Why Your Employees Should be Doing What They Do Best

In the last newsletter, we focused on making sure your employees know what's expected of them. This is a key factor in employee retention, based on extensive research done by Gallup and the University of Chicago. In this issue, we're going to look at ways to be sure that your employees - especially your best ones - have the opportunity to do what they do best every day. This is another of the five key reasons that the best employees stay in a job.

Based on my experience working with a variety of companies, both high-performing and otherwise, there is one all-important key to making sure that your best employees - in fact, all your employees - get to do what they do best every day. That key is to hire for talent, not experience.

Start by Hiring Talent

Because the jobs in your company are what they are, you have to look for people with talent in the things you do. If you're in retail, then you certainly want people with a talent for making customers feel comfortable and cared for. If you're in design, then you want people with a talent for quickly generating many ideas. Get a handle on the talents needed to do your jobs well, and then look hard for those talents.

Herb Kelleher, who founded Southwest Airlines, is famous for saying, "You can't train people to have a good attitude. We hire the attitude and then train the skills." Herb is saying that it doesn't matter if someone has twenty years experience as a flight attendant. If they don't have a talent for making passengers comfortable then they don't belong on a Southwest Airlines flight crew.

Here's another example. No one has a natural talent for selling tires. But many people have a talent for empathy coupled with a talent for enthusiasm, and some even have a talent for talking about cars. That's a very good combination for a talented tire salesman, isn't it? Notice I didn't mention a talent for remembering features and benefits or a talent for operating a cash register accurately. We'll get to that in a minute.

Hollywood gets it right: casting is everything. If you have people with the right talents for your jobs, you're more than half way to having a great team.

What, then, is talent? It's important to separate talent from skill and knowledge. Talent is not skill, and skill is not knowledge. The best managers know the differences between talent and skill and knowledge. Here's a quick rundown. 

Talent, Skill, and Knowledge

Talent is an innate ability. Some of us appear to be "wired" for certain things, like remembering names and faces or doing calculations in our head. Some people have a talent for empathy while others can't put themselves in another's shoes no matter how hard they try. Others have a talent for being organized or for thinking on their feet. Talents cannot be passed on from one individual to another. We have them or we don't. Talents can't be taught, but they can be nurtured.

Skill is the ability to perform a task with dexterity and speed. For a mechanic, a skill is disassembly and reassembly of mechanisms. For an accountant, a skill is doing the arithmetic that is a daily part of the job. For a manager, it's recognizing the individual differences among the people on her team. Skills can be taught and then developed further.

Knowledge is simply what you know. Knowledge comes in two forms: factual and experiential. Factual knowledge comes from learning. A salesman's knowledge of features and benefits gleaned from hours of studying product literature is a good example of this. Factual knowledge can be passed on from one person to another.

Experiential knowledge is the knowledge you pick up along the way. Experienced salespeople can usually sense when someone is ready to buy just from their body language. This comes from dozens and dozens of interactions. While you can't teach experience, it's possible to pass on to another the results of one's experience.

How do you put this to work?

When you're interviewing a job candidate, ask what he or she enjoyed about doing the same job for a previous employer. Ask what they enjoy doing in their spare time. Ask what they do best. Ask how they explain any success they've had. Ask for their idea of the perfect job. Ask what they would look for in someone who's applying for the same job. Ask them to tell you about a time when they "really got it right" on the job.

Finally, think about your favorite buddy pictures - one of mine was Rain Man. Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman are both very talented actors, but Hoffman would not have been anywhere near as effective as the slick, selfish brother. And I doubt if Tom Cruise could have given half the performance of Hoffman in the role of Raymond, the institutionalized savant. The movie worked because the right talents were in the right place.

Your team should be the same.

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