Successful Talent Capitalization is How We’ll Create the Future of Work

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell described a talent capitalization rate as:

“The percentage of people in any given situation who have the ability to make the most of their potential.”

Knowing what to do is crucial for making any strategic decision. But no strategy can achieve its full potential unless the people tasked with its execution know how to bring their best performance to the job.

As organizations move to reset and rebuild workplaces that work better, they have an opportunity to improve their talent capitalization rate and create a true high-performance culture.

The Meaning of High Performance

High performance is that powerful state where human beings exhibit almost flawless execution of the necessary skills, actions, and capabilities to successfully meet their challenges and achieve their goals. When we’re performing at our best, our knowledge, momentum, confidence, and focus seem to intuitively flow and work together. But achieving peak performance is no easy feat.

It’s especially hard to do reliably or at will, even if all other conditions are just right. Ask any athlete whose performance peaked at practice the day before but flagged at precisely the wrong moment during the actual competition, despite years of intense preparation and training.

Performance can also unexpectedly falter, especially under pressure. Even highly skilled people with impressive track records sometimes deliver below-average performances. According to Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, when such failures happen, we often say these people “panicked” or, to use the sports colloquialism, “choked.”

If high performance is hard to reliably achieve for the most skilled and talented among us, how can any large or diverse organization hope to create a high-performance culture? Fortunately, high performance is not something that only special people can achieve. Everyone can be a high performer if they learn how.

Leveraging Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences

Thanks to significant advances in both cognitive and behavioral sciences, there’s a thriving sports psychology industry helping athletes recognize and regulate the mindset, emotions, relationships, and behaviors essential to consistently maintaining peak performance.

Military organizations are also applying the same data and insights to optimize performance, moving beyond physical fitness to address cognitive factors in key areas central to military success: confidence, focus, attention, learning, and resistance to fatigue.

While an average day on most jobs rarely brings the intensity of a major competitive event or military drill, these same performance methods and techniques can transform how a company capitalizes on the talents of its people and drives better overall business performance. Just like a low-performance culture, a high-performance culture is contagious, elevating not just average performance but everyone’s performance potential.

The Talent Challenge

That’s good news because talent capitalization has become a top priority.

When asked about the biggest challenge they face today in a 2021 Deloitte survey, CEOs named one above all others: talent, in nearly every form.

Organizations historically viewed talent performance in terms of recruitment, incentives, and functional skill development. But the results of this approach were “hit or miss” when it came to increasing talent capitalization and enterprise-wide performance. Often companies were more focused on other goals and priorities, like enhancing the customer experience or driving faster revenue growth.

Today, under-capitalized talent is extremely risky for your organization, especially if you’re in a situation where failure is not an option. It’s also a sign that your culture and approach are not meeting the needs of a dynamic and evolving workforce.

More than a third of American employers are getting that message delivered the hard way. According to a 2021 PWC survey of workers across the country, 36% are actively looking for a new job. Tools and techniques exist today that can empower a high-performance culture and help optimize talent capitalization in any organization.

Talent at Risk

It’s frequently referred to as the billion-dollar talent challenge. According to KPMG’s 2021 US CEO Outlook report, 79% of CEOs admit that the accelerated pace of digital transformation will not be sustainable without first addressing employee burnout.

Noting that these CEOs also cite the employee value proposition as their top operational priority, Laura Newinski, Deputy Chair and COO, KPMG U.S., observed that the concerns were not just about remote work, adding that “ensuring a successful outcome includes thinking beyond where teams work and focusing more on how teams work together—enabling purposeful, intentional interactions to help people succeed, learn and develop their careers.”

The primary purpose of any organizational structure or training investment is to capitalize on talent by providing the context, motivation, and resources needed for optimal performance. Just as importantly, it involves removing the barriers (internal and external) impeding success.

In other words, it’s nearly impossible to create a high-performance culture without first understanding and upgrading the human talent your organization wishes to capitalize on.

Empowering Talent for Peak Performance

Here’s an insight many organizations have yet to embrace: one of the best ways to attract, retain, and capitalize on talent is to help your talent achieve their full performance potential.

A myriad of business services, technologies, and products are now on the market to help improve talent and business performance. At first glance, this wide range of specialized options seems empowering. But look closer, and a muddle of confusion and complexity emerges.

Some organizations have tasked their HR leaders and L&D experts with chasing down, evaluating, adopting, and integrating new training methods and tools to enhance the most critical cognitive skills associated with high performance (i.e., leadership, conflict resolution, motivation, diversity-equity-inclusion).

At the same time, senior executives and business unit leaders are forging ahead on their own—often in partnership with consulting firms, software systems, or executive coaches—to independently equip themselves and their teams with an enhanced ability to solve urgent problems and achieve targeted results: increased sales and revenue, innovation transformation, digital technology adoption, and better customer experiences.

On top of everything else, the pandemic is requiring these same organizations to also create new approaches (remote work, less travel, strategic shifts, supply chain pivots) and rethink old priorities, especially when it comes to providing what their employees and organizations really need to thrive.

What Works?

What makes addressing human performance even more difficult is that most types of business training and coaching are specific to a task or process: the training imparts knowledge and the desired outcome is the individual’s subsequent competence with the tool or system. Even most leadership and management training is model-based or closely matches strategies to scenarios.

But performance training is a different kind of mental engagement.

We’re not working to become proficient at a new software service or automated process or to conduct more effective interviews and negotiations. Instead, we’re learning to recognize, influence, and manage our own mindset, emotions, relationships, and behaviors to create a readily accessible mode of high performance.

Despite the interest in improving performance, most approaches and practices don’t engage the inner world of the human being. And yet all real change begins in the mind.

Upgrading the Human Operating Framework

To really move the needle when it comes to human performance, organizations must first acknowledge the existence of what is both the most fundamental and least tangible aspect of being human: our inner lives. Any program powerful enough to facilitate significant improvement in human performance will require that employees examine how their inner world impacts how they show up at work—their mindset, emotions, and interactions—and then work to better understand causes and manage effects.

Technology skills training, soft skills, leadership, and management training address the “what.” Human performance training addresses the “how.” We think of it as upgrading the human operating framework, meeting every human being exactly where they are, right here, right now, today.

From Individuals to Culture

Helping individuals and teams learn how to upgrade their inner operating frameworks is the first step to creating a new performance normal—and quickly increases your talent capitalization rate. Next comes the challenge of getting your key employees, teams, and organizational leadership to create a high-performance culture.

Culture dictates your organization’s overall performance potential. Until your culture is oriented toward creating future states of performance, any tactical intervention or action plan will produce suboptimal results focused on fixing past problems. When your culture aligns to support high performance, employees begin to show up as the “best actual” versions of themselves.

Creating a high-performance culture elevates everything you do and empowers your existing talent to create the kind of workplace that will help attract and retain a world-class workforce for the future.

Conclusion

In Deloitte’s 2021 survey, 71% of CEOs said they expect to increase their spending on workforce and talent transformation over the next three years. But the return they expect on that investment will only be achievable with an optimally capitalized workforce. Empowering your people to function at consistently higher performance levels unleashes engagement, innovation transformation, and growth by connecting the organization to future possibilities. It’s how organizations can create a future of work that works for all.