Competition, Coaching and Talent

Coaching and Talent

People say, “There is only one winner, and everyone else is a loser.”  There is nothing inherently wrong with this statement if we refute the common misperception that losing has no redeeming qualities.  Failure and loss are a part of life.  Only in life and death competitions is there strictly a loser in the zero-sum sense that most people imagine.

Our understanding of skill and talent identification and nurture is deep and rich and productive. Likewise, marrying talent with aptitude and drive yields results beyond imagination.

Talent identification

Consider simple reading courses. At the beginning of a reading course some students will read at 400 words per minute (wpm), while others are reading at 800. If we teach them all reading and comprehension techniques, the students reading at 400 wpm can often learn to read at 800 wpm. But some of the students reading at 800 wpm will learn to read at 3,000 wpm.  In the end though, every student should be proud of their progress.

Specialization and allocation

I have been on both sports and office teams that have doubled their previous years’ performances simply by re-arranging their members to better suit their talents:

• Does your organization have engineers writing manuals?
• Perhaps you are considering promoting your best sales person in a decade to management because you wish to give her more money, or a promotion. Are you sure that is the most efficient use of her talent? Is she mentoring anyone?
• Do you know who your most creative programmer is? Hopefully he is not in a maintenance position.
• Do you have an absolutely genius widget expert? Hopefully she is not setting up Excel databases, or answering questions about the color of the widget.
• On a basketball team, the short guard does not play defense where the tallest center is most effective. And the best player rarely becomes a great coach.

Deming and other management theorists observed that white collar professionals and especially their executives remain the most inefficient producers by almost any measure. In this regard the Peter Principle may have some validity to the extent that we do not coach them on how to use their talents in their new jobs.  All too often we then compound this promotion mistake by making another one and firing them, thereby losing the talent and spirit they contributed in the first place.

The challenge of coaching

Some organizations do a wonderful job of internalizing these team and coach concepts. But in general our dissemination of such powerful models has been relatively unrealized given the fantastic gains available. It begins with our children and their coaches. Children and young adults play a variety of sports all over the world. And yet the next Pele is often overlooked and never developed. The same might be said of our artists. The reason is principally due to our lack of approach.

Much denigration of competition and its concepts are the result of the effects of inadequate coaching or nurturing, or misusing talent. Our training and nurture of leaders and management is virtually non-existent given the importance of the position. Too much attention has been given the concept of the visionary leader, and not nearly enough to having the right person doing the right job on the right team, and then enabling them heart and soul, to do it. That is the essence of competition.

References

Photo by Jahem on Flickr