The previous chapters of “Talent is Overrated” focused on what drives high level performance and providing a broad understanding of what constitutes deliberate practice. It is the concept of deliberate practice that seemingly separates superior performers from average ones. The final four chapters explore the application of the principles of great performance organizationally and examine the roles of innovation, age and passion in the pursuit of excellence.

On the Organizational Level

As discussed previously, hiring is a critical part of organizational development.  The “first pick advantage” goes to organizations that are able to attract high level performers and further enhance their abilities through superior professional development programming.  

Great organizations follow the principles of great performance (p.128):
Understanding  that each person in the organization is not just doing a job, but is also being stretched and grown
Finding ways to develop leaders within their jobs
Encouraging leaders to be active in their communities
Understanding the critical roles of teachers and feedback
Identifying promising performers early
Understanding that  people development works best through inspiration, not authority
Investing significant time, money, and energy in developing people
Making leadership development part of the culture

Putting these principles into practice, the leaders of high performing organizations build people through job assignments that push them beyond their current capabilities.  

These leaders also recognize the importance of doing the work necessary to change their organizations to truly benefit from deep and broad feedback (p.133). They realize that when people are able to break down and understand their work experiences, they’re eager to improve their performance. This was nicely illustrated by the discussion of the “after action reviews” used by the U.S. Army to learn from experiences in the field (p.132).

Successful leaders also agree that people development is the center of their jobs (p.134).  Not surprisingly, the CEO’s who were discussed reported that roughly 50% of their time was spent on people issues, which included personally reviewing the development of their top managers. For large companies like McDonalds or General Electric, that involved the personal review of between 200 and 600 managers (p.135).

Creating the dream team?

The concept of dream teams has always been intriguing.  In theory, putting individual superstars on a single team, harnessing their individual talents for a common mission in their field of expertise, should be a formula success. As the author points out, however, this scenario is more likely to fail for a host of reasons.  Building a team is more than merely creating a group.  Turning a group of individuals into a high performing team is a discipline unto itself.

As U.S. Olympic Hockey Coach Herb Brooks remarked when asked why he didn’t choose many of the country’s greatest college players, “I’m not lookin’ for the best players, I’m lookin’ for the right players.” As Mr. Brooks did with1980 Gold Medal hockey team, the most highly performing organizations develop teams, not just individuals (p.137).

Well designed practice activities, coaching, repetition, feedback, self regulation, and knowledge building all work for developing teams as well. The organizations that are the most successful at building team performance are skilled at avoiding and addressing potential problems that impact the elements of deliberate practice.

Specifically, these organizations avoid the following:
Picking the wrong team members-chemistry and culture are key elements of success
Low trust-trust is the most fundamental element of a successful team
Competing agendas-the best teams have members who share an understanding of how the team will be effective
Unresolved conflicts
Unwillingness to face the real issues

The author describes several approaches to working through the various issues that arise as teams are developed.  The most original approach was the wrestling exercise used by the West Point crew team (p.142). “Putting the fish on the table” was a great metaphor to describe the work that goes into honestly and openly working through issues as a team, and the positive outcome for all involved (p.143).  

As tempting as it may be in some instances, wrestling is probably not an option for those of us in local government, but it does encourage looking beyond more conventional methods for working through team issues.

The key, of course, is finding what works in an organization and building on that. As with individuals, deliberate practice activities benefit the teams within the organization.  These benefits are cumulative, so the earlier an organization starts developing people individually and as teams, the more advantage it will have over those organizations that start later.

Waiting for Lightening Bolts?
Commonly held beliefs regarding innovation and creativity would have us thinking that inspiration strikes out of the blue and creativity is hampered by too much knowledge.

If we follow this logic, it would seem that great innovators spend their time waiting for inspiration and avoid burdening themselves with a deep understanding of their chosen field.

As he did with the innate-talent explanation for high-level performance, the author provides findings and information that show the shortcomings in those beliefs regarding innovation and creativity.   High-level performance benefits from innovation and creativity, so it should come as no surprise that the principles of deliberate practice are equally applicable in those areas.  The evidence underlying the principles of deliberate practice and great performance shows that in finding creative solutions to problems, more knowledge is better.  In essence, creativity is not a lightening bolt (p.151).

Great innovators aren’t burdened by knowledge they’re nourished by it (p.156). The greatest innovators in a wide range of fields (business, science, painting, music) all spent many years in intensive preparation before making any kind of creative breakthrough (p.151). The 10-year rule applies here as well.

Innovation doesn’t reject the past, it relies heavily on the past and comes most readily to those who’ve mastered a domain as it exists (p.157).

Organizational culture determines the level of innovation and creative energy generated by employees. It was interesting to see the divergent views of top and middle management regarding organizational innovation shown by the McKinsey research (p.163).

Those in top management thought the lack of innovativeness was due to the fact that their organizations didn’t have enough of the right people. The lower level managers felt that the organization had the right people, but the culture kept them from innovating.  These very different viewpoints illustrate why many organizations aren’t as innovative as they would like to be or think they are.

Culture change starts at the top. If those in the top positions of an organization think nothing is wrong, nothing will change. Candid assessment of organizational culture is an important part of making progress. What would the top level and lower level mangers say in our own organizations? Depending on the responses, are we, as leaders, open to making the changes necessary to positively change the culture in our own organizations?

Innovation-Friendly

Innovation-friendly organizations tell employees what is needed and give them the freedom to innovate.  As the author points out, the most effective steps an organization can take to build innovation include helping people expand and deepen their knowledge of their field.  Creating innovation networks within an organization is an effective approach to finding ways to connect people so they can talk with one another about problems they’re working on, the approaches they’re trying, and what they’re learning (p.162).

Vague exhortations encouraging innovation are not effective (p.164). If employees understand what is being asked of them, they can move forward.  Employees who understand the organization’s priorities know where innovation will do the most good.

Giving people the freedom to innovate is a matter of motivation.  Interestingly, some research shows that people perform creative tasks more innovatively when they are offered no extrinsic rewards (p.164).  

In fact, it has been shown that offering a reward can actually reduce creativity.  As the author points out, not all the research agrees, but the point is plausible:  people who are internally driven to create do seem more creative than those who are just doing it for the money.  

Innovative companies, like 3M and Google, let employees spend a certain amount of time (10% to 20%) on any project that they find personally compelling.  The benefit of these policies is that they embody a culture of trust, which is an important contributor to creativity (p.165). While it is difficult for many organizations to adopt policies like these, those that are able to will hold a competitive advantage.  

With budgets continuing to tighten, local government organizations may not be able to match private sector salaries, but they can compete by providing cultures that foster innovation and create opportunities for individual growth.

From Home to Organization    
The author’s discussion of the rising standards across the various disciplines, ranging from winning the Nobel Peace Prize to obtaining a first patent, was intriguing.  As he points out, the rising standards are forcing more intensive preparation by anyone who hopes to excel.

The increased demand of excellence in every field only intensifies the importance of a supporting environment for prospective achievers, and starting at the earliest age (p.169).  

Nobody does it alone.  A striking feature in the lives of great performers is the valuable support they received at critical times in their development (p.170).

The supportive environment is critical.  The principles of a supportive home environment, as discovered by educational researcher Benjamin S. Bloom, can be applied to organizations by focusing on the following elements (p.172):
Being employee oriented
Modeling strong work ethic
Choosing training with increasing levels of challenge
 Developmental assignments that continually stretch employee abilities
Stimulating, supportive, and structured environment that builds on success

Age is a state of mind
Excellent performers continue achieving at high levels well beyond the point where age related declines would seem to make that impossible (p.180). As noted by the author, studies across a wide range of fields (management, aircraft piloting, music, bridge, etc.) have shown that excellent performers suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else, except in their field of expertise. Great performance, it seems, doesn’t come from superior general abilities.  It comes from specific skills that have been developed in a particular way over a long period of time (p.181). Deliberate practice maintains skills/strategies to compensate for declines that can no longer be avoided (p.182).

As it turns out, people can continue training their mental abilities far later in life than previously believed. Our brains are able to add neurons well into old age, when conditions demand it. Also, brain plasticity, the brain’s ability to adapt itself to new challenges, doesn’t stop with age.  The key take away from this information is that for many years, longer than we may have thought, performance deterioration in our chosen field isn’t an inexorable process.  It is a choice about how much effort we want to invest in our performance (p.185).  If Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch or Sumner Redstone are any indication, the window of high level performance is definitely staying open longer.

Workplace Flow

What motivates people to dedicate themselves to the rigor of deliberate practice? As you will recall from the previous chapters, deliberate practice is “not inherently enjoyable”, at least in theory.  At a deeper level, one has to suspect that practice is somehow meeting an inner need for anyone who can maintain it at an intense level for years (p.190).  

The author notes the possibility that the role of practice in producing the highly enjoyable flow state could be one reason.  Flow is the state in which a person is so totally involved in a task that time slows down, enjoyment is heightened and the task seems almost effortless (p.189). This “high” occurs when the challenge just matches a person’s skills; if it is too easy the experience is boring, if its too hard then it creates frustration.  Moving beyond the initial “high” of mastering a task, people must seek greater challenges and match them with higher level skills to keep experiencing flow.  

Csikszentminalyi makes the argument that this is what many people in creative pursuits do, which is a process that parallels the deliberate practice routine of continually pushing past one’s current abilities.

How do we create flow in the work place?  Past studies have shown what motivates employees, not what drives the top performers (p.190). The studies on high-level performers have uncovered a wide range of driving forces, most of which are intrinsic (p.191). The drivers are almost never extrinsic.  

However, Teresa Amabile (Harvard Business School) found that some extrinsic motivators did seem to enhance creativity; Specifically, those that reinforce intrinsic motivation (p.192). Examples of beneficial extrinsic motivation include recognition that confirms competence and personal feedback that is constructive, non-threatening, work related, and not person focused. Beneficial rewards involve more time, freedom, or resources to pursue exciting ideas.

Wrap up

Through the course of the book, we have had the opportunity to study high-level performance from many angles.  What drives it?  What doesn’t?

One thing that is clear is the definite role of individual choice.  Exceptional performance doesn’t happen overnight and takes more than a spark of inspiration to sustain those who achieve it.  The choice to embrace the author’s premise that high-level performance is possible for anyone who is willing to put in the time and deliberate practice will lead to individual development and progress within any given field.  The choice to believe an individual’s performance is limited by a lack of a specific innate gift or a certain level of general ability will likely lead to a constrained experience that results in less than optimal performance. Individual choices ultimately drive organizational performance and set the culture.

The author provided a great deal of useful information that can be used in our own organizations to create a framework that will support high-level performance, creativity and innovation.  

As Henry David Thoreau once said, “What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us.  And when we bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen.”  

Successful organizations make it possible for their employees to fully contribute.  With the current climate of constricting budgets and increased demands on local government, fully engaged, highly performing employees are our greatest resources.  Talent is Overrated provides practical insight to help us develop these resources.  

The Alliance for Innovation would like to recognize Kathleen Leidich, Assistant to the City Manager in Leesburg, VA for her outstanding contribution to the Ambassador program with the book review of Talent is Overrated.