According to my husband, this year’s German soccer team is really good. The players are also quite young and you wouldn’t necessarily expect this level of performance from such an inexperienced team. But as it turns out, they have more hours playing soccer under their belts than many an older player.
Soccer being the fabulously profitable international business that it is, it’s not uncommon to scout for and train soccer players at an early age to ensure a steady pipeline of soccer talent. Then they train like mad and some drop out until only the ‘best’ remain and there’s your new lineup. (I’m simplifying here and glossing over all kinds of personal drama but you get the idea – find them young, weed out all but the very best, voila.)
I wouldn’t normally ponder whether the selection process for a sport I don’t follow could be improved but over the weekend I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. According to him, an overwhelming percentage of promising young soccer players have birthdays clustered soon after the age cutoff date. That’s because if you’re looking for a group of kids who turned ten in 2011 with a cutoff date January 1st, a kid born on January 2nd has a relative advantage over a kid born in the same year on December 31st in terms of maturity, coordination and strength.
And if we fast forward a decade, we’ll find more world class soccer players born in the first few months after the cutoff date than in the last few months.
No surprise, really. The chosen few get thousands of hours of training and experience under their belts by the time their voices change. The others go home and maybe keep playing on their local community league until they grow up and get a job, at which point they only play Thursdays after work until their knees give out. They might even have had the stuff to go the distance but once you miss your window of opportunity there’s no way to catch up on those thousands of hours of practice.
And it turns out that thousands of hours of practice (about 10,000) are what differentiates between world class and average. Natural talent plays a role - think of it as the cover charge to get into the world class club - but it’s not a substitute for 10,000 hours of practice.
I read all this and thought, ‘OK, so kids born further from the cutoff date rarely get to play professional soccer. Sad for them, of course, but if the national team wins the system works.’
Then the phrase squandered talent caught my eye, which bothered me because businesses and countries are supposedly facing a global critical skills shortage even as I write this. And let’s face it, soccer isn’t the only place arbitrary cutoff criteria weeds talent out early. What about schools, succession plans, high potential programs and recruiting, just to name a few?
The point is this: 1) There’s a lot more natural talent out there than gets developed properly; and 2) ANYONE possessing a basic minimum of the natural ability can become a high performing expert with training, opportunity and experience. In other words, once someone reaches a minimum level of ability necessary to do a job, someone slightly 'better' won't necessarily perform better over time.
This has several business implications:
- There’s plenty of talent out there, it’s experience and opportunity that are missing.
- Typical succession, pay for performance, high potential and recruiting programs weed out talented people in favor of those believed to be slightly more talented.
- Studies have shown that random selection within a group that meets minimal skills and educational criteria produces better results than trying to find the ‘very best’ people.
- Businesses might therefore be better served by trying to develop as many people as possible rather than trying to develop as few as possible.
Bottom line: Between the perfect employee and the, ah, turkey are plenty of people who have the potential to be great. We just have to stop weeding them out.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Picture courtesy of flickr.com.
Laura Schroeder is a global talent specialist at Workday, headquartered in Pleasanton, CA. She has nearly fifteen years of experience envisioning, designing, developing, implementing and evangelizing global Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions and holds a certificate in Strategic Human Resources Practices from Cornell University. Her articles and interviews on HCM topics have been published in the US, Europe and Asia. She lives in Munich, Germany and enjoys cooking, reading, writing, kick boxing (well, kicking things) and spending time with friends and family. If you want to read more from Laura, check out her talent management blog Working Girl or follow her on Twitter @WorkGal.
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