Thoughts
THE POWER OF TALENT
Dear Growth Partners,
‘A players hire A players, but B players hire C players and C players hire D players. It doesn’t take long to get to Z players. The trickle down effect causes bozo explosions in companies.’ Steve Jobs
When Steve Jobs communicated his view on talent, he probably was not planning for it to become one of the most heard mantras regarding people’s performance in organisations. And of course it is incomplete, even questionnable in some aspects, yet full of insights. Let’s agree on the definition of an A player as an ambitious performer.
BACK TO THE CORE CURRENCIES OF GROWTH: CAPITAL, TIME, ENERGY
How you decide to allocate your capital, time and energy belongs to you. How that capital, that time and that energy is put to work once delegated to your management, collaborators, external partners (or even yourself if you work on your own) becomes a critical proxy for your future success. That is where the context of internal and external talent becomes mission critical.
Given the proper context A players have a much higher probability to behave as A players. Even in the best of contexts C players have an exponentially smaller chance to behave as A or B players (there is not only performance but also competence and others to compensate for).
Many management schools are primarily focused on compensating for weaknesses, rather than growing zones of talent, or even better, zones of genius. As a consequence A players are often neglected and gradually loose their uniqueness, their genius. It takes a strong culture to incentivise people to hire better and smarter than them, it takes an even stronger one to have people realise they are themselves not performing at the A level and nevertheless seek to hire from that talent pool, with or without help.
When you’ve found your talent give them the framework in which they are expected to behave with excellence and creativity and out of which they are not supposed to exercice their mandate. Then get out of their and your own way and focus on your personal genius zone.
This folds nicely into a narrative with another Steve Jobs quote: “it doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
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