Gloves Off

Old Ideas That Have No Place in Talent Management

If you're anything like me, you'll hang onto an old pair of work gloves indefinitely. Once they're broken in and fit perfectly, they become effortless to slip on. They make my work easier. They're comfortable.

Ideas can be like this too. At first they don't seem to sit right in our minds, but with time they come to make sense. We get used to them. They become our rules of thumb for understanding the world. They make our work easier. They're comfortable.

But just like old gloves, old ideas eventually start to wear out. Holes form in them. The stitching holding them together loosens.

Like old gloves, old ideas sometimes need to be thrown away. When it comes to assessing talent in organizations, worn heuristics are a big problem, and a brake on the development of our teams.

In a world of easy, bullet-point summaries that seem to make our thoughts and lives clearer, opting to wade through the muddy thicket of complex human performance feels unnecessary and cumbersome.

But the future of leadership in our organizations depends on talent processes that forego oversimplification and actively combat the bias we know will inescapably creep into our assessments. It depends on discarding those old gloves, and instead of replacing them, doing some of the work bare-handed, so we can appreciate the delicate texture of what we're handling.

I've noticed the undeserved prominence of three particularly old and worn talent gloves in my recent travels. They are patently, notoriously, obviously bad ideas. But they live on, taking center stage in talent assessments that determine the futures of our organizations.

Please reflect on them. And then give each one the swift and merciless death it deserves.

1️⃣ "Hard Skills vs Soft Skills."

This false binary does more harm than good. It perpetuates a simplistic view of leadership, reducing a complex art form into crude categories.

Leadership is about human interaction and emotional intelligence built on a foundation of technical ability.

But the term "soft skills" subtly relegates critical competencies like empathy, communication, and mutual support to the periphery, as if they are optional rather than integral.

This archaic partition grossly oversimplifies talent assessments, leading to poor decisions based on false estimates of leadership potential.

I came of age alongside a pilot colleague who was known to have some of the sharpest tactical skills in our community. He earned every qualification, aced every exam, and progressed as a pilot faster than nearly everyone else.

But he was known to be a complete pain in the neck to work with. He genuinely despised people, preferring machines that accepted his direction passively and didn't talk back. None of this prevented him being promoted to a high level, with talent assessments repeatedly rationalizing that he would "figure out" his "soft skills" and grow into a leadership role, relying on others as needed. After all, he was so talented ... how could he not succeed?

This individual was eventually fired from a senior command role for toxicity. He was known to shout down and publicly belittle his own staff. His approach fostered sufficiently broad alienation that he become isolated and starved of the insight needed to guide the organization. Eventually he flamed out, but not before poisoning the climate of an entire wing of people while blocking the progress of a better suited candidate.

This is one example in countless across public and private organizations. The continuing embrace of this bad idea helps explain why so many organizations hire and promote the wrong people for leadership roles, which in turn explains why barely a quarter of the American workforce considers itself engaged.

2️⃣ "Introvert vs Extrovert."

I thought we were past this one, but seems to be enjoying an unfortunate revival. I've recently seen a piece written by a senior director with decades of leadership experience employing this tired old trope as his main premise.

This false dichotomy does a disservice to the complex spectrum of human personality. Its binary division shackles individuals to narrow, one-dimensional labels, ignoring the fluid and context-dependent nature of human behavior. It fosters stereotypes that caricature people as either reclusive, bookish soloists or gregarious, attention-seeking cartoons, overlooking the nuances that make up individual personalities.

75% of people are in fact "ambiverts" exhibiting characteristics of both introversion and extroversion, depending on the situation, and in patterns that shift over time.

The three most effective leaders I've ever personally observed would have all been described by the outside world as "extroverts." They had big personalities and their presence and energy could instantly change the human terrain of a situation.

But what set each of them apart was their insistence on making others famous. They were not attention seekers, but champions and promoters of their teams. And each had the capacity for considered reflection and critical thinking, indeed powering their leadership engines with the produce grown in quiet thought.

In clinging to this outdated binary, we not only limit our understanding of others but introduce dangerous biases into our assessments of ourselves and others, ultimately making bad developmental decisions as a result.

However, this doesn’t mean a massive well of high-quality introvert memes should be disused.

3️⃣ "High Potential Candidate."

This is the euphemism applied when a senior executive decides, nearly always based on impressions, fractals of performance, and the second/third/fourth hand observations of others stitched and woven with multiple threads of bias, that someone has "VP potential" and "deserves" outsized investment in their development.

There is a lot wrong with this practice. But it is pervasive and proudly promoted as "good advice" under the guise of development.

When executives involve themselves in talent decisions, they riddle the process with bias and favoritism, both real and perceived.

Once someone is designated as "high potential," the bias is compounded by the halo effect. Executives may believe they know how to pick winners, but research shows they typically pick people a lot like themselves, or over-correct by picking someone completely different.

In either case, their impression-based judgments are a poor proxy for objective, collaborative, honest talent assessments conducted by people close enough to see performance accurately. People whose assessments are more trustworthy than the wistful impressions of a distant corporate monarch.

"Potential" is a dangerous loophole for bias. It typically has no definition, and therefore can mean anything. This doesn't mean we should try to totally exclude potential from talent processes. But we should openly acknowledge the risk of bias it introduces, and do our best to agree on what it means so we can decide whether particular evidence indicates it.

And we should of course question the premise.

Every human being has high potential. Your role as a leader is to help an individual locate, grow, and exploit that potential. If that carries them beyond the boundaries of their current role, help them find another one where they can continue to thrive.

But to pretend some people have "high potential" is to pretend others have "low potential." When what we're really saying is we prefer to judge their potential narrowly, according to a static view of their current role and trajectory. What should happen instead is to ask the question of how we unleash an individual's potential and how we can make that relevant to our organization.

What should never happen, but constantly does, is the anointment of an individual as "the future" based on a snapshot assessment. This creates a presumption of superior performance which must be rebutted by others rather than proven by advocates. It becomes a secret and often slimy path by which pragmatists who play a good game rise to senior roles, afterward laying waste to entire organizations.

As an Air Force captain, I was part of a selective Pentagon internship available to only 50 of more than 4,000 eligible officers. It was designed to (and did) provide a developmental boost to officers whose performance had indicated they had an above average chance of reaching the strategic level.

After graduation, most but not all continued to demonstrate the same level of performance. A few fell off the mark. Yet they continued to be promoted ahead of peers, having donned a perceptual halo of presumed excellence. This set them up to fail by reaching high-level roles too quickly and alienated others to the program.

While I hasten to add that many of my fellow interns continue to serve and have proven to be exceptional leaders, I expect they would have reached the same altitude without the bias boost of the "high potential" label.

The net effect of cherry picking future leaders and placing them on a "fast track" is the demotivation of others, and ultimately a loser's bargain between having chosen the wrong candidate or having played king-maker by giving someone advantages, without which they might have been out-competed on the merits.

It’s also most often an answer to a question nobody asked. Operational leaders are talent managers. They want the task of assessing and developing talent and consider it core to what they deliver.

When the vertical organization slaps a seal of approval on an individual, this takes assessment partially or wholly out of the leader’s hands. Instead of deciding whether someone has high potential, they are expected to adopt that conclusion and will be judged on whether they make performance match. Power grabs of this sort are distorting and demotivating for organizations.

An old pair of work gloves can make things feel easy and comfortable. Ideas can be like this too.

But old things sometimes need to be thrown away. When it comes to hiring, developing, and promoting the right leaders, it's essential we're brave enough to take the gloves off, discard them, and handle the future of the organization with the care and expertise our people and teams deserve.

TC is a veteran of operational leadership and an expert in developing high-performance teams.