Maximize Talent to Multiply Profit

Scripture of the Week – Psalm 139: 13-16: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”

Today we’re talking about how to maximize the talent or capability of you and your teams because this ultimately helps you multiply profit for your business and pursue the mission of your organization. 

It’s important when assessing potential and the potential of your teams to not rely solely upon the fruit. The Consultant and The Coach live in an agricultural region and as any farmer will tell you, it’s about what goes into the tree, not what comes out of it. The fruit is simply a result of the soil, pesticides, nutrients, etc. The same thing can be said of the fruit of your business or organization. The fruit (aka profit and output metrics) are simply a result of what you put into it and do not reflect the potential of your people, teams or company. 

This means identifying and addressing the right problem. Let’s start with a family example from Josh (The Consultant). In Josh’s family there has been for many years chronic challenges with a couple of extended family relationships. For many years this caused great turmoil for Josh personally, in his marriage and generally his health. However, he finally realized he was addressing the wrong problem by trying to fix the fruit (ie anxiety, strained relationship). These were rather people and more importantly relationships with limited potential to actually help Josh achieve his mission and priorities which are to faithfully pursue faith in Christ, love his wife well, and raise healthy, balanced children. While this does not fix the strained relationship, it alters the lens through which Josh is able to engage with these family members because it properly sets up his own expectations regarding limited capability of these family members and the relationships to help achieve his family’s goals. 

What does this mean for your business? Consider carefully the capability of yourself and your people? Are you in the right role to maximize your talent? Are your team members? Don’t look at the fruit but rather personalities, strengths, and intangibles. When Josh decided to go out on his own as a consultant, the fruit of his work was not what helped him decide. He started by doing several personality and strength assessments to understand the situations where he’s at his very best. He checked this by having several discussions with mentors and colleagues in similar lines of work. Finally, he considered his intangibles such as his own self-belief, his drive to do more important work, and his interests. All this allowed him to successfully pivot his career into a more successful, meaningful arc. You can do the same with your business and people. 

When you start assessing yourself and your people, gaps will emerge. Your next task is to ask why these gaps exist. In many cases for our clients, the problem is usually tied to expectations of the leader. Usually leaders fall into one of two extremes which they need to guard against. On one end of the spectrum, executives expect too little of their people. This is many times due to the impersonal nature of large corporations and leaders not knowing their people very well at all.  On the other end are executives expecting too much of their people. This can be because CEOs, entrepreneurs, etc are made a little different than most people and this is easy to forget. Most people in an organization are comfortable in smaller roles with less pressure, responsibility, etc. Leaders are typically good at or even better in many cases at particular roles or tasks than the people they lead but unless they figure out how to maximize the talent of those they lead, they can never leverage themselves for greater success. 

So what do you do next? First, pull out your strategy and dust it off. Assuming it’s still relevant, assess the capabilities you need (and can reasonably afford) on your team including that of your role as leader. Do you have the right people in the right seats on the bus as compared to their capabilities today and/or ones you have the time and resources to develop in them? Where there is mis-alignment, start moving people to the right seats and/or off the bus.  

What are some ways The Consultant and The Coach help their clients with capability? 

The Consultant

• Work with a CEO and executive team to refresh the strategy
• Conduct a gap assessment on resources identified for the strategy and current resources, people and other dimensions of the company
• Guide the company through a change management exercise when deciding how to re-organize leaders or teams to better align with the strategy 

The Coach

• Work with the CEO to help them identify their own personal capability and guide them through an improvement plan
• Provide coaching to high potential executive leaders critical to success of the strategy but currently underperforming 

Thanks everyone! We hope this gives you some tips on how to multiply your profits by maximizing your talent and that of your teams.