Successful Talent Capitalization is How We’ll Create the Future of Work
In Pursuit of Performance Series
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.
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.”
Fortunately, high performance is not something that only special people can achieve. Everyone can be a high performer if they learn how.
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.
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.
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.
Talent at Risk
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.
It’s frequently referred to as the billion-dollar talent challenge. According to KPMG’s 2021 US CEO Outlook report, seventy-nine percent 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, but just as importantly, by also 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.
81% of HR leaders in 2020 rolled out or are piloting various technologies to improve the employee experience.
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 head 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.
Management consulting?
Productivity software & tools?
Skills & training programs?
Leadership development?
Executive coaching?
Online courses?
So what works?
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.
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 doing something much more fundamental, with potentially profound consequences: we’re learning to recognize, influence and manage our own mindset, emotions, relationships and behaviors to create a readily accessible mode of high performance.
Like athletes and soldiers, helping employees achieve reliable peak performance requires helping them manage their inner world – what we call their operating framework: mindset, emotions, relationships and behaviors
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 – i.e., their mindset, the emotional component of their interactions, how they are feeling, and so on – and then work to better understand causes and manage effects.*
Technology skills training, soft skills, leadership and management training – that’s all the what. Human performance training is the how. We think of it as upgrading the human operating framework.
And we start by meeting every human being exactly where they are, right here, right now, today.
*Clearly none of this is compatible with any version of “The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves” schools of management. Millennials and the generations after them are drawn to enlightened organizations. A culture of fear and punishment will drive them away.
How do you move from upgrading the performance of individuals and teams to creating a high-performance environment?
One word: culture.
For many people in business, culture remains a vague term that embraces the corporate mission and philosophy but has little impact or relevance on day-to-day business operations. Yet nothing could be further from the truth, because an organization’s culture dictates the set of dominant attitudes and beliefs that drive everything you do.
Consequently, culture dictates your organization’s overall performance potential. Unfortunately, most performance-enhancing methodologies largely ignore culture and are unconsciously oriented backwards, anchored in past performance and addressing past problems. But 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.
Something different happens when your culture is aligned to support high performance: employees begin to show up as the “best actual” version of themselves. Realizing they have the power to determine their own destiny, employees recreate their work environment and practices to support optimal performance, and previously insurmountable barriers give way as employees and teams stop trying to fix past problems and begin creating a new future.
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.
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.
When you upgrade your people for performance transformation, it naturally yields greater talent capitalization.
By understanding and helping people purposefully manage the internal factors that impact and drive their performance, it’s possible to create and customize training programs and tools that can help them elevate their day-to-day performance.
When these programs and tools are integrated and customizable, you have a powerful, holistic methodology that reliably inspires and equips individual actors and teams to achieve high performance – a methodology that can be applied and scaled across all roles, business units and functions.
When your business approach is aligned for high performance, individuals, teams and leadership quickly begin finding new ways to apply what they’ve learned to help achieve and sustain it.
Our Achieve System™ is like giving your people the missing “instruction manual” on how to leverage more data, execute strategy pivots, adopt new digital technologies and processes, and apply all of their individual skill sets to deliver the high returns you expect.
