Talent Is Water

One time early my dating relationship with my wife, I noticed her goldfish tank was clouded with algae. The tank sat in direct sunlight and had bloomed into a giant green smoothie. As an earnest prospective boyfriend, I offered to clean it, and she agreed.

The next day she walked into her living room and all the fish were floating on the surface, dead. Turns out, using a kitchen sponge to clean the glass is a bad idea because they contain toxins fatal to aquatic life. Worse, it says so right on the label! We use those sponges to clean our drinking glasses without getting sick, so why did the same sponge kill the fish?

Most of us know water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, and it's pretty obvious that it differs from air. A working knowledge of water doesn't require us to understand chemistry and most of the time we operate with water at the level of unconscious competence. We drink it, we bathe, we water the lawn, and all is well. It's only when we start messing with specific uses like fish tanks that we need to understand how tiny additives alter the value of the substance.

Talent is to organizations as water is to the human body. Without talent, an organization is a dried husk. Most hiring managers have a working knowledge of talent the way they have a working knowledge of water: it's a daily element they interact with in every aspect of their business. Yet in my experience most managers don't have an appropriate scientific understanding of talent to fit the right person in the right place doing the right things. The number of "using-a-sponge-to-clean-a-fishtank" errors is astounding... and it's an expensive lack of expertise.

Practices from the Middle Ages

We know a great deal about the science of people at work, but most companies run talent practices that were invented centuries ago. Managing talent is often like moving chess pieces around a board, as if the people involved had no say in where, when, or how they work. Recruitment, selection, evaluation, and promotion all have well-known flaws, yet remain in place even with success rates barely better than a coin toss.

Nearly every company uses résumés to filter candidates. Résumés were designed as a form of introduction, not a means of evaluating talent. Their invention is credited to Leonardo da Vinci during the Renaissance when career mobility was just becoming a thing. A letter from a lord or noble let an enterprising person travel to faraway lands and be seen favorably upon arrival. The holder was legitimized by association. Who we know and where we've worked are still what the résumé signals, and they are not the best indicators of what we can do.

Almost everyone agrees a résumé is a poor indicator of fit, so companies bolster with interviews, but research shows the common "tell me about yourself" interview has little effect on accurate selection. Interviewers are subject to many biases and rarely trained in structured techniques. Even structured techniques are deeply flawed. Some estimates put résumés plus interviews at around 60 percent accuracy. Why do so many businesses keep doing something so clearly inadequate? The boring answer: something is better than nothing and alternatives are not obvious or as simple.

A word that meant balance

The word talent comes from the ancient Greek talanton, which means balance. In ancient Greece a talent was a standard unit of weight used to balance a two-armed scale. The original talent was a measure of gold or silver, precious metals that don't corrode, so they could be trusted for a fair exchange by weight. Somewhere along the way, society adopted the idea that the skills we use to deliver commercial value in exchange for pay should be called talents, and the collective ability to do the work of a company should be called talent. Talent management is the company's technique for harnessing skills to generate value.

Here is a refreshed definition, built to enable a more accurate fit between the demands of work and the supply of human behavior.

Talent is the currency for exchanging what companies need and what people offer in order to create commercial value.

And talent is a compound with four required elements to be a stable predictor of value:

Talent = Skills + Attributes + Experience + Interests

A skill is a pattern of behavior that produces a successful outcome in a specific situation, and on spectrum of difficulty. Evidence of skillfulness includes error rate, independence from instruction, managing scope, risk, complexity, or volume, and handling the unexpected. Attributes are a set aligned values, constructive traits, and contributing attitudes that define the quality of an effort. Experience is the essential prior accomplishment required for the current agreement to succeed, measured by impact and frequency of completion, not years; time is a poor measure of experience because it doesn't capture either. Interests are the additional requirements, conditions, and terms that define a specific exchange between a person and a company. When interests are aligned, intrinsic motivation is activated.

Managed as a liquid

Talent is fluid, so it should be managed as a liquid, not a solid. Organizations are permeable, so talent can flow in and out and skills can be mixed to match the work. IDEO did this successfully using a weekly staffing meeting that operated something like a trading floor. Project leaders came looking to staff their teams, talent managers offered ready and able designers, and enterprise resources looked across the communities and the portfolio to find patterns, develop supply, and ensure quality over time. Individuals could lobby for projects, and project debriefs fed back on every team member. It was transparent, specific, and fluid, and it worked because everyone in the room could speak about assignments and skills with precision.

That precision is what defines scientific talent management. A skill description must include enough of a behavior pattern to be observable in context: watching a hockey player push a puck through a goalie's legs is basic shooting skill; doing it in a professional context is a different degree of difficulty and perhaps an additional skill. A complete assessment needs evidence of the skill and the context, and a clear sense of how much of the skill is present. Not just skillful, but how skillful, and how often.

Judging a person by their handshake, the way they dress, or how they answer your favorite question is operating at the general use level of talent. Persisting in this faulty approach signals that talent doesn't matter and could lead to toxic shock in an organization. Lack of precision is paid for with poor fit, turnover, and missed opportunity. Fit requires evidence of skillfulness, not general pedigree. That is the difference between drinking water and keeping fish alive.