Sometimes, high-quality talent exists within an organization, but that person is completely overlooked. There are many reasons for this, from underrepresentation and poor management to a lack of self-promotion and involvement in big projects for that employee. We spend time building talent and concocting new approaches to finding talent, but talent is often under our noses.
As Fast Company cofounder Bill Taylor notes in a piece in Harvard Business Review, "Leaders everywhere are desperate for new insights, new products, new sources of energy and creativity. One way to find those things is to embrace new ideas about who gets to contribute and how, whether they are inside or outside the organization. The talents and passions of your colleagues and customers are too valuable to waste."
Taylor illustrates the success of an experiment at the Baltimore Museum of Art: Letting 17 of the museum’s security guards curate an exhibit of their own. It's hard to conceive of a similar experiment in a traditional organization without acknowledging the talent.
What’s the roadblock, then? Why is talent typically overlooked? Some major reasons:
- Most managers are more concerned with tasks, deadlines, and deliverables than personnel development, especially in the middle ranks.
- Most managers are relatively busy, managing up instead of down and thinking about talent development.
- Managers have trouble recognizing talent. Some have trouble thinking outside the box about what the business does and how it best operates. It’s easier and more comfortable to put people in boxes. A security guard is a security guard. He’s not a docent.
- Let’s be honest: Talent scares many managers because it represents someone potentially coming for their jobs.
Here are steps we can take to avoid overlooking talent within our ranks and even cultivate it:
- Connect with employees.
- Listen to what they are interested in.
- Give them a chance to do it and evaluate. Let them do what interests them if it doesn’t interfere with their core function. If it does, return them to their core function.
These bullet points can help you discover untapped potential in overlooked talent. Of course, these are relatively simple. Most overlooked talent starts with the organization’s culture. At Culture Partners, we think of culture as four stacked elements, top to bottom, which we call the results pyramid:
1. Your experiences at work and with colleagues lead to …
2. Your beliefs about working there, the leadership team, and more, lead to …
3. The actions you take, which lead to …
4. The results you can achieve.
When talent feels overlooked—one worker at a cybersecurity company asked more than a dozen times to transfer into marketing operations before quitting—employees’ experiences suffer, which means their beliefs about the organization spiral, leading to negative fallout in both actions and results. On the flip side, when managers feel they can’t find the right people internally and expend effort looking externally, their opinions of the company also falter. Both sides suffer when simple one-on-one inquiries such as “What do you want to do?” or “How could we stretch your role a bit given the current makeup of the team and its needs?” could solve these issues.
Focus on culture and discuss employees’ wants, needs, purpose, and goals with them. A simple discussion can be more significant than you think for you, the employee, and the organization’s future.
