The three points of Scott’s “Mercedes-Benz” star:
- Knowledge, skills, and experience
- Fit with cultural enhancement
- Talent or strengths
Many leaders focus mostly on the knowledge, skills, and experience of their employees or teammates, and often leave out their strengths.
Or, they try to make their teammates and employees “all-rounded” workers which end up wasting their current strength, and their potential to develop it.
Rather work with the strengths that are there, and develop the rest, but maintain the focus on the individual strengths and abilities that each person brings to the conversation.
Talent versus strengths
A talent could be who you are intrinsically, or an important part of who you are, and your strength is how that talent is manifested in reality.
For example, you could have a talent for being empathetic with the people around you. Your strength could then become creating and maintaining spaces of emotional awareness and compassion that people want to be in and contribute toward.
How to hire for (and because of) talent
Do not look at strengths in isolation. You have to look at strengths across the team, especially when you want to expand it and you’re looking to hire someone new to join the company.
When you force people to be one-size-fits-all in talents and strengths, they’re going to get frustrated and quit. Look at the overall team, see where each team member performs the best, and then let them develop within that role.
The limits of leaders today
Many leaders and their organizations today are limited because they do not focus enough on identifying the strengths of their employees, and because of it, they do not utilize them properly.
If you are a leader that often loses people from your team, you need to ask yourself:
- “What did you do to develop them?”
- “Was that development what that person wanted?”
If you cannot answer either of these questions, then it’s likely why this person decided to leave.
If you want to retain your employees, you need to provide opportunities for them to develop in ways that marry their strengths and talents with the role that they fulfill in the business.
Provide them with mentorship and leadership that is genuine, encourage them to develop and grow, and let them move on if they decide to go.
Redefine your definition of promotion
Your business does not have to follow the standard hierarchy when it comes to leveling up your employees.
You can completely define promotion and success on your own terms alongside your staff.
You have to have open and honest conversations with your staff about what success means to each of you, how it will be measured, and how their promotional journey can be structured so that it follows a path that they are motivated to work and walk upon.
Resources, books, and links mentioned in this episode:
BOOK | Peter Drucker – The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done
BOOK | Peter Drucker – The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
BOOK | Daniel Coyle – The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How.
Visit Talent+ and connect with them on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Connect with Scott on LinkedIn.
Awaken the Leader Workshop April 3rd and 4th 2023: theimpactdrivenleader.com
FOR LISTENERS: Make It A Great Day: 8 Benchmarkable Ideas You Can Implement Today For A More Engaged Culture
Sign up for the roundtable at: hello@theimpactdrivenleader.com
Check out the Practice Of the Practice
About the Impact Driven Leader Podcast
The Impact Driven Leader Podcast, hosted by Tyler Dickerhoof, is for Xillennial leaders who have felt alone and ill-equipped to lead in today's world. Through inspiring interviews with authors from around the world, Tyler uncovers how unique leadership strengths can empower others to achieve so much more, with real impact.
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Let’s focus on the strengths and let’s build compensatory strategies for the rest.
Scott Whiteford
Podcast Transcription
[TYLER DICKERHOOF]
Welcome back to the Impact Driven Leader podcast. This your host, Tyler Dickerhoof. Man, excited that you're here listening in wherever you listen to podcasts or watching on YouTube. Wherever you're watching, wherever you're listening, go ahead, hit that subscribe button, make sure that you are notified whenever a new episode launches. Or on YouTube, I share every day just the thought of the day through a process that I call coffee chat, share content there that continues the learning in between these episodes. So if you subscribe, you'll get that as well.
Today, I'm excited to talk with Scott Whiteford. Scott is the Director of Leadership Analytics with an organization called Talent Plus. Talent Plus is an organization that focuses on assessing, driving, empowering talent in organizations and working with different staffs to help them recognize and get the most in tone. So, we're going to talk about talent. We're going to talk about leadership from a talent place, but also today why focusing on talents is probably going to make your life easier as a leader. It's going to help you move forward as a leader, but also create an entirely different positive work environment. I'm excited to share this conversation with Scott, but also where we're at right now in our world. We're going through a lot of different changes economically, organizationally, generationally, that a way to move forward positively is recognizing and enhancing the talents of those around you to make sure that they're contributing the best they possibly can. I'll catch up with you at the end of this conversation with Scott, share a few more pieces with you and get you excited for the rest of the month.
Scott, welcome to the show. So excited to have this conversation. So excited to talk about talent, but even more than talent, I mean, that's your expertise is where we get it so wrong because I believe we understand where we get it wrong. We can reverse engineer it and make sure that we don't perpetually get it wrong. Does that sound fair?
[SCOTT WHITEFORD]
It sounds fair. And Tyler, I'm happy to be here. I'm excited about our conversation. Look forward to questions and answers and hopefully some insights for your audience.
[TYLER]
Well, I'm excited. You're another Pacific North Westerner. I'm a Midwesterner, I didn't share that with you earlier. You're from the Midwest. I grew up in Ohio. We won't get into any Iowa Hawk guys or Nebraska Cornhuskers banter. Really, there's no reason to have any right now. We know that Ohio State is a more, I don't want to say prominent school. I won't even go there. I didn't even graduate from Ohio State so, I can't even go down that pathway too far. But I do want to have this discussion about talent. I shared with you as we were getting prepared, getting to know each other a little bit. One of the books that I've read the last couple years, spent a ton of time reading Peter Drucker. I got a book maybe now, 13, 14 years ago. It sat on my shelf for many years. It was the Daily Drucker. I learned so much from it and now I'm digging through The Effective Executive. One thing that Peter Drucker stresses, especially in section, right in the middle of the book, it's like focus on strengths. Peter wrote that many, many, many decades ago. Why have we gotten that so wrong in organizations?
[SCOTT]
It's interesting. I think that we get it so wrong because people are programmed to focus on knowledge, skills, and experience when they're looking at selecting and developing people. So by focusing on those, they tend to shy away from things that are like soft skills, like strengths. I often give my clients a clients a Mercedes-Benz star to explain strength management theory. In the, if you remember, Mercedes-Benz star will have three components to it. The upper right part of the star, knowledge, skills, and experience, all really important. We should know those. The knowledge that a leader has accumulated on the job is important, the skills they have, the experience. We often go to organizations and they'll say, well, they need 10 years of experience, although I have no idea what that is different than five years or two years or 20 years, but whatever, they'll say 10 years of experience. So knowledge, skills and experience are important. The bottom part of the star is fit or cultural enhancement. How does that work with the individual? It could be fit with the team, it could be fit with the leader, it might even be fit with the region. We're both in the Midwest. We both live in the Pacific Northwest. There are people that couldn't stand the winters of either
[TYLER]
Drastically different, yeah.
[SCOTT]
And that final part of the star is talent and talent or strengths account for, 36% of the variance are about a third of the Mercedes-Benz star. That part is really important. When you think of what makes a great leader, you think of things like, oh, they have to be relationship oriented or highly focused or intellectually curious. All of those fall in that talent part. The other thing I often talk to my leaders about is on that right side of the Mercedes-Benz star, let's focus on deficiencies. Let's focus on the proverbial weakness. If the leader doesn't have the right knowledge, let's get it for them. But on the left part of the star on the talent, I say, hey, let's focus on strengths. Now, I know your children play sports. So if you don't mind, let me give you a sports example of what I see as strength management theory in the nutshell. That is somebody like Steph Curry, great three point shooter. Right now would you say, Tyler, is Steph Curry an all-around great basketball player?
[TYLER]
Not prototypical.
[SCOTT]
Ah, no, because he's excellent at shooting three point shots. He's excellent at shooting further out than three point. He's great at passing the basketball, he's great at reading defenses, but I guarantee he can't rebound very well. If he went to practice and his coach said, "Steph, you're a great basketball player, but what I need you to do is to be a complete basketball player, we need to focus on your weaknesses, and we need to have you practice rebounding," well, he'd probably become a little bit better of a rebounder, but it would be at the sacrifice of those strengths. He would not be the basketball player we know today if he had grown up focusing on rebounds. So to answer your question, Tyler, I don't understand why so many leaders look so heavily at the knowledge, skills and experience, or when they look at the talent or the strength side, they focus on the weaknesses. Let's focus on the strengths and let's build compensatory strategies for the rest.
[TYLER]
So let me do this before we get much further along, either compare contrast, talents versus strengths.
[SCOTT]
So it's interesting, a lot of people will, I've read quite a bit on talent versus strengths, what is a talent, what is a strength? I've heard that talent is part of who you are, and a strength is how it manifests itself. So I might be relationship oriented, and so therefore the strength is that I'm good at talking to people in a large audience or something like that. I like to focus more on strengths more holistically, almost as if they are synonyms. Now, I know that there are people out there that probably argue with that, and I do understand what I see is the difference but really I think of it as how can, I like strengths because I think it resonates better with leaders. So the leaders that are listening to your podcast understand what a strength is and a talent, it's a little bit more difficult, but a set of strengths could equal a talent, for instance. So I like to focus on strengths when describing that part of leadership.
[TYLER]
To take that a little bit farther, you think of someone, oh, they're talented and where they may have talents in specific areas, and I think one of the inherent ideologies people have is that you can't do anything to change your talents. Daniel Coyle and The Talent Code debunked that in essence. I believe when you get into those strengths, you could, like you just mentioned, you're comfortable in situations where, oh, you may be better to present and speak. So it's the expression. What I really wonder is, again, coming back to Steph Curry and trying to make this all-around player or this enigma of this five tool player in baseball where they can do everything well, this is my, I guess, theory is that when managers or talent seekers, when you're selecting for position, it's almost an idea, hey, if I find that person that's talented everywhere, it makes it easier for me because I don't either have to fill in the holes or they are already trained up. I don't have to train them. So that's my theory is often I think people go to that because they think, oh, it's easier for me. I don't have to worry about making up their deficiencies through somebody else or rearranging the job roles. Do you find that to be true? Is that something you would agree with or?
[SCOTT]
So I agree with, I think people look for that and I think they think, to use your baseball example, five tool player has all of the speed, has all of the catching ability and the batting and whatever it is home runs. But there are so few in the world that can do that. Is that I don't, 95% of major league baseball players would not be considered a five tool player? We're talking about the very best players in the world. So I think that translating that to leadership, yeah, I think people do look for what's that five tool leader I can have? Instead I've been doing this for 20 years, I've coached over 1700 leaders, I don't know if I've ever coached a true five tool leader that's good at everything. I would say no, except I'm probably going to offend somebody out there, but I would say no. So instead, what can we do with you and make you the best leader that you can be, rather than saying you know what? Like Babe Ruth, he wasn't a five tool player. My guess is he couldn't, he didn't have the speed. Well, okay, so let's not have him steal basis. I mean, we can make this better for the player. We can make it better for the leader by focusing on what they do best.
[TYLER]
So in a process of your working with leaders, if the leader that's listening and saying, okay, I hear what you're saying, Scott and Tyler, and this idea of let's focus on strengths, let's see the unique talents, and how to put that person in a place to have success. How do you start doing that in an organization either with your current staff or, hey, we're looking at hiring new staff. Maybe it's staff that have been dislocated from their positions because of all the layoffs where it's like, hey, here's a talent pool that, my guess is their talents were underutilized and that's why they were chose to be laid off rather than maximized. So again, share with me a little bit your mindset through the process of how to go about that.
[SCOTT]
I think another mistake that leaders use when they first discover a strength management approach is they try to isolate that strength management to a single person on their team. Or it could be themselves, but it could be, okay, I get this. I've read Drucker, I'm excited about strength management theory, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start, I'm going to start with Bob, because why not, let's start, start with Bob. Then you're really looking at those strengths and isolation. I think that one of the important facts of strength management theories, that you can't look at is isolation, you have to look at it across the team. So when I start with my, when we onboard new client or my existing clients that are going into a different spot in their organization, we want to interview everybody. We want to get an assessment on everybody and understand all of their strengths. A little bit you go back to your basketball analogy, might understand Shaquille O'Neill's strengths, might understand Steph Curry's strengths, but in isolation, I can't say that they're going to have, going to win the championship.
[TYLER]
Totally, yeah.
[SCOTT]
I've really got to understand where's everybody's strengths. I think that is an issue or a problem that young leaders face when they first start looking at strength management theories. They look at it in isolation.
[TYLER]
I think that makes perfect sense. I mean, you think about the greatest team is not the one with the greatest individual contributors. The greatest team is the team that's able to put it all together and achieve greatness. It's the sum of the parts is greater collectively together. To me that really comes back to this idea. Is there a, if we were to jump to, if I wanted to jump to Strength Finders, there's a unique strength called arranger, and that strength is good at someone. I'm a high arranger and love to put people in spots. If we go back to sports, and again, I've always been frustrated in new sports where coaches will say, well, you need to play every position. In my viewpoint on that, like, no, that'll frustrate people and drive them away from the sport. You have this five year old who is right footed and you're trying to tell him he needs to go play on the left side, and he gets frustrated, he can't do it, he's going to quit. I believe the same thing happened in every organization is there's unique talent and strengths people have in their superiors, their leaders, their managers are putting them in the wrong spot. So is there a talent, is there a strength to say, hey, you are uniquely gifted at being able to recognize and bring this out of people? Is that something you find?
[SCOTT]
It is, except that I look at it a slightly differently. Use your right foot, left foot example could be within, in leadership as well. The executive interview that I spend a lot of time with, it's our executive interview here at Talent Plus, we've got 10 themes that we measure. Those themes vary from things like focus, how focused an individual is through relationships, how well they build relationships to understanding vision. When I talk to my leaders, when I'm coaching, I'll focus on their five strongest themes. Again, there are 10 themes, so I'll focus on their five strongest. Well, you could have five themes over on one side of our little chart, and somebody else could have five themes on another side of the chart so the five strongest over here, or five strongest over here and they can both be successful, but it's about focusing on where they're strong that allows them to be successful.
Like I said, I've been doing this a long time and I haven't seen somebody who's good at all 10 themes. Everybody has areas of strength. Everybody has areas of weakness. Go back to your five-year-old soccer analogy, and it's great because if you're right footed and you're playing on the left side, basically you're saying to me, Scott, as a leader, I'm 40 years old, I'm Gen X, I'm in the mid part of my career, and these are my five strengths, and they want me to focus on the areas that I'm softer instead of building compensatory strategies. I'm not going to succeed in that environment, just like the five year old soccer player. It's a great analogy.
[TYLER]
Well, and I think when you, again, you can look at it with kids, you see kids and they're like, maybe they love the sport. They go through a couple practices, a few games, and they come home and they're like, I hate this. I'm like, well, you loved it before. Why? It's because someone put you in that position. There's an element where I would contend, hey, help people stretch, but do so with success. Meaning, hey, I'm going to help you maybe stretch where I can get more out of your strengths, but I'm going to do it in a way where you feel energized and supported and not, well, it's either this or the highway. Because we see that too often. It's like, oh, you need to either be able to achieve this or you have no value to our organization instead of the other way around saying, you have value. It's our job in the organization or as a leader to find that and maximize it.
[SCOTT]
That's a great way of looking at it. It is, are we even searching for it? I often tell my young leaders that they need to take, excuse me, they need to take control over their careers. A lot of young leaders will sit back and wait for their leaders to set up a growth development plan. A lot of times that growth development plan is actually, hey, you need to do these four things to be at the next level. Well, we don't even know if that's what they want to do. We don't even know what they want out of their careers without asking them. So I often talk to my young leaders about understanding your own strengths, understanding where you're, you can contribute the most and then talking to your leader about how you can develop those areas. Because to your point, a lot of times people just get frustrated because the focus either isn't on strengths or it's on areas of weakness. So that's one of the key parts for young leaders.
[TYLER]
So I think the answer to this is pretty obvious with what you just stated, but I want you to go deeper into it, is most organizations, is talent the limiting factor or is identifying and supporting the talent in a way that they can accomplish more really the absolute limiting factor?
[SCOTT]
Yes, that's the limiting factor. Unfortunately, for a lot of organizations, they have probably the talent to succeed, but they don't focus on it and that's the limitation. At Talent Plus one of the things we talk about with our clients is that everybody has talent. They might not have talent for a given role. They might have talent in the industry or the company that they're in, but that doesn't mean that they're not, they can't be successful given the, in the right spot with the right leaders in the right time. So I think a lot of times, when we look at talent, we are focused, we do not focus enough on identifying what the strengths are and then utilizing those strengths. It is the first question that I ask when a leader loses somebody on their team is what did they do to develop them and was that development what the individual on the team wanted? If they can't answer yes to both of those, of course they left again, the five year old bright footed player playing on the left side.
[TYLER]
Well, I mean, the thought that comes to my mind there is what is the easy way out of it? Because I believe this is where we're at right now today, in this flux of between post-Covid into this an economic, we're trying to figure out what's going on, but we're also in a massive generational change. We're in that Gen X, millennials a little bit younger, but again, we're all in this period where the baby boomers, the older, the leaders of many, many years and decades are trying to transition and it's really threw us into a Gen Z, millennial that are the main workforce. It's this transition that's difficult because you have people that are like, I just want it done. I don't want to have to do it.
And you have people like you and I or people that you, we try to support that are like, that are listening right now it's like you're asking me to do way more and I don't have really the capacity to do what I'm expected to do now and now you're telling me I have to figure out how to transition and lead differently and I'm not given the tools. So I think that's the problem that we're seeing more and more today. So when I come to you and say, how does someone feel empowered in that process to ask, here's where to get help, when you're saying, hey, figure it out on your own, where do you go to get help? How does that process really where you feel empowered to, hey, I can actually do this?
[SCOTT]
It's interesting, I thought you were going to go with another question so I had an answer for the other question in mind.
[TYLER]
Well, you can share that. It was a conversation, man. Go for it
[SCOTT]
I think it's an important one. So the empowerment piece, we'll talk about mentorship, so let's come back to that. One of the things that, where I thought you were going to go with that question is if you think about boomers, I have the most difficulty talking to older generations about strength management theory than I do gen, Gen Z, Gen Y, Gen X. The Baby Boomers, 64 is the last year of baby boomers, so those folks are, the young ones are just about to enter into their sixties, the older ones are almost 80. So the entire high, top level of leadership in most organizations, the people in their sixties and seventies, all those folks are getting closer and closer to retirement. One of my clients' biggest fears is that his whole, his entire population aged today. So what does that look like with Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z?
I think Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z understand strength management better. To your point they look at their careers, what am I doing to develop myself? We look at things like the gig economy. They're naturally drawn to things that they do well. People aren't in the gig economy doing things they hate. They're doing things that they do well. Back to your actual question, is mentorship, again, and I put the locus of control on the millennial, on the Gen Zer, on the young Gen Xer to go out and find that mentorship. Because unfortunately in a lot of roles, strength management, career develop, mentorship is not part of what that leader has set you up to do. So rather than do nothing, be the advocate, go out and find those opportunities, go out and find that mentorship, and you'll, I think that they'll see a more fulfilling career. But it's hard because now I'm asking you to do something that you might have thought, oh, I'm not supposed to go out. I'm not supposed to color outside the lines. But if your leader isn't interested in developing you, then you need to take the control and do it at least establish those mentoring relationships so that you can find success.
[TYLER]
Man, I think that's a great point and something I've experienced. I'm 43. Right there at that mentorship was never encouraged when I was early in my career. It was never even discussed. It was like, it wasn't, it was just figured out and you know what, this is the way you do it, and not the idea of a, well, hey, here's my experiences of going through it and here's where the pitfalls are, all those ideas of mentorship and encouragement. But what I found is for the people that I get to work with, you get to work maybe a little bit younger, that that is pretty normal, where to seek mentorship is very normal. So it's a drastic generational difference. I think, I'm glad you bring that up because that is really, I would say a great solution is if you're not getting that mentorship internally, go find it externally. There's people there will do it. That's what I think you and I are both an example of trying to provide through our experiences, but as well is that's the solution. That's the solution to be able to navigate through, hey, how to get the most out of your people. It's how to encourage them best, how to contribute with what they're doing, maximize their talents and strengths that they provide. It's not, hey, sink or swim. Yet a lot of us are faced with that.
[SCOTT]
I see it, I see it frequently. One of the funny things for me is, I turned 50 this year, I don't know what happened there because, I think I'm 32, okay, but I turned 50 this year and I've grown up in an organization, a strength management organization. And right from the beginning there is this look to see, well, what do you do well that we do within the organization? I gave an example a few months ago of, there's probably 20 things I'm supposed to do on my job. I probably do 10 of them well. I probably do 10 not so well. The longer I'm with my organization and I've been there a long time now the more the focus is on those 10, the more the focus is on, here's what we're going to do to put you in areas that you can succeed. And you know what, we'll develop compensatory strategies with other people to fill in some of those other gaps.
Unfortunately, well, fortunately for me, but unfortunately in a lot of organizations, I think leaders look at that and they say, okay, you have these 20 things. If you can't do these 10 or can't do them, well then we have to move you out. I think as the younger generations come up, I think there is more of an understanding and an emphasis on strength development and that includes the mentoring thing to the mentoring point. A lot of young leaders look inside their organization for mentorship. I would argue, especially if you're in the position where you need to, where you're not having that mentorship look outside, and you know what, you don't even have to look in the same industry because young leaders in your organization are facing the same type of navigating the political structure of developing the people of implementing plans and it doesn't matter whether their particular industry is in hospitality and yours is in healthcare. You're both facing basically the same issues. So if you are a young leader and you don't have that mentorship, you can look outside of your industry to find it.
[TYLER]
So transitioning, but not far, we're talking about talents, there's, the ideology always is that hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. If we're again, thinking about this leadership in an organization and our role and our opportunity, and I saw this the other day from a friend who's been in leadership space and talks about the missed expectations where a lot of our younger workforce has these really high expectations, I think you pointed it out and I want to go this way again with that idea of talent working hard, is I don't need to go to a job and do the 20 elements just so I get to do the 10 that I love. I can go to jobs left, right, and center all day long and do the 10 that I love. Why should I put up with the other 10 that I don't love? I think that's the missed expectations. That's where we get our frustrations, is this idea of you have to come and do this entire job. Instead of saying, Hey Scott, I am great at these five things. Can I do these five things and you just help me figure out the other five? If you say yes, absolutely, I'm excited for it. If you say, nope, you have to do those 10, whether you like it or not, I'm probably going to struggle.
[SCOTT]
This is where we're changing for the better. I'm an optimist just by default, but we are, and I think the pandemic actually sped a lot of this up, and that is, if you aren't finding reward in the job that you're in, then find a job that can be rewarding. There's lots of different jobs out there. And if these 20 assets, let's say, you're 10, you're good at 10 and not so good at the other 10, there are jobs out there that will focus more strategically on those 10 but the other thing is, it's more and more acceptable. You look at the older generations, a lot of them spent their entire career in one organization or one job.
I remember being in grad school, and now it's a long time ago, but we would study that the average person changes jobs five times in their life. And now if you look at it, I can't even imagine what the Gen Zers think five times in your life, five times in a decade, man. That is probably more likely and the way to hold onto those folks is to have them focused on what they're good at, back to our strength management. And they know that if you're not focused on that, they can find an opportunity that will focus on that. So I think we're changing for the better. I think we'll see more focus on strength management theory and developing strengths but right now we're at that tipping point where we have the older generation is retiring and now the new, the Gen Xers are the ones that are going to be leading this country in this world for the next 10 or 15 years.
[TYLER]
Well, and I think there's a point there that I've experienced and it's been shared with me, is understanding we're, for individuals our age, my age and older, we were educated in a system where, hey, this is how you do it. It's very individual based and it's either sink or swim. As I've learned, I look at my younger brother, I look at other siblings, other people that I know that isn't how they were educated. If you think about it today, we can have, for the last 10 years, people that enter the workforce that have never walked into a classroom. All of their education was done 100% remote, and they walk into a job and we get frustrated because they don't want to come to the office. Yet hiring managers, and I think about this, there's like, have you stopped and thought about how they were able to succeed at the highest institutions? They did so remote. I think about my kids, my kids during the entire pandemic, it was remote work, they did fine. I think it's those missed expectations that's costing, causing so much frustration where we have an opportunity to challenge and say, wait, does it have to be this way? Can we be more creative? Can we look at a different work system?
[SCOTT]
Completely agree. It's another one where the pandemic really sped that up. You have to take a look at all organizations and wonder, do we need to have a headquarters? Do we need to have a place that people go into work or we were successful during the pandemic and we did it that way without people going in. I'm a extrovert. I enjoy going into the office. Like I said, I live in Portland, but my company's located in Lincoln. So when I go back, I love going in, I love seeing people, I love interacting with them, but we found success in our organization from what, mid-March until about a year ago before people really started to come back into work. So that expectation though, for the Gen Zers and whatever the generation is behind them, that expectation is going to be front and center as they think of their work. So as an organization, it's another hurdle that if you're not thinking about how two things, the strength part of your people that report to you and their development. Another facet is going to be do they have to come into work or can we do this remotely we're going to see more and more remote work as a result, putting the onus on leaders then to focus on those individuals and develop them and make sure that they are finding success in their careers or they're going to go someplace else.
[TYLER]
I think that's really where we go back to, whether it's talent management, whether it's strength management, whether it's even development is, it's an active job and it's a good thing and it's a good thing for leaders to be doing. The expectations so often has been that's not what's most important for you to do. And I think the perception and the paradigm is changing that you know what, as a leader, the best thing for you to do is to help everyone accomplish the best they can. And maybe that's a completely different skillset than what you had as a performer and we have to be able to look at that from a talent and a strength in saying you are a great individual performer. You were great at sales, you were great at whatever it may be, but that doesn't mean that you're set up to be the best leader and get the most out of people and accepting that rather than leadership being just the succession of hierarchy.
[SCOTT]
Yes, it is one of the big pain points that I see with organizations. I was working with a group in Las Vegas and the person took their best salesperson off of the floor and put them as the sales manager. We've done two things there. We've taken your best salesperson, basically said goodbye, and we put them in a role that they may or may not be very good at. It goes back to a wider challenge of why is that the progression that we need to see in organizations? Why is it that the only way to succeed in an organization is to move up that ladder? I now see a lot of organizations actually have a separate ladder for individual achievers or knowledge workers to confine success in their roles and then you go back to the fact that leaders have to recognize that and they have to have those conversations.
If you're a young leader and you're leading a team of five people for the first time, have you asked them each one of them what they want out of that role, what they want out of their careers in that organization and then how can you align the vision that you have for the team or the organization with their individual vision of what they want out of their careers and not assuming that what you think is best for them is what they want? Again, it's another hurdle that I see a lot of organizations face and as time goes on, it's going to be more and more important to really focus on what they want out of their careers rather than just saying, well, I know what they want. They want to be the next manager of whatever. It's not the case.
[TYLER]
Yeah, it's really debunking the idea that succession in a company is a title. Succession in a company is really, in my mind the ability to contribute at a higher level and make more of an impact. To me, and this is what I've seen, this is what I've heard you sharing, is that when we focus on talents and when we focus on making sure those talents are being utilized properly and finding ways to develop that, those talents are at their maximum capacity, everyone in the organization is more fulfilled. Both sides of the equation, everyone is more fulfilled.
[SCOTT]
Yes, it absolutely is. It's one of the key takeaways that I would leave your leaders with, your Gen X leaders with is how can you develop your team, understand your team so that they function at a high level while understanding the individual strengths of that team, how you can develop them, focus on what they need out of their careers, and for you, understanding that you probably have to? As a young leader you probably have to take charge of your career as well. So what does that look like? Where can you find mentorship and how can you focus on your development? I think that over time we're going to see more and more of this. Perhaps Tyler, we'll have the same conversation in 20 years and be laughing about the fact that now everybody does strength management theory, the two of us are now unemployed. So we'll see. Maybe, maybe not.
[TYLER]
Well, there's one last piece that I'd love for you to touch on. How does, in your experience working with organizations that either make the transition or are primarily focused on, again, getting the most out of talent, supporting talent from a trust and psychological safety within the organization?
[SCOTT]
How do they accomplish that?
[TYLER]
Well, just what is their, like what's the difference there?
[SCOTT]
A lot of, when I work with teams, a lot of times they'll talk about they need to have trust on the team to succeed. Totally agree. But they talk about it as in trust is something you work on, such as we're going to go do trust falls over in the corner and after everybody gets through with their trust falls, then we will trust each other as a team. Well, I can tell you the fastest way to that trust is to show interest in the careers and the lives of the people who report to you or across the team who work with each other. It's not just about their careers. It's about who they are as individuals, what their families are like, what are their hobbies, what do they like to do in their free time? Really get to understand who they are as people and that trust will grow and then you have your psychological safety.
If you don't have that psychological safety and I'm a new leader, I'm not going to tell you that I can't do these 10 things over here as well as I can do these 10 things over here because there isn't that psychological safety. Now I imagine my boss will probably listen to this saying, he'll probably totally agree now he can't do those 10 things, I knew about that, but he does these other 10 things well, and that's because there's a psychological safety there. So on those teams, as young leaders on those teams building that is so important because the result is that you'll see advancement in your team's, members' careers and the honesty that they'll have with you on what they enjoy and what they don't enjoy.
[TYLER]
I have to think that that point of connection, that wanting to get to know people and especially when you do that around what they either are great at or maybe they don't realize they're great at, to me in my experience, that does a lot to really guard trust to a point where you can have some ups and downs, but when you're looking out for someone and you're like, I am trying to put you in a place to succeed because you have success there, you do that well, don't worry about those other things that are difficult, I'll help you there, we'll figure out some other option. To me that builds a lot of trust that you can work through a lot of different situations together.
[SCOTT]
It absolutely does. I think you said it earlier, if that exists, then not only will that individual find success in their organization or find success in their careers, but that will help the leader find success. It's, the greatest correlate to customer satisfaction, thus revenue is employee engagement. If people feel they're being developed, they're more likely to have strong employee engagement and it's more fun for the leader. My goodness, how difficult would it be to be leading a team of five people and focusing on everything they're doing wrong? What a terrible life. I'd hate to wake up in the morning, think, wow, I'm going to focus on these 10 things today. They're all these things that these people are doing wrong. What if you woke up and thought I'm going to focus on these 10 things and these are all things these people are doing right. Your psychological wellbeing would be stronger as well
[TYLER]
And they'll end up doing more of those. Scott, thanks so much. It's been great. I appreciate the conversation. In the show notes, there'll be a link to your stuff but also Talent Plus. Thank you so much for joining us and I appreciate it, man.
[SCOTT]
Tyler, I appreciated being on your show and I look forward to talking to you in 20 years when we're talking about how strength management is now throughout the country and we retired early
[TYLER]
As Scott and I had talked about, we talked about strengths and we shared a few sports analogies, for me, when I really dug into my strengths, understood my strengths, and went through the Strength Finders 2.0 assessment, I learned what I was great at. What I found is when I started focusing on what I was great at, man, my life got so much better, not easier, but better. I've found that and seen that working with other people in no different than what Talent Plus does with their assessments and help empowering leaders, if that way focus on talents within organizations, and I know it almost seems elementary to focus on one's talents and bring out the best there, but so often as I've found, as I iterated and shared, it's do the job. Well, sometimes the job is frustrating or harder. What I've seen people getting burnt out is when they're asked to do things they're not good at or they don't feel that they can be successful.
So when you start to limit those restrictions, everyone gets better. Here's one thing I want to share with you. I will be sharing an Awaken the Leader within Workshop. It's coming in a month. We're just about a month. April 3rd and fourth, 12:00 to 2:00 Pacific Time. That is 3:00 to 5:00 Eastern. Go to theimpactdrivenleader.com to register for that event. But one week prior, on March 28th, I'm going to be sharing a special presentation, a special free to anyone, wherever you want to. I will share that. You can register on LinkedIn or there's a link also at theimpactdrivenleader.com to get access to that trend. I want to talk about The Window in the Mirror. Maybe I heard the podcast earlier. I'm going to go through it a little bit deeper, more, share with you, The Window in the Mirror. I'll see you till then. Have a good one. Thanks for being here.
