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A Talent Driven Organization

Written by: Roger Ingbretsen

Article Overview: “Winning is about having the best people on your team. It doesn’t help if you’re surrounded by people who are less talented than you are.” So much of leadership is about accomplishing results through others. The building of a great team starts with developing great leadership or a “great coaching staff” – a staff that gets rewarded for building a great, high performance team.

A Talent Driven Organization

No organization can continue to prosper and grow without having the right people in the right jobs. Quoting Jack Welch of GE fame, “Winning is about having the best people on your team. It doesn’t help if you’re surrounded by people who are less talented than you are.” So much of leadership is about accomplishing results through others. The building of a great team starts with developing great leadership or a “great coaching staff” – a staff that gets rewarded for building a great, high performance team.

The soft side of a coaching leadership style is all about making the hard choices. The coaching leader accepts the personal responsibility for making tough decisions about, who is going to be on the team, and who is not. In the book The War For Talent, authors Michaels, Handfield-Jones and Axelrod, provide a straightforward approach to “assessing performance” to enable strengthening your organization with the best talent. Strengthen your talent pool by: investing in A players (the best 10 to 20 percent), developing your B players (the mid 60 to 70 percent), and acting decisively on C players (the bottom 10 to 20 percent). This is not about passing judgment on people. It is about taking a snapshot in time and assessing the bench strength of your players. This process is not about using people simply as if they are merely a means to an end. It has everything to do with seeding the organizational team with solid talent, coaching and inspiring that talent to self-actualize, and helping that talent create meaning for themselves and the organization.

Once you have identified the different levels of talent, you can then begin the dialogue with each player at each level that will allow you to drive his or her level of performance in a direction that will best meet both personal needs, and the business objectives of the organization. This approach amounts to: (1.) Looking out for and strategically placing your very best talent; (2.) Challenging the mid-level talent to get better; and (3.) Deciding what role, if any, your least talented players will have.

One of the greatest barriers to optimum team performance is having people on the teams that are not capable of pulling their weight. Keeping the wrong people around is unfair to the right people because they see their hard work impeded by those who cannot or will not perform as needed. As an organization or a leader, you cannot afford to pamper under performers. Additionally, you cannot risk not taking care of and rewarding your over achievers or best performers. This process of ranking your players is directed at evaluating and assembling the best talent for your specific team and placing the right person in the right position for the overall benefit of the person and the organization. Borrowing from the GE play book, any replacement players brought on to the team should be better than your best players, there-by raising the bar of performance for the entire team.

As an organization you must organize around what you want to become, not simply around what is being done on a daily basis. Leaders at all levels must become the developers of a “talent pool” for the future. Anyone in any supervisory/leadership role must understand that their primary job is to focus on the building and development – “the coaching” – of the team (people) for which they are responsible. Also, it is not just a matter of building a talent inventory of people; it is also very important that you create the “play book” that fits “the strategy” and an environment in which that talent can perform to their full potential. Every member of the team needs to clearly understand and be able to carry out his or her play book role, so the team can implement the desired overall winning strategy.

The strength of an organization does not lie in its structure; it is centered in the collective strength of its leaders and the people they lead. As an organization strives to become a great entity, it must continually invest in and grow great people. Quoting Peter Drucker, “There is no long-term success without a successor.” His challenge in this statement centers on the ability of an organization to produce great people and the next line of great leaders. However, an organization cannot stop at just developing the replacement of its top leadership level. Organizations should assure themselves that every level of leadership and the talented people they lead have an abundance of high performers to draw from both for now and in the future.

The objective must be to develop a pipeline of people who have the right attitude and aptitude to allow organizational sustainability and growth. To accomplish this, the talents of an external as well as an internal coach can be used to both prepare and coach key leaders along with high-potential individuals who represent the present and future leadership of the organization.


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You MAY reprint the information contained in this article as long as no portion of the contents are modified and it used “exclusively” within your organization. You must also give credit to information by including the tag line...

Roger M. Ingbretsen, Author, Speaker, Leadership Coach, Organizational and career developer For more information, visit www.ingbretsen.com or call 509 999 7008.

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Article Tags: actualize, bench strength, business objectives, coaching leadership, decisions, dialogue, fame, hard choices, high performance team, jobs, judgment, leadership style, means to an end, michaels, mid level, personal needs, personal responsibility, snapshot, straightforward approach, talent pool



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