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Episode Transcript
In this episode of the Strategy Podcast, I want to talk about the seventh mistake I see companies make. And that is spreading their talent around, particularly their best talent around the organization.
In every company, there is a set of employees who are really the difference makers. They perform at a very high level.
Usually, they’re pretty well, the organization knows who they are. And there’s a strong tendency to try and want to spread this talent around the organization and like reinforce everybody. It’s partially sort of being fair, if you will, to the management team. Everybody gets a big player on their team.
And you end up kind of dispersing this talent into the organization. And effectively what happens is you’re diluting the power of this group to actually make a meaningful difference inside your company.
It’s kind of like on the Sandlot, when you’re taking, picking round robin and everybody’s kind of picking the best players they can, but you end up sort of evenly matched teams, but doesn’t give you the best team.
And what you really want, working on the most important things in your company, are the best team you can possibly put forward. You want to put your best foot forward on the things that really make a difference.
And if they’re spread out all over the place then you’re not going to really, really harness their talent. A
nd in fact you’re probably going to diminish their experience because they’re not achieving as much as they could. And when you put these high potential, high performing people working together on the most important things then you can make tremendous progress, much more progress than other kinds of teams can make.
And clearly there’s some important factors in here in terms of making sure the team is diverse in both opinions and skills. And it’s effectively, in terms of, in a personal, how these people work together.
But those are important things for this group to work on and develop because their ability to work both individually and as team members really make a big difference in the performance of the company over the longer term.
These are your future leaders in the organization. You want them to develop these skills. You want them to develop these skills as rapidly as possible. It’s very common to see the best performers out performing the average performer by 10 or more to one.
You know 10x, about the differential in terms of performance, particularly when you’re dealing with things like knowledge work.
Use this talent in the most effective way you possibly can to get the important things done in your company.
I hope you found this Strategy podcast to be helpful and useful in your work. My name’s Alex Nesbitt, and I’ll see you in the next podcast.
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