I spoke at the Guardian’s Future of HR Summit recently about how neuroscience can inform the execution of talent strategy. The sessions from speakers were cleverly interspersed with discussions on the current and future challenges for HR. One persistent theme was HR leaders seeking the ‘heroes’ in their organisations – those people who are exceptional performers. This description resonated with me as my organisation has been running a campaign about heroes.
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The conference participants, some of whom were HR directors from household name companies, talked about their exceptional people and how knowing the attributes which create success – the super powers of the heroes – could really help the business in these grave economic times. The observation was that just how people achieve their success was unclear for most HR practitioners and that competency frameworks, and even development and assessment centres, were really of little or no help. What they needed was a way of isolating the things these people did that was different to the norm. This is an area that HR has not traditionally focused on. Instead we have tried to describe everything. In the drive to be comprehensive, we have also become complex and the complexity hinders the ability to help the business.
What would we do with this more focused information? The HR directors at my table talked about the need to hire, select talent and replicate success. One large retailer mentioned how this would help their expansion plans as well as enable them to transfer the exceptional store mangers’ characteristics to more stores. This would create better customer experience and ultimately increase revenue for the business.
Neuroscience does throw light on this dilemma. The work of Carol Dweck has identified two different mindsets. One she calls ‘fixed’. People with this mindset believe they were born smart or talented. The problem with this is, when they come up against obstacles, they give up quickly. The other mindset she found is a ‘growth’ mindset. These people believe success comes from hard work and learning from experience. These people persist through challenges and will tend to take more risks. This may not be the whole explanation for heroes but it is probably better to have a team made up of growth mindset people in the business right now than fixed mindset people. Further research has also shown that the culture of the people managers in an organisation influences people‘s mindset. If managers coach, provide stretching assignments and support risk taking while debriefing learning, people will begin to shift their mindset too.
So, if you want more heroes, give people feedback on how hard they tried rather than how smart they are.