In my previous blog I provided an Axiological definition of Talent as being:

‘ a person’s recurring and habitual patterns of thought’

and we all possess a multitude of these talents.

So knowing what talents a person possesses is of vital importance to any employer, but of equal importance is a way to measure their ability to access their talent.

When conducting talent benchmarking exercises within organisations we have measured the talent of high and low performers in teams and found that both groups contain people with high levels of the right talent required to be a success. However, our system is also able to identify each individual’s ability to access that talent and as shown in the chart below, often it is not a lack of talent but the lack of ability to access that talent that is the key differentiator between high and low performers.

Interestingly, this chart shows that both groups achieved equally high scores on talent and equally poor scores on their attitude, but it was the high performers ability to access their talents that was the key  performance discriminator.

We can all have temporary losses of form or performance, or put another way, have things going on in our lives that will temporarily block us or stop us from being able to access our talent, but as an employer or recruiter you want to avoid employing people for a role that either do not have the talent, or are unable to access that talent, or you will be spending a lot of time and energy managing that employees problems. To read more about the Axia Talent benchmark solution click here

Firstly, let us try to define talent

There are many different definitions to describe talent resulting in a huge amount of confusion in the workplace, especially in relation to recruiting for a new role.  Some companies define talent in terms of competencies, but competencies are often knowledge based.  Just because someone has knowledge it does not mean they have talent.

Just look at the debates and comments that follow every football match.  The majority of the male population often voices an ‘expert opinion’ but this knowledge or interpretation of an incident definitely does not make them a talented footballer or manager!

In the work place you can take 100 people who possess similar knowledge (experience or qualifications).  If you then provide them all with the same job specific training, will they all complete the job in the same way? The answer, as every employer, manager and HR professional knows, is definitely not.

So, if talent is not Knowledge then what is it? Is it attitude or personality based?

There are many psychometric profiles now that will accurately define someone’s personality group and the traits you are likely to see from this group type, but this does not infer any specific talent.

Robert Harman proved mathematically that human thought has a structure and that it can be measured.  Each individual’s thinking process is therefore what makes them unique.

At AxiaMetrics we define talent as a person’s recurring and habitual patterns of thought.

The way a person reacts to any given set of circumstances is dictated by how they process the information presented to them.  In the work place, no two people will react the same to a problem, as we all have different thinking patterns.  This means they will not come to the same solution and we will all be influenced in some way by the set expectation of acceptable behaviour.

To find out how the Axia Talent benchmark can dramatically improve your recruitment and succession planning click here

Not my words, but those of Bertrand Russell! He summed up in one sentence what many of us know to be very true, a phenomenon that causes endless problems when interviewing for new staff as the more able candidate is less likely to be as confident or push their abilities compared to the less able who may come across better and more confident at interview.

This has been scientifically proven and is now known as the Dunning–Kruger effect. It is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it”.

The less competent therefore suffer from ‘Illusory superiority’, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from ‘illusory inferiority’. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the mis-calibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the mis-calibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.

So if you can not rely on past performance, interview testing or educational background to assess skills competencies what can you rely on. The smart money has completed framework assessment to define the required skills competencies required for each role in their organization. Despite much work to enable them to define competency the difficulty is that many of the required competencies are softer skills that are harder to define and measure.

The Axia Profile competency modeling process helps organisations develop a framework competency. For larger organisations and teams this can be created on a bespoke basis clearly identifying the competencies of elite performers that are missing in the less productive team members. For smaller teams and organisations our generic reports have been developed over many years and already specify the key competencies for general roles such as management competencies and sales competencies. Using the Axia profile not only identifies these competencies but provides a measure of your existing team and a benchmark for all new potential hires.

So to find the most cost effective route to developing your own framework competency and avoid being the victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect at interview contact AxiaMetrics today