(From Forbes) -- Perhaps we’re just over-engineering this.

Attracting talented people, engaging them, inspiring high performance, rewarding and retaining them – maybe it’s become a leadership obsession and we’re struggling to see the forest for the trees?

Today’s leaders effectively need a tertiary degree in talent management. The science of people leadership has snowballed into a rather large mound of frameworks, tools, processes and systems – delivered through MBAs, DBAs, leadership seminars, forums, programs, technologies and networks – all designed to manage that elusive, slippery, challenging team of talented people working with you. Is it really that hard?

How much art, how much science?

Let’s agree that it’s not exactly simple to manage talent effectively, and some leaders definitely do a much better job at it than others. Because effective leadership requires succeeding through others, it brings with it the problem of divesting control, building capabilities, providing direction, guidance and inspiration to people other than yourself. To the rescue have come a plethora of scientific processes aimed to guide the hapless leader: defined competencies, performance criteria, psychometric assessments, structured feedback, bell curves, 4-quadrant matrices, 9-box grids, circumplexes, weightings and ratings.

I wonder how we managed before? When instead of mastering processes, you honed your innate social skills to read someone’s mood, empathize with their highs and lows, have conversations, exchange experiences and communicate even without words. As a human being, that’s actually what we are designed to do. Scientific processes have only been with us a few hundred years, talent management processes a few decades. But learning to interact, influence and engage other humans goes back some 200,000 years to our origins. That’s a lot of genetic refinement. Social cognitive neuroscientists such as Drs Matthew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger of UCLA are continuously producing more evidence of the fundamental nature of social interaction in their laboratories and in fieldwork. It seems that effectively connecting with others is not an option, rather a basic tenet of human survival.

Time to go back to basics. If we stop overthinking the business of managing talent and focus on some simple truths, we may find we are better at this than we give ourselves credit for.

High performers don’t need motivating

Think about the last time you threw yourself at a challenge and worked your way through it. Who did you need to get you out of bed and motivate you to perform? No one. So what makes you think that you need to motivate others? High performers don’t strive for poor performance or even mediocrity. Self-motivation is as natural to the DNA of a high performer as water is to a duck. If motivation is an issue in your team perhaps the real question is do you have the right people in it? The simple truth may be that you have players among you who are in the wrong job today and the best thing you could do is to assist them rectify this underlying problem. At any rate, draw on the intrinsic motivation of your people who are driven to achieve, recognize and reward them and let the magic happen.

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