Chapter 8: Unlocking Talent

Leading in a Social-Era world will require a new approach. Just as creating value has new levers, so does leadership. 

Where the industrial era is oriented around the institution and its ability to create scale, the Social Era is oriented around how to formulate value with and by connected humans. This new orientation is changing how we value the individual and how we lead. Gazelles will choose where and when to assemble, based on where they will be nourished. So what needs to change? And what are the shifts in organizational practices?

Celebrating Onlyness

The first step is celebrating something I’ve termed onlyness. Onlyness is that thing that only that one individual can bring to a situation. It includes the journey and passions of each human. Onlyness is fundamentally about honoring each person: first as we view ourselves and second as we are valued. Each of us is standing in a spot that no one else occupies. That unique point of view is born of our accumulated experience, perspective, and vision. Some of those experiences are not as “perfect” as we might want, but even those experiences are a source for what you create. For example, the person whose younger sibling has a disease might grow up to work in medicine to find the cure. The person who is obsessed with beautiful details might end up caring about industrial design and reinvent how we all use technology. The person who has grown up under oppression might end up advocating for freedom of speech and thus advance the condition of his country. This individual onlyness is the fuel of vast creativity, innovations, and adaptability.

Embracing onlyness means that, as contributors, we must embrace our history, not deny it. This includes both our “dark” and our “light” sides. Because when we deny our history, vision, perspective, we are also denying a unique point of view, that which only we can bring to the situation. Each onlyness is essential for solving new problems, as well as for finding new solutions to old problems. Without it, people are simply cogs in a machine—dispensable and undervalued—and we’re back to the 800-pound gorilla approach. With it, gazelles are singularly unique and able to contribute meaningfully.

It’s not that everyone will, but that anyone can.

Some people, when we start talking about “unlocking all talent,” roll their eyes and ask who would pour the coffee or stock the shelves in this new world. Well, let’s look at an example where people are literally pouring the coffee. Every time we walk into Starbucks, something amazing happens without most of us really noticing. It is this: every staff member from the order taker to the café barista manages to make full eye contact with every customer. That signifies something. When people feel seen, valued, and respected, they can see, value, and respect. Starbucks has a long history of providing health-care benefits, decent wages, and a cultural norm of dignity as it prepares its 200,000 employees to do work. It trains people who come from a wide variety of backgrounds, sometimes from families that have no history of knowing how to organize their lives and get to work on time. It does more than instill procedures; it unlocks self-worth and personal dignity. That effort shows up the small ways we don’t notice (eye contact), but also how we as consumers experience something in totality. Think of the comparable that does not instill a sense that everyone counts: Walmart, where people are largely treated as replaceable parts. 

Now you could argue that Starbucks has higher margins where Walmart does not, but I would argue that the margins reflect the value created in and by the organization by its approach. Starbucks says everyone can contribute in a meaningful way, and then people do. One is a precondition of the other, not a by-product of the other. 

While organizations have honored the gem from Jim Collins to get “the right people on the bus,” once those people have been hired, too many organizations often ask them to sit down, shut up, and let someone else drive.^[1] In chapter 1, the obituary for traditional strategy, I mentioned that the predominant way we’ve handled strategy was to focus on getting the idea right. This is necessary, but not sufficient. Implicitly, then, shifting from merely “thinking right” to “doing right” is key in the Social Era. Let’s talk about what that looks like in practice.

In most organizations, one small group creates or “owns” strategy, and another much larger part “owns” execution. Across industries and countries, research shows only 5 percent of people know the strategy in an organization.^[2] When only 5 percent of the people in an organization knows the strategy, then only 5 percent are ready to make decisions that align their work to that vision. It means only 5 percent are able to apply themselves to building that strategy into reality. Typically, this means that a part of the organization develops a great idea that is only fully understood in a small corner of that company. The larger organization then gets to work on the execution plan without ever really owning the strategy. While the strategy-execution gap is a persistent bugaboo, it becomes nearly catastrophic in the Social Era: you can’t be fast, fluid, or flexible if 95 percent of the people in your company have no idea what direction they’re supposed to be running toward.

This strategy-execution gap creates an “Air Sandwich”—an empty void in the organization between the high-level strategy conjured up in the stratosphere and the realization of that vision on the ground (let alone owned by anyone outside the organizational perimeter). The filling in an Air Sandwich consists mainly of misunderstandings, confusion, and misalignment, rather than the effective connections between the vision and the on-the-ground, fast-changing reality that make a good strategy a reality.

The Air Sandwich exists any time different participants lack a clear, shared understanding of the big picture. Usually, executives try to address it by working on their “communication skills.”^[3] But in practical terms, even a good communication plan does not create what is necessary: individuals to think through things enough to prepare to make the one thousand little decisions that are essential to make change really happen. When people are not involved in the formulation of a direction, they can never make it reality.^[4] What needs to change is not the CEO’s ability to communicate, but the premise that strategy creation can be separate from the people who will execute it. The Air Sandwich prevents us from reaching the desired end.

Strategy as a separate concept from execution is a relic of the past. It is something that was created when organizations needed structure to direct people who didn’t have much education, where information was limited, and when markets and competitors moved slowly. In a world where we increasingly outsource or mechanize repetitive work, in which we’ve unlocked the free flow of information and built teams of highly educated millennium-generation talent that demands a seat at the table, we need to shift our approach from telling the strategy to co-creating it, so that it is owned throughout the organization.

Granting Power

The second step toward unlocking talent is establishing a baseline of shared understanding. The third is to allow people to make decisions. Those are, of course, linked in practical application.

A case study brings this idea into practice. Google reveals its high-level direction to everyone who works there. Everyone is expected to know what matters to the company. The high-level direction is posted on an internal website and updated whenever it needs to be changed (not just quarterly or annually), petitioned by anyone. It is live to every employee regardless of level. Google actually treats its talented, principled, creative people like talented, principled, creative people, instead of brainless sheep. Google acknowledges that direction will constantly change, and it is every person’s responsibility to align his or her work, to define the substrategies of product lines and markets, and to be adaptive.

At a minimum, posting the high-level strategy for everyone signals something important: we value your brain. Giving people this understanding unlocks them to truly show up, engage, and participate. Indeed, it actually demands something from them also. It says that everyone—not just the executives—is responsible for figuring out what and how his or her stuff fits into this big picture. At meetings, product managers are often asked the question, “How does your idea (project, product line, proposal, etc.) fit into the big picture?” The ensuing dialogue creates understanding. Understanding unlocks people to recognize what they need to let go of or change to shift from the current “here” to a new “there.”

Google doesn’t get everything right, but this transparency of direction, openness to change, owning responsibility for knowing the direction, and constantly asking everyone to align his or her daily work is how you unlock talent. These actions align us, letting us work together better, tighter, and faster. It’s like the difference between the performance of driving on the Interstate 5 and the Indy 500.

This also recognizes the role each of us has in providing something: our onlyness. The Beatles famously did this for each other: John kept Paul from being a teeny-bopper, and Paul kept John from drifting out into the cosmos, while George lent soul to both. (I have to admit I can’t explain Ringo’s onlyness except to say that drummers are important.) The Social Era is ultimately about the way connected individuals form an ensemble and create value together.

From Knowing the Right Answer to Getting to the Right Outcome

Physics has a concept called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Werner Heisenberg says we can know either momentum or position, but not both.  It seems to me that this applies to our organizations today. We can fixate on having a particular idea right (traditional strategy), or we can focus on the way in which people engage ideas so that we develop momentum and turn our intentions into outcomes.

After twenty years of being inside, advising, and running organizations, I’ve come to realize that all organizations are made up of conceptual boxes. Which boxes are our competitors in? Which ones are our customers in? Where do we fit on the org chart? Which building will we sit in, what title do we have, who is responsible for the budget?

Boxes can help us define what everyone is doing. That was especially helpful when things didn’t change very fast; in those days, if we could confirm that everyone was doing the right thing today, then we could have some confidence that they would be doing the right thing tomorrow as well. But today, conceptual boxes do not help us achieve success.

That’s because as soon as we make those boxes, we make something else too: space between the boxes. That space is always where things start to fall apart as our environment changes. While each of our roles matters, what matters more is the way those roles interact and engage with shared ideas. When we focus on boxes—as traditional organizational design work does—we try to keep people out of the spaces where failure happens. Back when things moved slowly, maybe we could get away with it because we had time to notice when little things would begin to unravel.

But firms that embody momentum are focused on how to take action. Firms that embody momentum are focused on how they think and act together. And this sets a pace or rhythm for work. When we embody momentum, our work is more fluid and resilient, more like a living, breathing organism that adapts to the world, where different limbs naturally move in concert.

Companies that focus on momentum have high personal ownership and incentives not just for personal achievement but collaborative achievement. Success isn’t about how smart or good or accomplished any individual is (although, of course, that does matter), but in the resulting outcomes of what happens when all those talented individuals are in community, co-creating, with shared purpose.

Often at this point, some executives challenge me by saying, “This is the kind of feel-good message that doesn’t translate to the real world!” Maybe you’re thinking the same thing. We honor the things we can track and measure more easily than this seemingly “soft” stuff of people and leadership.

But, this approach to strategy and execution is well supported by empirical data. Gallup, the research firm, recently did a meta-analysis across 199 studies covering 152 organizations, 44 industries, and 26 countries. It showed that high employee engagement uplifts every business performance number. Profitability up 16 percent, productivity up 18 percent, customer loyalty up 12 percent, and quality up an incredible 60 percent.

These gains are based just on high employee engagement, the first (almost micro) step on the road from traditional strategy to the talent approach needed in the Social Era. Imagine what happens when direction is fully known, when insights are gathered everywhere and acted on quickly, when ownership is shared, when power is distributed. And these are not technically hard to do: share your direction, ask people to weigh in, allow for self-organizing teams rather than functional assignments, and so on. But it does require a level of comfort with uncertainty because it will seem messier to think of things in this way. And I say, “seem” because in reality, people working together is inherently messy and any tidy boxes we draw is not actually changing that situation, only the appearance of it. 

Beyond the numbers, there are other benefits when we activate people to be fully alive at work. If you’ve been lucky enough to lead people when they fully contribute what they have to give, you’ll know that this is when they are also their happiest. This is powerful. Back when we wanted brainless sheep for workers, and we could measure their output by, say, number of windows installed on a car assembly line, maybe we didn’t need happiness. But now, people are working on trickier stuff. Happy workers solve problems over the weekend or in the shower, or wake up at 3 a.m. with breakthrough answers. This is the picture of a Social Era team.

Unlocking talent is not the frosting on the cupcake as it was in the industrial era. In the Social Era, it’s the key ingredient in how we make the cupcake itself, and whether the cake is viable. Whereas the gorilla was about having the right strategy and having a few people own the direction, gazelle work is about distributed ownership where talent at all levels is unlocked to contribute onlyness and bring value in working together. When someone proposes that we can put off that talent engagement stuff until later, we can all answer with a resounding, “No, we can’t.”

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