#HRTechChat: 58,000 Assessments and 18 Key Learnings

As part of researching The Five Talents that Really Matter, Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton, the co-authors, conducted and reviewed 58,000 talent assessments. Their research was global in nature, and they studied leaders at every organization level. Their findings challenge the status quo and call out for leaders, at times, things they may not have wanted to know. The key learnings offer us insight into how we have been making decisions, unaware of their impact. Understanding these insights can help us make better choices and deliver better business performance. Let ‘s look at just a few of the learnings here...and then listen to the podcast to get the whole story. For example, when we are selecting candidates, we think of ourselves as objective—looking for whom we think would be the best candidate for a given role. If you ask leaders if they intentionally select people like themselves, they generally disagree. They think of themselves as seeking talent diversity. In fact, just the opposite was true, leaders had succeeded in “self-replication.” Even though it has been known for decades that “talent diversity predicts stronger collective performance advantages.” Have you ever heard leaders profess that they welcome all points of view and love to be challenged? Well, the reality is that dissention is often not welcomed. How do you know if this is going on in your team? If your team is discussing a complicated issue and no one is speaking up—then disagreement is not welcomed—yet leaders perceive themselves as welcoming dissent. If team members are having a meeting after the meeting to talk about the real issues—the leader does not welcome dissent and may not even see it. Do organizations have a bias for action-oriented leadership versus those with a keen eye for strategy? Would you ever hire someone you personally dislike even if they were highly talented? How often do you hire for likeability and are not even aware of it? Why does it take some leaders a longer time to terminate poor performers? In this podcast we will discuss the 18 insights and how you can use these findings to make better talent decisions—both in how you select and develop leaders.