It’s Skills – Not Talent
My friend Raja is a professional Guitarist and a brilliant one at that ! One day after a magnificent performance years ago I gave him what I thought was a compliment . Raja, I said, “you’re so talented ! “ Thanks,“ he said, “But I’m actually not more talented than most people, I’ve just worked very very hard to get to where I am today.” That struck me that what I saw as a compliment was actually an insult. Raja didn’t roll out of bed knowing how to play the guitar, he spent decades perfecting his craft and he deserved recognition for all of that hard work.
This experience stayed with me when I thought about music and art and all of those things that we showcase in talent shows . But then I noticed a disturbing business trend…companies no longer talked about employees and employee development , they talked about talent . Instead of a head of recruiting we have a Vice President of talent acquisition. We talk about talent management and talent assessments and we moan a lot a lot about talent shortages. This is a problem because talent is something you either have or you don’t have . I can’t wave my magic wand and give you musical talent or a mathematical talent or any kind of talent. It’s inborn. And when we use the word talent to refer to employees what we’re implying is you need to have the knowledge skills and abilities necessary to do the job perfectly from day one. This is how we end up with crazy talent shortages.
Peter Capelli, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania shared a story of a company that had 29 thousand applicants for a single engineering position. 29 thousand people ! People who thought they were qualified for the job applied and yet their applicant tracking system determines that not one of them was qualified to do this job. Now we all know that these criteria chosen by a human who was searching for talent are completely ridiculous. I could probably find three or four in my building that could do that job with just a little bit of training.
Well, this is frustrating from a career perspective it also means that we’re not investing in ourselves. If we believe that doing music or high level math requires talent and we don’t have that natural talent we won’t even try. We’ll say I could never do that .Well here’s the secret you probably could. This isn’t to say that natural talent and ability don’t play roles… of course they do ! Mozart wrote his first minuet at five! That’s some serious natural talent but it took Lin-Manuel Miranda a full year to write a single song for his musical Hamilton. Well I don’t doubt he has natural talent and what he did was a lot of work.
So what’s the solution ?
We need to stop using the word talent when we mean skills.
Nobody comes out of the womb knowing how to do cloud computing. What we want to hire our people with skills. Well what’s the difference between talent and skills. Skills are something you gain through hard work and dedication. Could I learn to paint ? , could I learn to ride a horse? Of course could I learn all that ! Cloud Computing ? of course ! Could I learn to
run a marathon? Well , I could but it’s doubtful that I’m ever going to win an Olympic gold medal in track because I do lack natural talent in that area.
When we’re hiring though we need to not only look at does this person already knows how to do it , but can they learn it ? How can you tell if someone can learn something ? Well have they learned hard things in the past ? Do they know similar things ? Do they have a history of recovering from failure ….somebody that has failed and then succeeded has demonstrated that they have the grit and guts necessary to do hard things. We Shouldn’t just look for someone that has never failed but always succeeded, well that’s kind of society’s goal. We all want to hire that person with the perfect resume but when Google took a look at what made great employees, perfect grades were not at the top of that list . What was? listening, critical thinking and problem-solving !
When we remove talent from the equation it’s easy to see that just about anybody can learn just about anything with hard work and dedication. We don’t have to worry if we’re math people or language people… we just work at what we want. Talent isn’t what really matters – it’s hard work and a desire to learn. So, the next time you’re tempted to say to someone wow you’re so talented try “Wow you must have put a tremendous amount of work into that “ ….because that’s the truth.
