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.
Full Episode
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.
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