Is talent overrated?

People aren’t born with talent — it takes 10,000 hours of solid work to produce a ‘genius’: Author

By Dave Crisp

On the subject of interesting new books, I stumbled on another, Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, in an airport. Just had to have it and couldn’t put it down until the end. Like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, one could say the main premise is it takes 10,000 hours of solid work to produce a “genius.”

Colvin refers to Gladwell, but takes the subject in a useful new direction. What he focuses on is debunking the common belief some people are simply “born with talent.” He covers eye-opening stories of “geniuses” that can clearly be explained as due to hard work and consistent, life-long application to a particular subject.

Of course, if you aren’t the person who started singing, dancing or playing the violin at the age of three, and kept at it religiously into your teens, that doesn’t change the fact you aren’t likely to perform at Carnegie Hall. But what it does impress on us is that continuous lifelong learning is the route to becoming better and better at whatever our chosen talent area is — and those who don’t do it are destined for mediocrity. Of course, we’re all born with or learn some skills early, but to be really good at something a tremendous amount of practice is necessary.

When you choose to pursue what you love, practice comes naturally. You simply do more of what you like, so getting people into jobs they really enjoy is critical in talent management and leadership.

Another key learning to draw from this for organization strategy is that internal candidates for leadership have a distinct edge due to longer experience within the industry and operation. Colvin makes a very good start, if not a totally researched argument, that their “practice” is hard for outsiders to duplicate. It’s an interesting challenge to the idea that innovation requires outsiders to be brought in. He acknowledges the truth is that both are needed in some proportion. Insiders can get stale and simply repeat the same routines year by year, learning and developing nothing better, but they are the backbone of the operation. And setting an outsider in the CEO role, where everyone has to do as told by the new person, rarely works.

Colvin promotes the idea of deliberate practice — choosing a target area to improve and working hard, trying hard. He points out most people do not do this. I can certainly confirm that many appointed to leadership positions don’t do this with the skills of leadership. These appointees rarely get training and even more rarely practice to improve after the first years, which are mostly pure trial and error. A few have some prior skills, but hardly the level of practice Colvin finds necessary.

Instead many managers settle into routines that get them by. They apply their own brand of psychology of handling people – “don’t give too much praise or they’ll get lazy; keep them on their toes; challenge everything because people can always do better than their first effort.”

Many executives apply such shorthand guidelines blindly to every one of their people as if every person responds to the same approaches. They argue doing otherwise “takes too much time.” Well, Gladwell and Colvin are expecting 10,000 hours or 10 years — not just of experience, but of deliberate practice at this critical skill that most people don’t start developing until their mid-20s at the earliest. Sure they may have had some leadership experiences to copy or draw on from earlier days and some are truly insightful, but there is rarely dedicated or guided practice in these key skills. What are we doing to promote the extensive learning periods and continuous struggle to grow that this reveals is required to turn out the best?

Dave Crisp is a Toronto-based consultant with a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co. where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.crispstrategies.com.