There’s a difference between talent and skill.
Talent is something that you can do naturally.
Skill is something that you can learn to do.
Very often a person’s biggest talent is NOT the skill they are getting paid for.
For instance, ‘Suzy in accounts’ was always good with numbers, so she studied for accountancy … and works in the accounts department.
But at school, she had another talent. Something she was even better at. She was always involved in the school plays. Not as an actor though. That would have been way too much limelight for her! But she just loved being behind the scenes – as a director she had a natural talent for creating the show and making other people shine.
In her spare time, she now runs the amateur drama club, and her annual production gets standing ovations at the local theatre.
But the sales team has never asked her to take a look at how they make their board room presentations.
Why would they – after all, what do people in accounts know about selling?
Sure, the sales department has much better sales skills than Suzy, but the results they are achieving could potentially be enhanced significantly by tapping into her talent for putting on a show and coaching people to give their best performance.
As CEO, your role is to optimize results using all of the resources at your disposal.
Your people’s ‘other’ talents are hidden resources.
Finding out what these ‘other’ talents are and then giving people special advisor roles or empowering them to create pop-up teams to work on things beyond departmental boundaries will enable your business to tap into these hidden resources.