The Five Talents That Matter: How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance
Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton
Hatchette Books (August 2024)
Here is a scientific methodology that consistently reveals the best talent for a given role
In this book, Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton explain the Executive Leadership Assessment that they and their associates have researched, built, and refined throughout the last twenty years. “You will come to understand the scientific methodology that allows us to predict successful executive leaders with 78 percent accuracy (and to predict unsuccessful leaders with 91 percent accuracy). We hope that this book will convince you of the importance of unbiased, data-driven, and statistically validated methods of candidate selection. As you think about yourself and your current and future leadership potential, the insights gained from our work could be invaluable to you.”
These are among the subjects on which Conchie and Dalton focus, devoting a separate chapter to each:
o What people and organizations get wrong about leadership
o What organizations get wrong about selection for hiring or promotion
o Research that identifies the very best candidates
o The most valuable lessons about all this that Conchie and Dalton have learned thus far
o The five talents that really matter
o How to transform an organization’s selection process
o Four “harsh truths”
Whatever their size and nature may be, all organizations need effective leadership at all levels and in all areas of operation throughout the given enterprise. It is no coincidence that companies annually ranked among those most highly admired and best to work for are also annually ranked among those most profitable and have the greatest cap value. However much they may differ in most other respects, all of them have in place — and continuously fine-tune — a process comparable with the Executive Leadership Assessment that Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton present in this book.
I commend them on a brilliant contribution to global thought leadership.
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Tom Rath and Barry Conchie’s Also, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent Times (2018) and Nancy Koehn’s Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times (2017).
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Here are two suggestions while you are reading The Five Talents That Really Matter: First, highlight key passages Also, perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references, and lessons you have learned as well as your responses to head notes and key points posed within the narrative. Also record your responses to specific or major issues or questions addressed or suggested in the material. Pay special attention to the “What Really Matters” material at the conclusion of chapters 5-9.
These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.