A friend on Twitter offered up this quote as an old Turkish proverb, apropos for the weekly Leadership Caffeine article: “Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love.”

If that doesn’t stimulate some senses, nothing will!

This week’s focus is on scouting talent, and like most of my posts, I’m encouraging you to break some established rules in pursuit of excellence.  

The best leaders that I know are also the best talent scouts. They are acute observers of people and extraordinarily quick to identify individuals with potential. They are also great developers of talent, but that’s a separate topic for another day.

  • There’s the sales manager who never visited a city without setting up meetings with prospective future reps. He was so good at building a pipeline of talented professionals interested in working for him, that whenever there was an opening in his region, the position was filled immediately. His region was number one in the company year after year.
  • In another case, a corporate executive watched in fascination as a young retail employee in a cell phone store calmed angry customers while fixing their problems and simultaneously helping his less capable associates with their customer issues. He was not the manager, but clearly, he was the leader on the floor. The executive shared how impressed that he was with the young clerk, passed along a business card and asked him to call. Fast forward several years and this former cell store clerk is now a top partner relations director for one of the world’s largest tech firms.
  • A marketing manager had an uncanny ability for identifying college interns with great potential. His batting average was 1,000 when he recommended that an intern be hired for a full-time position upon graduation. In all cases, those interns went on to become remarkable contributors.

What Great Talent Scouts Look For:

In my experience in working around and talking with individuals that have outstanding track records in finding and developing new talent, there are three core attributes that they look for:

1.  Character: Top scouts recognize that they can teach and help hone skills, and teach industry and position particulars, but they cannot teach character. This is a deal breaker regardless of potential.

2.  Passion: Similar to character, you cannot teach someone to be passionate about fielding angry customer issues with enthusiasm and pride. Talent scouts look for people that put their heart and souls into their work, regardless of how mundane or difficult it may be.

3.  Raw Talent: The executive that shared the cell-phone clerk example above indicated that he is often able to envision someone several years down the road applying his or her natural skills to new problems in very different environments. “The ability to make angry people happy, while supporting colleagues and compensating for a weak manager were all transferrable to managing complex partner relationships,” he indicated.

Develop Talent Scouting Habits:

  • Accept that one of your most critical functions is to ensure a steady flow of great talent on to your team and into your organization.
  • Listen and observe in meetings and company events. The next great product manager might be laboring in engineering testing or the next great sales representative might be working in customer support.
  • Expand your talent scouting horizon. Move through the world with the idea that your server in a restaurant or the retail clerk helping you in the cell phone store might be a great future contributor.
  • Learn to ask questions that allow people to showcase their character and passion. A key to this is learning to be quiet. Quit talking and listen hard.
  • Develop your future vision. Are the habits and skills on display today transferrable to future challenges in different circumstances and settings?

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Who said that the best hires have to come through traditional means? I take pride in finding great talent in unusual places. Frankly, I would rather cultivate my high performance team by blending individuals from diverse backgrounds and experience sets.

Our traditional HR models teach us to hire clones or to reach out for people that don’t exist. We either hire from our competitors or we specify insanely detailed job descriptions that few fit and then fool ourselves into believing that because someone looks and feels like that job description, they will succeed. Baloney!

Hone your talent scouting skills, broaden your horizons and yes, take what will look to your firm’s hiring administrators as a few more risks. Ultimately, the only risk is whether or not you are up to supporting the development of your diverse and talented team members.