<aside> ☝️ Focus on each person’s strengths.
Manage around their weaknesses.
</aside>
The technical parts of roles—knowledge, skills—can be taught and learned.
Talents—things like willpower, the desire to do amazing work, perseverance, and the like—cannot be taught or learned. Talents are a person’s patterns of behavior. They are a person’s innate motivations. Talents are the reason why different people will react vastly differently to the same stimuli.
When we Select for Talent in our hiring process, we’re looking for the right talents for the role. Talents are the driving force behind an individual’s performance. It’s not that experience, brainpower, and the like are unimportant—it’s just that how someone is driven, how someone thinks, and how they build relationships—are much more important.
But, nobody is talented at everything. And everybody has weaknesses, too. If we believe that talents are resistant to change, then talent-based weaknesses are near impossible to fix.
Don’t waste time trying to fix what’s not there.
Pull out the talents colleagues already have and do more with those talents.
That is hard enough on its own.
Cultivate the strengths of your colleagues. Each person has a unique set of talents that will make them shine in one role, but make them look totally incompetent in another. Figure out what they are, emphasize those strengths, and put your team members in roles where those strengths can shine. Help colleagues to be self-aware of their strengths and weaknesses, so they know what to lean into, and what to lean away from.
Your ultimate goal with your team members is to help them to gradually select and change roles that increasingly better fit their natural talents.
Manage around their weaknesses. Don’t try to make everyone perfect. Each person’s talents (and weaknesses) are enduring and resistant to change. Know your colleagues and help them to find the right fit.
It goes against common logic, but invest in your most productive and talented team members.
Talent is a multiplier.
Spend the most time with your most productive colleagues.
The point of management isn’t to control or to instruct.
Instead, it is to be a catalyst that turns talent into performance.
Don’t spend your time controlling or instructing someone. Spend your time figuring out how to unleash that colleague’s distinct and unique talents.
Figure out how to set unique expectations for each unique individual that you work with. Figure out how they can use their talents more, and avoid situations that bump up against their weaknesses.
The better the talent fit, and the more energy and attention you put in lining it up with the work people are doing, the greater the outcome.