4 Reasons Talented Employees Don’t Reach Their Potential

 

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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No matter how talented someone might be, there is no guarantee that their talents will translate into top performance. The science of human potential has generally illustrated that an individual’s overarching competence cannot be fully understood unless we also account for their emotional make-up, preferences, and dispositions. No matter how smart, knowledgeable, and experienced you are, there is generally a difference between what you can do and what you normally do.

This is one of the reasons why talent identification efforts fail: when employers focus too much on candidates’ potential — the best they could do if they were motivated to do their best — they forget that the critical outcome they should try to predict is what people are actually likely to do once they are in the job, in particular their typical performance. Just like you shouldn’t assume that what you see in someone when you meet them on a first date is what you will keep on seeing when you are married to them five years later, there will probably be a difference between what you see in candidates when they are applying for a job and what you see from them when they have been in the job five years later (though science can help you predict this, too).

If you think you’re under-performing at work, you’re probably right: because few individuals give it their best and are 100% motivated throughout sustained and continuous periods of their tenure (my colleague Marc Effron has written an excellent book on this subject). In fact, even if you think that you are performing to the best of your capabilities, you’re probably wrong, as there is generally little overlap between what people think of their talents and performance, and how they actually perform. In fact, it is often the case that top performers evaluate their own performance more critically and harshly, whereas those who perform poorly think they are making a fantastic contribution to the company: self-awareness, it seems, is a critical component of talent.

The truth is that most people are not even bothered to try their best after they have been on the job for more than six months, a time-frame known as the honeymoon period. Although there are many reasons for this, here [is the first of] four common causes of under-performance and how to address them:

    • Poor fit: Talent is mainly personality in the right place, which explains why most people will do better in some jobs, cultures, and contexts than in others. Organizational psychologists call this “person-job-fit,” and it is measured by quantifying the degree of alignment between a person’s attitudes, values, abilities, and dispositions on the one hand, and the characteristics of the job, role, and organization on the other.The problem is that even when organizations evaluate the candidate correctly, they are often not as good at evaluating the role, and particularly their own culture. This is why so many organizations see themselves as more inclusive, diverse, innovative, and prosocial than they actually are — it’s wishful thinking rather than accurate self-assessment. This obviously impacts a candidates’ perceptions of the role and organization, where it may take them a while to truly experience the culture and understand what the role truly entails and demands from them.What can you do about this? The only alternative is to do your homework and carefully vet the organization you are about to join, ensuring that you understand the job in question well to avoid being surprised. Luckily, sites such as Glassdoor, which function as a sort of TripAdvisor of workplaces, and increasingly of leaders, can help you leverage the wisdom of crowds — but they are obviously not perfect. Asking detailed questions of your interviewers, speaking to employees, and figuring out whether you have much in common with high-performing incumbents in the same or similar role should help you predict fit.Of course, in some instances your main contribution to the organization or role may be to not fit in perfectly — this is the benefit of cognitive diversity. However, it is safer to assume you will adjust and perform well when you see similarities between your profile and the profile of high-performing employees (in fact, this is how science-driven assessment tools are calibrated to increase predictive accuracy, namely by benchmarking against high-performing incumbents).

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In short, you can always assume that your talents are necessary, but not sufficient to excel and impress at work. Optimizing your job so that it fits with your interests, beliefs, and broader life activities, and being alert to the invisible social forces that govern the dynamics of organizations, will ultimately help you perform to the best of your capabilities.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, and an associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. He’s the author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It). Find him on Twitter: @drtcp or at www.drtomas.com. 

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