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“Talent Whisperers” and Other Career Development Trends

Posted on | January 15, 2010 | 1 Comment

Like the guy looking for the perfect country song formula, most of us are looking for a formula for successful career development. In his book the Talent Code, Daniel Coyle claims the formula for a successful career depends on three crucial factors:

1. Practicing slowly, deeply, and attentively—operating right at the raw edges of your ability, making errors and fixing them. It’s a zone he calls Deep Practice, and he claims it increases skill acquisition by ten times over regular practice.
2. Get motivated and release unconscious energy, a process that he calls Ignition.
3. Get coached by a “talent whisperer”, usually a quiet, usually older, usually low-key person (didn’t this person used to be called a mentor?).

According to Coyle one of these factors isn’t enough by itself—you need all three. Through the right kind of practice, you are literally altering the electrical circuits of your brain and you are growing it. Just like a car engine is useless without a fuel tank, so, according to Coyle, Deep Practice is useless without motivation. Combine them, and things take off.

Coyle’s conclusions are similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s in his book Outliers. Gladwell claims that the best way to achieve mastery in any field of human endeavor is to spend 10,000 hours honing your skills. The greatest athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians and scientists emerge only after spending at least three hours a day for a decade mastering their chosen field. Ability, according to Gladwell, is just one factor in success—work ethic, luck, a strong support base and even being born in the right month play a far larger role than you would expect.

So putting it all together, the formula for career success seems to be a combination of:

1. Practice
2. Motivation
3. Luck
4. Getting born at the right time
5. And having a “Talent Whisperer”

I’m not sure the recipe for the perfect county song is fully there yet. You’ve seen it here first folks!

Career Stages

Posted on | January 13, 2010 | No Comments

Research suggests that employees’ progress through at least four distinct career stages as they mature and gain experience. Each stage has unique concerns, needs and challenges.

The four stages are:

1. The establishment stage (ages 21 to 26)
2. The advancement stage (ages 26 to 40)
3. The maintenance stage (ages 40 to 60)
4. The withdrawal stages (ages 60 and above)

The different career stages represent a broad developmental perspective on people’s jobs. Organizations who take a long term view of training, developing, and retaining their employees establish career planning process that takes account of these stages.

People in the establishment stage want to find out about the alternatives that are open to them. They are not sure of their interests or capabilities and they are often unsure of the skills they need to develop for advancement.

People in the advancement stage want to know how they can advance more effectively. They want to know the long term options open to them, and they want more exposure and visibility.

People at the maintenance stage want to help others to become established and advance. They may want to reassess what they do and decide if they should redirect their careers.

Finally, people at the withdrawal stage want to develop interests outside of work. Their focus is financial security and in many cases they want to find out how they can continue to help others.

Do your organization’s training and development processes cater to the distinct needs for these employee groups? If not, maybe a rethink would be worthwhile!

The Time for Workforce Planning for the Economic Upturn is Now!

Posted on | January 12, 2010 | 3 Comments

Ten years from now about 80% of the native born US workforce will be over 50. Here’s the problem—when these workers retire there won’t be nearly enough young people entering the workforce to take their place. It is just a demographic fact. The problem won’t just be lack of bodies—it will be the lack of skills, knowledge, and experience that walk out the door every time someone retires.

This takes time and money to replace and in the mean time we are at risk of loosing our competitive advantage overseas to the BRICK economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Korea). As hard as it is to envision, given our current economic climate, organizations need to start thinking seriously about training and retaining younger workers and gaining the continued commitment of older workers. They can do this by creating a more flexible attraction and retention programs and approaches to retirement that allows people to continue to contribute well into their sixties and seventies. Putting in longer term workforce planning strategies now could provide a real competitive edge when the upturn comes.

Changing Your Ideas about Employee Motivation

Posted on | January 11, 2010 | No Comments

Most managers believe that the best way to motivate employees is with external rewards—money, perks, and other dangling carrots to get people enthusiastic about their job. But according to Daniel Pink in his new book “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates US” motivation is created internally not externally and depends on peoples ability to make decisions about their own lives, to learn and create new things, and to better themselves.

His book draws on more than forty years of research on motivation and claims that, while the carrot and stick approach may have worked successfully in the 20th century, this approach will work far less effectively in addressing today’s challenges of motivating employees. Pink examines three elements of “true motivation,” which he calls autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and offers some surprising techniques for putting these into action.
If you want to challenge your assumptions about motivating employees then this book is a must read.

Mentoring is a Key Responsibility of Management

Posted on | December 2, 2009 | 2 Comments

One of the many duties of a manager is the professional development of his or her employees. Mentoring employees helps them to perform better, improves morale, and can help your business succeed. Most employees yearn to grow their skills with the aid of a knowledgeable, more senior member of the organization. Here are some tips to set the mentoring process in motion:

• Set the stage for a dialogue. Call a meeting or send an e-mail informing your staff that mentoring is available. Let them know you will match them with an in-house mentor who will help them plan how to reach their career goals. Encourage your employees to think about what they’d most like to develop with the input of a more senior staff member. Remind your senior staffers that they, too, can benefit from the mentoring relationship from the influx of new ideas that can be stimulated by a junior colleague’s fresh approach to projects.
• Buddy up. Consider it a kind of matchmaking—send your staffers and more senior members, or mentors, off to discuss past experiences and future goals over lunch or coffee. Pairing those who have fewer years in the business with those who’ve got a wealth of proven experience is a great way to get a fresh exchange of ideas flowing. These pairings needn’t be exactly in line along the hierarchy; all that’s important is that the two parties can learn something from one another. It’s also a good idea to take personalities into account, if possible, in matching employees with mentors.
• Listen Openly. For one-on-one conversations between junior and senior staffers, encourage both parties to abandon their preconceptions. Instead of “right” or “wrong” ways of meeting challenges, encourage them to approach problems or projects by finding ways that work to replace ways that don’t. Neutralizing this language promotes an open dialogue in which both parties’ ideas are equally valid. This parity will encourage the conversation to move freely and ensure that both the senior and junior staffer emerge with new ideas.
• Think Strategically. One of the best by-products of mentoring is the slew of novel approaches it can engender. Once your staffers have met to discuss their professional goals and new methods of achieving them, be open to applying these ideas. They may not always work, but with patience and perseverance on all sides, successes will be achieved and staffers will see that their mentoring conversations produce tangible, actionable results that enhance their performance.

While mentoring may seem at first to be a one-way street, benefiting the recipient of the mentoring, it invigorates everyone involved. Mentors are stimulated by the active need for their skills, while they can learn from the junior employee, who brings a fresh outlook and new ideas to what might feel like old hat for the senior staffer. Mentoring can boost communication, inject new ideas into old formulas, and promote a satisfying, more open work environment—all of which benefits your bottom line.

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