Training Trumps Talent

21 Jan Training Trumps Talent

Training Will Beat Talent Everyday Of The Week!

Christopher Hart here from Transforming Lives Coaching and Consulting, coming to you live from sunny, beautiful Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  So we’re continuing our Lead Strong series where we’re hoping to arm leaders to be better and stronger leaders in our businesses, our organizations, and our lives.  

So we’ve been on quite a journey up to this point covering a wide array of leadership topics of how we can implement them into our organizations.  We talked about how behavior really starts to take shape in our leadership journey, not only our own behavior but the behavior of others, and basically looking at some of the foundational elements of how do we get people to partake in consistent and purposeful action; and we talked about all behaviors as a conditioning process.  

So what we understand about that what we understand about that is behavior is a conditioning process, so what we what we come to understand is that the people that participate in our worlds of leadership whether they’re your businesses, your organizations, your lives, et cetera, they either come to you with what’s already conditioned into them or you participate in a conditioning process.  And so that kind of leads us into our topic today of what we’re calling Training Trumps Talent, no pun intended, this has nothing to do politically, so bear with me.

So why do we say training trumps talent?  

Here’s why, because when we talk about talent, a few videos back we talked about the talent code where talent equals intellect plus skill, and then we broke down the elements of intellect, we broke down the elements of skill.  And that’s all well and good but here’s what we understand about that is that talent, that intellect plus skill, that is a compilation of previous and past conditioning processes for that individual that makes them the intellect and skill and ability to drive results and achieve at a high level plus those underlying elements that we talked about the next video was high emotional need to succeed, that’s a pre-existing conditioning process.  And as great is that is, I mean that’s kind of like the ideal situation that we all want for our organizations but the reality is we have elements of our organization and the role for that matter that are going to be important behaviorally for that person to succeed in the role and in our organization, and what you cannot rely on is the fact that someone’s preconditioning process, basically their life, everything leading up to the point of where they join your organization, you cannot rely on the fact that whatever has existed before they’ve joined you matches exactly what you’re looking for.

So let’s look at this, what that looks like is…the reason why training trumps talent is because the training is the simple element of conditioning processes, so when you hire someone into your organization, there are some companies out there like Keller Williams who has a great model for how you train people when you bring them into your organization and it’s called the Hundred Day Action Training program. Great model, I love it if it’s implemented properly.  You see a lot of times people are just implementing the elements of the skill set like how to do the job, and whatever that job is we use that hundred-day action training model to teach people the skill sets.  And that’s all well and good but what we have to understand and remember is that all behavior is conditioning, it’s conditioning.  

Do you know the 80/20 rule?

We also remember we talked about 80%… success is 80% psychology, 20% skill set, so why through our training processes do we only focus on the 20% skill element?  You see your training programs have to be focused on not just the skill set, that’s important I agree, not just the skill set, it has to be focused on psychology, what’s the psychology of the role?  You see if this is a role that you’re requiring people to lead generate, this is a role that’s going to require people to put themselves out there and have conversations and ask for business and attempt to influence, there’s going to be rejection.  One of the three biggest fears in most people’s life is rejection, the other two is failure and the third one is fear of not being good enough.  

So if we understand that failure is one of the elements that hold people back and it’s the rein or the realm of psychology, why aren’t we training our people in that?  If we understand that showing up in that role every day requires them to lead generate basically a behavior that needs to happen on a daily basis, why aren’t we conditioning that? You see that’s how training trumps talent because here’s the thing, someone may be talented, they may have the ability to have high level conversations, participate, understand and communicate high level conversations, they may have the skill set of being able to know the capability of doing a job, they actually execute the job and they get the results but the question is can they do it consistently?  And if they can’t do it consistently what that tells us as leaders is it triggers us to understand that they’re not conditioned to do so.  A little child that grows up and picks his nose every day is still going to pick his nose when he’s 20 and 30 years old because he’s just conditioned to do so.   He feels a little itch in there he’s going to stick his finger…hopefully he just doesn’t eat it like some little kids I’ve seen running around these days.  

So what we come to understand is that training trumps talent because talent is nothing more than a preexisting conditioning process.   I’ll tell you right now, you can take someone talented and I’ll take a organization that has a really solid training program… good morning Gina, good to see you …that has a really solid training program that’s training people on the psychology of the role, the culture of the organization, the skills of the role as well as the behavioral patterns of the role and what they’re going to be held accountable for, if you master that in your organization, that will trump every single day of the week the organization that’s attempting to master hiring talent.

Here’s the second reason:  The second reason is because you can bring that talent in.  If you just throw that talent into the role, you don’t train them, you don’t lead them, guess what?  You’re going to lose them because remember they don’t need you, they’re talent, they have a high need for success; they have patterns of success; their life has shown you patterns of success.  One of the things that we always evaluate against before hiring someone is we ask is this person going to succeed despite being in business with me?  And if the answer is yes then I have to hire that person.  And if you answer is yes and you hire that person understand something, if you don’t show up and train that person, bring them to the next level of where they’re trying to go and everything that they need, the behavioral patterns and the skill sets to get to that next level, you’re going to lose them.  So training trumps talent.  

So here’s what we understand, training trumps talent.  

You can bring talent in, I highly recommend you bring talent in; but understand something, at the lowest level if you as a leader look to master training of your people you will trump the person that’s trying to hire talent every day of the week, why?  Because what you’re going to do is you’re going to outperform them based on time on task over time.  See the talent… we know how talent operates, they’re like this without leadership.  

Guidance or leadership, either way, we’ll call it that, but here’s the thing, here’s why, because talented people typically operate in the zigzags, they operate in the extremes. What talent, or what we as leaders do for talent is we take them from here and then we give them sort of this path, they’re still going to zigzag but we want to drastically reduce their path of zigging and zagging… zigzag, zigzag.  We want to get them on a straight …a straighter path.  It’s going to have its zigzags, because if you try and keep talent like this they’re going to resist because they don’t like boundaries, they typically operate from a need for freedom and need for variety.  That’s okay, we give them that, but we want to get them on more of a straighter narrower path keeping them more focused.

You know I’m not saying it’s perfect, I’m just saying that it’s something that we can have a better grasp of understanding to evaluate when talent really shows up in front of us because I think people, like I’ve said before, people have a difficult time recognizing what really is talent.  So hopefully that does something for you guys.

So looking at it, here’s what I would encourage leaders, here are some action steps:

What does your organization’s training look like?  There are some people on this call that they are heads of divisions in charitable organizations.  There’s Catherine who is the head honcho of the Browning Homes Group, runs that admin division at a really high level. Catherine here’s what I would encourage you, how do we implement the mastery of training within our organization?  Because if you do that you’re going to trump your competition every day of the week.  Guys stop worrying about how much more real estate or how much more product or whatever your leading indicators are.

Who’s the future of your organization?

So here’s how to encourage you, what can we do to implement training at a high level?  Who’s the future of your organization?  If you’re not training people in your organization not only to succeed in the role but also to meet the future of your organization, you’re going to epically fail.  If you run a department in an organization who’s your replacement?  Cause if you don’t have a replacement you’re not doing that organization any service when another opportunity for you to grow maybe within that organization, to elevate into that role, because you don’t have a replacement.  And why would you build something that you don’t want to leave over to someone else to continue your legacy?

If you run a business who is your replacement in such organization?  If you don’t have that then guess what, you’ll always be a slave to it, you’ll always be a slave to your business.  You see as leaders we all want freedom but it seems like once we get into leadership it just becomes more restricting, why?  Because it requires more of our time.  Why does it require more of our time?  Because you don’t have a training process in your organization; you’re not training people on how to act, how to behave, how to meet the culture of the organization, what the vision is, what the mission is, what we value, what we believe, our perspective of what our organizations and our marketplace is.  You’re missing that so it just always requires your time, why?  Because you’re attempting to lead people whose patterns of behavior have been preconditioned and that’s all they’re bringing to you.  Some people call it “baggage,” I don’t like that terminology but it just is what it is .  So look at ways of how you can implement a…or how to master training in your organization.

So one of the elements we do in our leadership coaching for organizational development is how do we build that?  Look guys, I’ll tell you something right now, you can focus on recruiting all day long, if you’re not focusing …you’re not putting just as much effort into the training process, my personal opinion, I think the recruiting process is only 25% of it.  I think the other 50% of success, or another…the 50% of success is training; and then the other 25 is actually leading and motivating people. I don’t even like calling it motivating, they motivate themselves, you lead them.

So here’s what I’ll lay out to you guys, if you need help right feel free to reach out to me.  I’m not saying I’m the guru in this but it’s something that I’ve studied at a pretty high level, it’s something I’m very passionate about is how do we create training programs.  One of the things I like to work with organizational leaders is creating those training programs that are duplicatable and repeatable.  Can you… look at the position you hold, maybe you support an organization, maybe you lead a division, let me ask you this, can you hire 10 to 15 people a month?  If you could, if you could create some amazing attraction element in your business where 15 people raise their hand every month and say, “I want to join your organization… I want to be part of this mission and this vision,” could you even handle that from an administrative end and from a training end?  Can you pump 25 people…or excuse me, 15 people every single month without too much weight on your time, energy?  Can your resources, can your training regimes just put people through and let your training programs?  If you hire 15 maybe you get that one absolute rock star and four or five ones that are that B to B plus player, and then everyone else is either weeded out or we just understand how and where they exist in our organization.  Think about it.  

If you can grow an organization that trains people on your mission and your vision to match the behaviors of the role as well as the culture of the organization… excuse me, what would your organization look like in 12-month period time?  You can fall short of recruiting…excuse me, you can fall short of hiring that quote/unquote “talent” that we’re all looking for.  But if you hire talent and fall short on training, no bueno.  You fall short on recruiting and master that training element, mucho bueno…I don’t even know if that makes sense but you get the point.

So love to hear your comments on this; love to hear what your ahas are.  If I could help you out in any way please feel free to reach out to me, Chris@transforminglivescoachingandconsulting.com.

So hopefully we brought value to not only your business, your organization, but your life today and your life for your future.  And just remember one thing before we go, you are a child of God; God loves you, so do I.  Lead strong.  Have an amazing Monday.  Start the week off strong.  Get those Monday blues out of your head, 80%t psychology; 20% mechanics.  You got the mechanics now go master the psychology.  Love you, have a great day.

About the author:

Over the course of 8 years, Christopher Hart went from an enlisted Private First Class to a Commissioned Officer-Captain. In 2005, Christopher chose to move on from his military career to focus on starting a family and embarking in the world of entrepreneurship. Christopher’s passion is now working to help others be the BEST version of themselves and helping them Lead others to the same!
To learn more about Christopher Hart or to get in touch with him regarding a coaching program you can email him at Chris@TransformingLivesCoaching.com