All talent is great. Learned talent is excellent. Natural talent is exceptional. I believe that peoplecan get to talent both ways, but inborn talent will always outperform learned talent when it’s tested (by pressure and other x-factors) because it’s the manifestation of hard-wired instinct defining our natural survival patterns, thus more unflappable. We finally have great diagnostics9 and pinpoint-accurate vocabulary to describe different kinds of natural talent themes, which has opened up a whole new way for us to understand and accurately leverage inborn ability.
The Talent Brake
When you’re unconsciously competent to the point of real talent, how do you explain how to do it to someone who’s clueless? If you’re a NASCAR driver, how do you suddenly teach someone who has never been behind a wheel before?
It’s hard. You don’t think about the steps of what you do anymore, so how can you explain them? This is what happens when we take a star who’s so great that we’ve decided to have them train or supervise others. We think they’ll keep accelerating forward, but then everything slows down. Maybe that happened to you when you first got people under you to manage. You knew how your reports should do something because you could do it easily, quickly and in your sleep. But could you teach it? Define success for it? Outline all the micro-steps to it? Uh oh.
Most leaders begin as talented contributors who excelled. We have a tendency to take people who are really skilled at something and unintentionally move them away from doing that something. We want to make their impact bigger, so we promote them to management or leadership of that something. A talented designer becomes a creative director, where they no longer design, but instead manage people who might not have talent anywhere close to their own. A gifted engineer is promoted to lead younger engineers. It happens in every industry, in every kind of job. And, in a way, it makes sense.
But it changes the game completely for them. It feels like slamming on the brakes when they were in cruise mode. All of a sudden, they’re back to Conscious-Incompetence—not with the original area of performance, but with this new thing called training or leading someone else in what I don’t even have to think about, which they don’t know how to do.
The Natural Talent Mistake
This brake-effect is even worse with natural talent. When someone arrives on the scene with the innate ability to hit it out of the park right away, it’s a beautiful thing. We’re wowed, and they’re psyched. There are few things more satisfying than doing what we do well instinctively AND it being the right fit for what someone else needs. It’s a holy grail combination. Like Michael Jordan for the Bulls, a person at that level, left to their own devices, will outperform our expectations and thrive doing what they do best.
Unfortunately, we often make the mistake of elevating someone like that as the model for everyone else to match AND the teacher/trainer/mentor for the wide-eyed newbies. MISTAKE! This move usually goes horribly. The superstar gets annoyed and feels slowed down, the newbies get intimidated because they feel they’ll never get to that level (and few will), and not much valuable training actually happens. Because…
That natural superstar started at Unconscious-Competent, rather than learning their way to it. So they’ve never had consciousness to explain how or why they do what they do… they just know they can do it if you give them the right setup for it. So asking them to teach it is an exercise in frustration because they don’t have words, steps or frameworks to break down what you’re wowed by. The best trainers, mentors and coaches of anything are those who understand the nuance of what it takes to be awesome at something, AND can articulate, explain and teach it from the clarity of Conscious Competence. Michael Jordan learned how to lead and coach his teammates because Phil Jackson taught him how to bring Consciousness to his Competence and articulate it to his teammates as a captain. And your stars can get that too. NOW what?
Here’s how to accelerate the process and leverage your talent into leadership:
You
You’re talented at driving. But were you always? Nah, you learned your way there. In your professional life, you’re pretty used to being smooth, not bumpy and messy so much anymore. Yet that’s what you might feel a bit here with this new area of competence- influencing or leading in this new way I keep proposing.
• Give yourself space to go through the process and be a learner. As you learn the concepts in this book, keep coming back to the UC-UI process, and remind yourself that you’re in your own process (probably multiple ones at once).
• Map your process along the way. Throughout the book, chart your process and plot where each tool is and how it’s moved in your competence. “Hey—check me out! I’m actually Unconsciously Competent now in addressing WIIFM all the time!” If you’re reflective, keep track in a notebook the things you’re trying, how it feels, what you’re learning/tweaking, and what response you’re getting.
• Get perspective on yourself. Intentionally pan out to see if you can spot your own unconscious-competent patterns as you lead, react and interact. The more conscious you are about what you’re doing, the more intentional choice you have about the best next move rather than just going on auto-pilot all the time.
You With Them
They’re in their own processes, which may or may not be moving at the pace you’d like. While it can feel like a roller coaster for them, your influence makes all the difference between a terrifying or awesome ride.
• Empathize. As you watch them clueless, stuttering, smoothing out or soaring, remember what it was like to be in those spots, your little voice screaming in your head. Slow your Unconscious- Competent self down to be patient with their process. What do you wish someone had told you, shown you or done for you?
• Highlight the wins. They may not see their own progress in the moment because they’re so focused on what they still don’t know ahead. So, you be the one to call out progress. Even pros need the fans to celebrate every yard gained, not just the touchdowns.
• Cheer. While they’re in the learning process, their little voice will mess with them. It’s up to you to drown out their little voice with your support from the outside. Tell them it’s okay for the roller coaster to lurch, that they’ve got it, that you believe in them.
• Set up your Talent. When you’re considering stand-out rock stars of talent on your team for leadership, first ask yourself how they got there. Learned or Wired? The learned talent can get to consciousness quicker, since they were just there not so long ago. The naturals will have a bigger transition, so really assess where their ultimate best fit is before moving them. To get them to their next level of leadership, invite them into a process to become a leader—more Conscious about their Competence so they can lead others in it. Pair them with a hungry, strong CI learner with the directive of getting inside the star’s head, noticing and documenting patterns in what they do naturally to find repeatable, teachable steps in what they do. They’ll both learn!
You can help others take leaps forward in their process and mastery as you take on your own. That’s your WIIFM. That’s what you’ll get out of all of what follows. You’ll learn how to tap into your team’s greatness, inspire them as a leader and make them better.
Trust me.
Notes:
“How often do you get to be the ultimate coach, able to create and find that greatness…where people can be even better, smarter than they might otherwise show up?”
You’ll need some different