Leadership Caffeine—Managing and Developing the Extraordinary

The Leadership Caffeine series is over 200 installments strong and is dedicated to every aspiring or experienced leader and manager seeking ideas, insights or just a jolt of energy to keep pushing forward. Thanks for being along for the journey!

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Let’s face it, some people are graced with an extra gear that the rest of us don’t have. Whether it’s remarkable creativity or ingenuity, or incredible technical skills, it’s exciting to manage and support extraordinary individuals.

It’s also very challenging.

Good managers and leaders tailor their approach for individuals, however, when presented with someone who is light-years beyond their peers in certain areas, many managers stumble and struggle when it comes to daily management and on-going support and development. Here are some suggestions for strengthening your support of these unique individuals.

4 Suggestions for Managing and Developing the Gifted Individuals on Your Team:

1. Remember, you cannot compromise your standards for accountability and fairness. Standards of accountability and fairness must be universal, however, when it comes to supporting development and leveraging the skills of those uniquely gifted, don’t feel compelled to hold these people back. A superstar needs role players to win a championship. Nonetheless, in the eyes of your extended team, the accountabilities must be equal.

2. Beware Enabling the Brilliant Problem-Employee Syndrome. Closely related to the first point on accountability, I’ve viewed many individuals gifted with technical or creative skills who clearly were deficient in the emotional and social intelligence areas. (No intent to generalize here…just to describe personal examples.)

If you encounter one of these challenging characters, be careful not to rationalize or excuse aberrant behavior with something that sounds like, “That’s just Joe. He’s brilliant, but he struggles to participate in groups without running all over people.” I actually lived this and my own rationalization of the behavior hurt the team and my credibility as a manager. In the end, it hurt the brilliant individual as well. Take action, provide coaching, training and ample heaping helpings of feedback, and put some teeth into the accountability for acceptable behaviors.

3. Carefully Tailor Professional Development to the Individual. While this is a good management practice for everyone on your team, it’s particularly important to customize the education and developmental opportunities for your gifted team members.

Challenge yourself to identify opportunities for this individual to engage with and learn from the leaders in their field. Encourage them to join and actively participate in relevant industry or professional organizations. And instead of reflexively exposing them to the mostly cookie-cutter training offerings provide via HR, provide something unique. In the past, I’ve sent strategists to Harvard to learn from Clay Christensen, engineers to MIT, marketers to Kellogg and emerging leaders to The Center for Creative Leadership. The results were priceless and the costs trivial compared to the returns these people generated.

4. Ramp up and Amp up the Internal Challenges. I love the idea of applying Ram Charan’s perspective on developing senior leaders: expose them to a series of increasingly ambiguous challenges as part of the learning, developing and testing process.

For those great people I’ve managed who have exhibited that extra skills gear, I’ve learned that it’s easy to bore them into depression with mundane tasks and alternatively, it’s easy to lose them to the pursuit of explaining the unifying theory of everything. Instead of holding back or completely letting go, develop together with the individual a series of deliberate projects that grow increasingly challenging and ambiguous. Provide coaching and feedback and when you encounter performance areas that create problems for the individual, add-in developmental support.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

People are our business as leaders and managers, and they make this work remarkably challenging and incredibly rewarding. Supporting the daily work and on-going development of a gifted professional is in some ways much more difficult than dealing with poor performers. It takes balancing the need for equity across your team with the very real need to feed what is often a tremendous hunger to do more, learn more and experience more. Your challenge is to create the environment and pacing to make this work for all involved.

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For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check out Art’s latest book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.