Unearthing Talents Your Employees Keep Hidden
I once worked with Jim, a business analyst who, like many of that breed, could make Excel sing like Pavarotti. One day his supervisor, Mike, ran across Jim building an Excel template to track stats in a fantasy baseball league.
Instead of disciplining Jim for violating company time, Mike saw Jim in a new light -- as someone who could create spreadsheet-based forms for any number of business tasks. As it turned out, Jim' spreadsheet virtuosity, utilized in a new way, saved the company significant coin it was paying to an outside vendor to design such forms, and gave Jim a fun new role in the company.
Guess what. You have employees with hidden talents that, if you only knew they existed, could help your business. As Steven DeMaio blogs on Harvard Business Publishing:
"Good managers know what their individual employees like to do (what tasks they enjoy, which projects motivate them). Great managers find out why someone has those preferences."What a splendid observation. It's so easy to pair up a staffer with a task because she has always done that work in the past. But knowing what motivates someone helps you find better strategic fits between employee and the work to be done.
DeMaio gives this example:
"Rosa might have enjoyed that customer-feedback project not because she likes working with surveys but because she has a strong affinity for the product that was being evaluated. Her next assignment should be related to that product, not a survey on a different product."Read DeMaios post How to Identify Your Employees' Hidden Talents. In addition to "ask for the reasons behind people's preferences," he advises:
- Turn a compliment into an interview.
- Analyze how people think, not just what they do.
- Inquire about people's dreams.