The Power of Talent Spotting
People are more than their Job Title
Here’s a thought experiment: Think back to when you were hired into your role. And think about the job description and set of responsibilities and skills that were in your job description, and then ask yourself the following questions:
Am I doing exactly what is listed in the job description?
Have there been times when I’ve used skills or taken on work outside of what was listed?
Chances are, you probably said no to #1, and yes to #2. And in some cases, if you’re really exceptional at your job, there’s probably a lot of examples you can point to where you did things outside of your role, or exhibited skills that weren’t necessarily asked of you when you started in your job. In today’s constantly changing and fast-moving workplace, it’s common for priorities to change, roles to shift, and expectations to evolve.
But this underscores another important point: All of us are more than our resumes, LinkedIn profiles and Workday HR records. As human beings, we’re multi-dimensional beings with a series of talents and skills. Ideally, we’re using them to be effective at our jobs, but at any given moment, there are probably skills, strengths or talents that our employees have that they can use to positively impact the team that we might not be utilizing today.
If you have a team of good employees, chances are, you are sitting on a gold mine of talent, and you don’t even know it.
As a young management consultant, I was often nervous because I didn’t have a lot of experience and wasn’t sure how I was going to find ways to do my job or contribute to the team when working on client engagements. This at first often meant I was taking on roles on projects where I was doing a lot of menial tasks, not uncommon or out of the ordinary for anyone just getting started. But one day, I got a glimpse into what I could do, which changed how I approached my job .
Early on in my career as a consultant, I was working on a strategy project for a healthcare organization where we had to do an assessment of their existing IT operations. This involved a series of workshops with some of their senior leaders to get insights into what was going on so we could make an assessment of how they were doing. I was the most junior person on the team, which meant my job was to focus on all of the logistics in setting up the workshops, taking notes, making sure there were enough post-it notes and sticky paper.
Afterwards, I did a lot of the summary and analysis and started building the slides - a pretty common set of responsibilities for the job description of an analyst on an engagement like this.
During the workshop, the Partner had to step out for a call and I was asked to lead a discussion around some of the challenges in the IT operations center, basically a big promotion from taking notes and replenishing stickies. After the session was finished, my manager came up to me and told me that the way that the client engaged during that session was the most engaged they had been throughout the day, especially considering during my session we were talking about their deficiencies.
She asked me if I had ever done any facilitation before (I said No, and asked her what that was) and said she’d love to see me lead more of these discussions because I was a natural at both engaging in dialogue and facilitating it, as evidenced by the quality and volume of the answers we got from the stakeholders. Over the course of the next few phases of the 6 month engagement, I began taking on more responsibilities. Instead of just getting stickies and replenishing paper (I still had to do that) I was facilitating discussions in our workshops and presenting the findings during our readouts. When it came time to present to the Executive Committee, someone on the team got sick, and my boss asked if I would present instead. The presentation went so well that when we were asked to communicate the strategy to the rest of the organization, the client asked me to co-present with them as we rolled out the new strategy.
After the engagement was finished and we were doing my review, the engagement manager told me that I should keep looking for opportunities to lead discussions and present in meetings, and the next time I worked with another engagement manager, to tell them I was good at these skills and deliverables. She also gave me the name of an internal team at the firm that actually trained people on how to become facilitators.
I ended up following up on that request, which unlocked a whole other set of skills and opportunities leading internal trainings and leadership development programs for consultants, initiatives that eventually helped me get promoted and built out an entire new set of opportunities for me professionally, first as a consultant, and now as an owner of a training and facilitation business.
Before that project, I didn’t even know what facilitation was, much less that I was actually good at it. But because my engagement manager was paying attention and observed the impact I was having in the room, she quickly realized I had more to offer than what I was doing.
The Value of Talent Spotting
My engagement manager at the time practiced what I call talent spotting, or the ability to identify a specific talent or skill of someone, and to let them know in context to help them learn and grow. This skill that my engagement manager showed me is something that I have taken with me to this day, and something I try to practice in my interactions inside and outside of the workplace.
As leaders, and managers, we are in a unique position to practice talent spotting, as it’s critical to our job in managing people and leading a team. Even the most competent and successful people are limited by their own bias and perspective, and being a leader and manager gives us a unique position to make an impact.
First, a lot of us can’t always “see our own genius.” We need external voices to offer up observations of how we see ourselves. Second, we don’t always have context. Before my engagement manager asked me about facilitation, I literally had no idea what it was. And finally, my boss went the extra mile in terms of connecting talent to an opportunity. In addition to making space for me on the project to use the strengths I had to contribute to the team, because she was committed to watching me develop and grow she connected me a step further so I could keep practicing and honing that skill that she saw me exhibit so well on the project.
That’s one small example of how talent spotting changed the course and trajectory of my career.
As managers and leaders, our job is to be talent spotters. It’s to acknowledge and see people beyond their LinkedIn profile’s Workday records and job descriptions. It’s about using one of our most valuable assets (our attention) , focusing it on our employees, being able to share with them what we observe and how it’s making an impact, and then using that insight to put people in positions to keep succeeding and growing.
You may not even realize it, but you’re sitting on a gold mine of talent - the question becomes, what are you going to do to maximize it to help your people and your team win?
So how do we get started with talent spotting in the workplace? Here are a few suggestions:
#1: Proactively look to find the strengths that others exhibit
Whether you’re a manager or individual contributor, building in time to think about where you’ve seen others exhibit talents and strengths will make this a muscle and skill of yours that you can consistently do over time. This requires you as a manager or leader to be directly in contact or observing your employees and their work. Incorporating moments in your workflow to directly observe what your employees are doing and how they are working provides you with ample time to spot their talents and strengths in the context of their work. While some of this will be synchronous such as in a meeting, or when directly working together, there are certainly asynchronous moments (ex: e-mail communications, reviewing their deliverables, etc) as well.
#2: Provide in-context and observable feedback when you see it
Once you’ve started observing and focusing your attention, the next step requires you to provide some in-context feedback, ideally on what’s working. While it can be tempting to want to focus on what they need to improve, focusing on strengths has a lot of benefits for learning and growth. As Ashley Goodall and Marcus Buckingham write in their piece The Feedback Fallacy, “learning happens when we see how we might do something better by adding some new nuance or expansion to our own understanding. Learning rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well, not on what we’re doing poorly.” Telling someone a year after they worked on a project that they did a great job isn’t nearly as helpful as telling them in the moment when they used their negotiation skills to lead the project to a great outcome right after it happened. (Note: Feedback is a meaty topic, so if you want to learn why it’s so hard to do, check out this and this, but TLDR, stick to positive feedback when you can!)
#3) Align talent to opportunities
If your manager, this is a core part of your job, and you should constantly be thinking about “how do I align my people’s strengths to projects and tasks that drive our outcomes?” For those of you who are not managers, you can think about this on your own individual level of thinking more deeply about how you are using your own talents in your existing set of responsibilities, and how you could use them in new projects or responsibilities. Even just doing an audit of how you are using your strengths today can be a great discussion point in your next 1:1 with your manager. If you’re not sure where you can even start, consider the following examples of moments in the employee lifecycle where you can incorporate this naturally.
Onboarding a new employee
Aligning projects based on a career conversation
New promotions
Re-orgs
Strategy or fiscal year planning
Quarterly reviews
Finishing a large project or initiative
Talent spotting exists because we as humans are not always aware of how others see us in the world. And in a constantly changing and evolving world of work, talent spotting helps us maximize the skills and potential of each employee, which allows you to evolve your team as the business evolves.
By investing in talent spotting like my engagement manager did, we can help the people who need it most (teammates, direct reports, etc) see their strengths and talents, help them improve, and put them in positions to contribute that lead to better outcomes, for them as well as for the team.
If you’re looking for some help for your learning and development, leadership development or professional development for this year, I’d love to work with you: Here is how I might be able to assist:
Team Trainings & Professional Development: Happy to facilitate training or professional development opportunity for your team & organization - common topics include: influence without authority, navigating change, hybrid working, and others.
Consulting & Advisory Work - Are you looking to improve the ways of working of your team or organization or looking for guidance on remote/hybrid work? Let’s chat about how we can work together
Leadership & Learning Programs: Formal training and leadership development in your company, such as new manager or new leader training, or skill-based programs.
Feel free to contact me directly for more details!
Have a great week!
Al