The Action Catalyst
The Five Talents That Really Matter, with Barry Conchie & Sarah Dalton (Leadership, Hiring, Research, Business)
Tue, 17 Sep 2024
Barry Conchie, Founder and President of Conchie Associates, and business partner Sarah Dalton, discuss their research taken from over 58K executive leaders, including insights on holding two conflicting truths together, how people don’t change, but the context they exist in does, being both rigid and flexible like an air traffic controller, why likeability is not an indicator of job performance (but it sure informs a lot of hiring), the ROI of a tortoise vs. a squirrel, identifying the 5 talents that REALLY matter in leadership, and how sometimes leaders just can’t be made.
The way we've talked about leadership in the past is immature, inaccurate, and ineffective. We've either said leadership is a million things and we've complicated it, or we've been even more silly and said it really only boils down to this one thing, like, I don't know, humility. Well, goodness me, that's just not true. A lot of nonsense. Not everyone is cut out to be a
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On today's episode, Barry Conchi and Sarah Dalton, both of Conchi Associates, discuss their new book, The Five Talents That Really Matter, How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance, taken from research on over 58,000 executive leaders in a variety of industries representing everything from small companies to global enterprises. The takeaway? Leadership isn't for everyone.
So let's start here. We rarely have two folks at the same time. So let's start with that. How did the two of you guys come to be working together? Share with me a little bit of that history.
Well, Barry and I worked together at the last company that I was with. He was one of their major clients. And when it came time for me to leave that organization, I reached out to Barry to ask him if he could help me get another job. And he just said, over my dead body, if you're leaving this company, you're coming on board with me.
In my version of that, when I set my own company up in 2013, my aim was to do interesting work with interesting people. So my expertise is in assessment and selection. I'd had a career spanning nearly 40 years before I set up my own company. So I had a lot of background, a lot of experience in leadership.
And I quickly got to the point where we were growing so quickly that I couldn't handle it on my own. And I needed to bring people on board. But being an expert in selection, nobody came up close to what I was looking for. And then when I started working with the company where Sarah was at,
It kind of dawned on me pretty quickly that if there was ever a possibility that she became available on the market, I'd slap her up in her heartbeat because she checks so many boxes. I had a very successful book that came out, sold a ton of copies. And I'd always had this idea of a book in my mind for our old company based on the work that we did. It was time to write that book.
And I thought, Sarah's going to be a part of this.
So you had a book 16 years ago, came out, did incredibly well. Tell us about this one, the difference. Bring us up to speed on that.
The last book I wrote was when I was at Gallup. I used to lead Gallup's leadership research and selection. When I left Gallup and set up my own company, it was a completely different focus to what I did in Gallup. I was relentlessly focused on top-level selection, whereas in Gallup, we were a bit more of an all-round consultant. So we had to cover a whole gamut of different things.
But in my own business, I just became relentlessly focused on leadership. And I built my own leadership assessment. So I researched it, validated it. And that assessment in and of itself tells a really interesting story. So it became a story of itself and it was a story that needed to be taught. So if you can imagine my life existing in three big chunks.
The first chunk was like pre-Gallup work as a senior professional in education in the UK. I spent about 10 years at Gallup and then I spent 13 years in lower business. And this particular book captures the last 13 years. Now, here's an interesting thing to think about, Stephanie. Two things can be true at the same time, even though they sound contradictory.
So here are two things that sound contradictory, but both are true. The first is that human beings are infinitely variable. But our experience of this is every person we meet. And it doesn't matter whether they're professional, it doesn't matter whether they're family, it doesn't matter whether they're in the neighborhood or community or whatever.
Person by person by person, these folks are infinitely variable, not in people of the set. Contradictory fact number two, humans are eminently predictable. Even though there's such a variability, we can predict aspects of human behavior, aspects of human performance pretty accurately. And what we do within our business is we try to marry both of those things.
So we measure the variability in people. We can see that you're different from Sarah and you're both different from me, but we can work in a way that enables us to build up accurate statistical predictions of success in terms of performance. When you think about that at a leadership level, that's our value.
So I'm going to ask you a question, and then I'm going to ask a similar one for you, Sarah. And you probably know the question, because as we just determined, humans are predictable. But just in case, in your tenure, Barry, the more you've seen, have you seen that people really stay the same? Or have you seen people as whole and as individuals change?
It's an interesting question, but there's a question you need to ask before that, and that is, what can change? So, if I think about myself, I haven't changed that much over 40 years, but what has changed is the context. So, when you think about where I was 40 years ago, what I was doing, characteristically, I wasn't that different to how I am now. I was still relentlessly competitive.
It just manifests itself in slightly different ways. I don't cry when I lose, but I used to. used to hurt me that much that I couldn't bear to lose. I've always been a very deep thinker that I've never been overruled by a particular problem because I knew eventually I could probably find a solution. Those characteristics have remained very, very constant.
You know, what changes are the experiences that we acquire over the course of our careers? And that teaches us to either moderate or extenuate certain characteristics that we've got. I no longer try when I don't win.
And the interesting question to us, you know, certainly if you've got a partner or a significant other, but the question to ask yourself is, you know, if you do have a partner in life, What success have you had in changing their characteristics over the course of the time that you've known them?
So if there are irritating things that your partner does, you know, and you've tried to change it, how much, how much luck have you had with that? And most people at that point crack out in laughter. Because, of course, the idea that you're going to change is ridiculous. But here's what does change. You learn to accommodate certain things. You learn to live with it. You adapt.
So the characteristics in the person don't change. And your attitude towards those characteristics don't change. They're still irritating. What changes is how you handle it. And if you think about that from a leadership perspective, then... You know, we've got a whole world out there thinking that you can train people to do anything. You can't. But we should stop lying to people about this.
Because that's what it is. We're lying to each other. No, you can't train people to do anything. If you want to pick nuts off a tree, don't hire a tortoise. Hire a squirrel. Squirrels are brilliant at picking nuts off a tree. Now you could teach a tortoise to do it. And maybe they could pick one or two before they fell off. But what's the return on that effort? It's really, really limited.
We don't change anywhere near as much as we thought we do. And so we live in this pretense. And that pretense is, I manage myself differently now. I've learned over experience, not to say this in this environment, I've learned to keep my mouth shut and let other people speak before I speak. We're just managing them in more effective ways.
Wow, that is food for thought. So flip side of that similar question to you, Sarah, when folks reach out to you and say, hey, we need some help improving our hiring processes, improving our retention, all the myriad things. How receptive do you really find that folks are to changing their mindset? I mean, in your experience, walk me through what that can look like.
It's always a journey. It doesn't happen overnight because when you think about a typical hiring process that you lead any candidate through, the factors that we're usually looking at have to do with the person's background and career experience. So what companies they've worked in before, how long that they've been around in certain jobs.
We look at the kind of skills and expertise that they list out on their resume, and then we get them in a room. And we try and have a human conversation with them. And at that point, what you're really doing is thinking about how you build chemistry with that person, whether or not you like them, whether you can see yourself working with them.
But likability isn't a predictor of future job performance. And neither are the companies that you've worked in, how far you went in college, and or any other things that people typically list on their resume, none of those things predict future job performance.
So it's the very reason why we can get someone who might be brilliant in an interview where we build up a ton of confidence about what we think they're going to be like in the job, and then we plug them in and then we find out otherwise. Every manager has had this experience where they've had this brilliant candidate in an interview.
Everyone they've interviewed felt really good, really positive about them, but yet how they perform in the job isn't what we thought it was going to be. So none of the things we typically look at are a really good indicator of future performance. One of the first questions I ask some managers that I'm working with is, tell me what kind of candidate you're looking for. Describe it.
And they'll always describe aspects of talent. So when they talk about, I need a really good problem solver, or I need someone who's going to be the relational glue. in an organization that's otherwise really dissatisfied right now. Or they talk about someone who can put good processes in place. These are all illustrations of very specific talents that we can measure in people.
The difference is we put them through an assessment. We can ask way more questions in an assessment and get a much more reliable read of how people think and whether or not they have the talents that you might think they do in an interview, but they really don't. It's way too easy to fool someone in an interview where you've got no real experience with them.
You're not exactly sure what questions to ask. So what I've got to do in my job is to wind people back and try and get them to hold back their own gut instincts and decision making about the candidates that they like and say, look, I know you might think this because you met them once or twice. But here's what the assessment results tell me about how they actually think.
And here are the questions that you should be asking. It's a journey. It doesn't happen overnight. And they don't always listen to us. So they don't always take our advice. They don't always listen to us when we say, do not move forward. We just look at what happens. We're usually right. I was like, do you have a stack of I told you so cards? You do have a stack. We definitely have those.
And that's, you know, that's what helps us tighten up some of our predictions and our understanding of what characteristics drive better performance in a role.
Okay, so let me shift gears and talk about the book, The Five Talents That Really Matter. How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance. And I think what's just so just catching already is we are definitely seeing an emerging emphasis on a different kind of leadership than probably existed, Barry, when you first started in your career.
The way that people are really embracing this idea that, you know, leadership isn't just about climbing the corporate ladder. It's a lot of responsibility, not just to those north of them, but to the folks that they're leading and managing, etc. So tell us a little bit about how the book came to be and maybe give us a couple of nuggets to entice us there.
Well, the book came to be because there isn't a book out there like this right now. And the book does four things. First, it describes, as the title suggests, that there are five talents that really matter. So when people ask the question, what is it about leadership and what do we need to know about leadership in a way that drives high levels of performance?
The answer to that is the five talents. Now, the five talents, I'll just very quickly run through them. The first one is setting direction. So establishing a course, heading somewhere, right? You need to be heading somewhere. The second thing is harnessing energy. And that means, you know, you're going to motivate people, you're going to motivate yourself. The third component is exerting pressure.
Leaders need to change people's minds. And in our view, without the capacity to do that, your organization will really go nowhere. Not everybody's going to agree with you, but you're still going to get there. The fourth element is improving connectivity. That means organizations are associated as well as professional. It's about the connections between people.
If your organization is supremely well connected, it predicts strategic agility. And if it isn't, you're going to get silos, trenches, and divisions. You're going to get missteps, poor handoffs, and so on. The fifth element is controlling traffic. And controlling traffic is how you think about the way that you manage complex operation.
And the controlling traffic that we describe in the book is like an air traffic controller. There are rigid rules that, my goodness, you've got to change on a dime in a heartbeat when things change. plane malfunction, angry passengers, a drug pilot. I mean, whatever it is, you've got to be able to deal with it.
So you've got very, very strict rules that guide certain parameters like how far planes have got to be apart, how fast they go, how quickly they descend, how you move them around the taxiway. Then everything after that is managing them to the rules. Goodness, there's so much unpredictability. You've got to be able to cope with that too.
So the five talents that really matter is our explanation of the critical elements that predict the top performing leaders. Now, not everybody is going to be good at all of them, but you need to be good at enough of them. And what the book does is describe that balance. Because I've got to tell you, there are some things I'm not good at. Absolutely hopeless.
Sarah, did you want to chime in on this?
You've got to booker these things. And as I think about my career, step B, I've learned to do more and more of less and less. So I'll let certain things go. And that's actually a really interesting model the book describes because we're not saying everybody has to do these five things. We're saying these five things need to be taken care of.
So you need to contribute some, but maybe the way you build your team fleshes out the rest. So first element of the book, five talents that really matter. Then there are three other things. First two, number one, the way we've talked about leadership in the past is immature, inaccurate, and ineffective.
We've either said leadership is a million things and we've complicated it, or we've been even more silly and said it really only boils down to this one thing, like, I don't know, humility. Well, goodness me, that's just not true. So we deconstruct leadership. a lot of nonsense that's been written about leadership over the last 40 years or so.
The third element of the book is that companies get a lot wrong about selection. Sarah highlighted a few of those a little bit earlier with respect to face-to-face interviews. So what we do is we analyze what they get wrong about selection and then put in place a series of things that will help correct that. One of which, of course, is the assessment that we describing in the book.
If you use a well-calibrated predictive assessment, you'll make far fewer selection errors and far more selection hits. So the third element of the book describes what companies are currently doing wrong and how to fix it. And the fourth element of the book is the most exciting, and that is we give people a chance to take the assessment. So the book covers those four issues.
A lot of the things that we'll be saying to folks before they even think of taking the assessment is not everyone is cut out to be a leader and not everyone is going to make it as a leader. Be prepared.
I mean, just to add to what Barry is already saying, the idea with the five talents that really matter is that there are unchanging elements of who people are that drive very good performance in leadership roles. As Barry said, not everyone will have them or people will have them to different degrees. So what we wanted to do with this book is give people a means of very...
Give people a very clear language and a means of identifying the characteristics in themselves that might lend to more effective leadership and to help them think about where they spend their time if they're going to develop those.
Usually, I think one of the mistakes we make in our culture is thinking that we should be well-rounded people who are just good at everything or that we should focus on the weaknesses that we have and try and coach those to just get a little bit better. But that's not how you get the best performance out of people.
We got to help people understand how they're unique and what talents make them stand out. And we know through research that if you want to get the best out of people, if you want to help them perform better, you've got to give them a way of understanding the natural talents that they have and the things that they naturally do really well.
Because the more interesting question is how good could you be in those areas? We'll want people spending their time in the areas where they've got the greatest potential to develop and grow as leaders.
Sarah's point about self-awareness and helping people understand more about who they are, recognizing that they won't be brilliant at everything. We do have people in our database, by the way, who think they're brilliant at everything. You might even have met one or two in your career. But here's something really interesting.
Fair enough.
disconnect is not only worrying to us, but it's also potentially damaging for the individuals who claim that and for the organizations that they need. So we have to spend time unpicking those perceptions of self and saying, look, I think what you really mean is you're pretty smart. But there's a difference between being intellectually smart and being very good strategically.
So a lot of the time we've got to pull people away from low levels of self-awareness and try to shine a light on what they really mean about themselves in ways that is much more helpful to their growth and development.
So maybe a good piggyback to your book would be self-awareness for dummies. Yeah, yeah.
That might be a good precursor to this book, yeah. I don't think there's any virtue in being always wrong, but never in debt. Those two things worry me. And I think too many people have got an inflated view of their capabilities when it comes to interviews and selecting people. So I'll give you an illustration.
One of the questions I often ask the CEOs we work with is, how good are you at recruiting leaders? Nobody's ever said I'm bad. And then I'll say, so what's your hit rate? And they look at me and say, well, what do you mean by that? Of your last 10 appointments, how many turned out to be above average performance? Well, they look at me and they say, well, maybe six.
I said, so what you're really saying is you don't know because people don't track this information and we wish they would. You should have a number and you should be able to say, Six of the last 10 people are appointed with above average performance. It's remarkable the lack of specificity that organizations communicate with us about their hit rate when it comes to hiring.
These are people, by the way, who measure widgets to microns of tolerance. They can tell you, you know, with a nanometer of, you know, what the tensile strength of a steel beam is. They can tell you how many widgets are in transit between Indonesia and Cape Town, right? They go into this inordinate detail. Most important thing of all, well, I think it's about six out of ten.
It's as good as they can get that we think it's an embarrassment and we need to change it.
We hear all kinds of books and stories and feel goods about what made somebody a great leader or, you know, a certain characteristic or something happened in their life or some kind of professional event or whatever. And I'm not saying there's not value in them. There's stories, there's inspiration.
But in terms of really modeling a formula, a research based way of approaching leadership, it sounds like you've got the corner on that.
And we think we're doing a big public service, Stephanie, because if we stop the person in their tracks and make them think, maybe I don't want to be a leader, that's actually really good for them because there may well be another role that isn't a high-level leadership role where they could be utterly brilliant. But if we can encourage people who've got
measurable leadership potential, but have either not been encouraged or a little bit unsure of themselves. If we can build their confidence to take on these bigger jobs and to unleash their talents on the world and be a great success, we think that's phenomenal. So we take that really, really seriously.
Just because you might not be cut out being a top leader doesn't mean there is a role out there where you can shine and be fantastic. And if we can help people in those kinds of discoveries, it's not only good for them, good for the people they work with, good for organizations, it's actually good for society.
Yeah, that passion definitely shines through. Thank you both so much. This has been super fun and really a fascinating topic. I can really hear the passion and the mission, making the world a better place with better leaders.
Well, it's been great talking to you, Stephanie. Thanks for the opportunity.
Thank you so much.
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