The problem
Companies are always looking for those
magical employees whose creative spark and work ethic can turn a firm around. Are people born with these talents or can they be
developed over time?
By Peter Lauria
One-point-three seconds. That’s what American sprinter Noah Lyles needs to shave off his best 200-meter time to set a new world record in Paris this summer. A bronze medalist at the 2020 Tokyo Games, six-time world champion, and holder of two American records, Lyles still wants more. His goal: a time of 19.18 seconds in the 200-meters, one-hundredth of a second faster than the current world record, set by Usain Bolt in 2009. Lyles clearly has the innate talent of an elite athlete—but he also has that intangible drive that’s needed to grind through four years of intense training and competition to get barely a millisecond faster. Or as Lyles simply told a reporter for the website Olympics.com after winning a tune-up race in Atlanta in May, “I wanted the world record.”
Ask any top coach what makes an athlete great, and they’ll
tell you it’s not just talent. It’s the willingness to be trained and the desire to get better that turns athletes into champions. “Talent doesn’t express itself automatically in performance,” says Jim Loehr. “It has to be brought out.” Loehr should know. As cofounder of the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, he’s worked on
the psychological aspects of elite performance with (among others) professional athletes, Fortune 100 executives, and military special-forces units.
It’s no secret, of course, that business leaders want to maximize the performance of their employees. But the challenge is miles different—and not just because it occurs in an office rather than on a field of play. Leaders are struggling to not only find the right people with potential, but also to train them in a way that works.
According to Korn Ferry data, 69 percent of CEOs worry that their employees lack the skills needed for the future; other surveys put the figure as high as 80 percent. If business leaders could just go out and find the talent they need, they would. But hiring so-called “star performers” is expensive—average salaries for these employees are
10 percent to 25 percent or more above market rate. And as with world-class athletes, there aren’t many of them. High performers, or employees who consistently exceed expectations, account for just 5 percent to 10 percent of the workforce, experts say. The other option for business leaders—or perhaps the only real option—is to train people in the skills they need. But CEOs can’t identify and develop
an employee’s engineering aptitude or coding brilliance the way top coaches can train a tween in gymnastics or swimming. Survey after survey paints corporate training as woeful, with employees routinely labeling it “unsatisfactory” or “inadequate,” and saying they “lack opportunities or direction,” and that their employer “doesn’t value their career development.”
“Developing talent in business, as in sports, is extremely difficult,” says Loehr. “Figuring out who has it, where to apply it, and how to create the conditions to maximize it is the most difficult challenge companies face.”
Seven in 10 CEOs worry that workers lack
the right skills, but most haven’t decided if the answer is to improve training or hiring.
Particularly in the AI era, the future for most companies hinges on the skills and talents
of employees.
Why it matters
Improve employee training and rejigger hiring processes to identify more gifted and motivated workers.
The solution
Eye for
a Star
View Contents
Where they fall down is on the follow-through.”
“
Companies invest a tremendous amount of money into training and development every year—whether in the form of formal on-the-job education and learning, certificate and credentialing programs,
e-learning, webinars, or games and simulations. US companies with more than 100 employees spent $102 billion on employee training last year, the same amount as 2022. But on a per-employee basis, they spent 21 percent less, the result of budget cuts, layoffs in training staff, and freezing of some outside investments across industries. And regardless of cost, when it comes to training, experts say, companies fail to stick the landing (to use a gymnastics term). “Where they fall down is on the follow-through,” says Bell. Indeed, Korn Ferry data shows that 40 percent of employees feel the training they’re offered fails to help them develop new skills or advance their careers.
Many workers feel employees the training is just too generic and impersonal. Nearly 70 percent of employees say the training employers offer isn’t tailored to their needs or learning styles. Bell says that many companies think that training consists of little more than buying subscriptions and providing access to LinkedIn Learning—which means employees must figure out on their own which courses to take and which skills they need to learn. And it’s not as though employees don’t want training: Four in ten say they took training courses on their own. “Most corporate training isn’t about improving performance so much as it is about dumping information on employees and hoping they pick it up,” says Kyle Harwell, a research psychologist who focuses on elite performance training.
Harwell likens corporate training to what is known in the sports world as “naive practice”: the repetition of a task without feedback, a specific goal, or a strategy for improvement. Take tennis, for example. Most people believe the way to improve their game is simply to play as much as possible. But Harwell says that’s an inefficient way to develop skills. Naive practice can actually result in diminishing returns by making an activity so robotic that learning ceases altogether. By contrast, elite performers engage in “deliberate practice,” in which each session has a goal for improvement. So a tennis player with a weak serve might set a goal of hitting 100 balls, focusing on their serving form, and featuring a reward or penalty based on a specific objective. “Not all practice is equal in terms of what the person gets out of it,” says Harwell.
As the needs of businesses have changed over time, so too
have corporate trainings. Here are some highlights.
Home
Post Game-Day
Know Thyself
Eye for a Star
Winning…with a Work-Life Balance?
Leadership at the Top
World-Class Athletes on the Job
Every Four Years: The Challenge of Staying Long-Term
Hiring so-called ‘star performers’ is expensive—with average salaries 10 percent to 25 percent or more over market rate.”
“
Developing talent in business, as in sports, is extremely difficult.”
“
Read more about
Gold Medal Leadership
Know Thyself
Know Thyself
Winning…with a
Work-Life Balance?
Winning…with a
Work-Life Balance?
Leadership-Centric
Back to School
Even the most talented person can fail if they aren’t put in the right situation. Just as an athlete needs the right coach, experts say, employees need the right support system around them to succeed. That means creating a culture that provides them with avenues to discover their unique talents and holds them accountable to the highest level possible. Firms are starting to experiment with personalized training programs that become more challenging as performance improves, for instance. Creating a regular feedback loop between employees, managers, trainers, and mentors also helps foster a team environment, say experts. Further, matching rewards and incentives with training can increase motivation and engagement among employees.
The best coaches are the ones who can make athletes fall in love with practice, says Matthew Robinson, a professor of sport management at the University of Delaware who runs a coaching enrichment program in partnership with the International Olympic Committee. Robinson says his team gets results by connecting on a human level with athletes and gaining their trust. “Corporate managers and leaders need to do the same when training their talent.”
A timeline of corporate training
1950s
General Electric establishes one of the first facilities devoted to management and leadership training, the Crotonville Management Development Institute.
1960s
Companies start to view culture as important to business, and launch branded universities to teach their mission, values, and—most importantly—processes and practices to employees.
Creative Vision
As jobs start to become
more specialized and knowledge based, companies change recruiting tactics, moving away from skills and focusing on creativity, vision, and innovation. The age of “rock star” talent takes hold.
1980s-1990s
On Demand
Training undergoes a philosophical change as technology allows employees to be more self-directed and learn on demand. Companies begin collecting and analyzing data to improve how training is delivered.
2000-2010s
AI to the Rescue
Remote work leads to a new approach to training focused on continuous learning, a growth mindset, and the soft skills—such as collaboration, communication, agility, and adaptability—needed for today’s environment. AI training models that mimic human instruction start to appear.
2020s
Corporate hiring philosophy has gone through several epochs since the early 1900s, when Henry Ford created the assembly line by breaking down tasks into specific, routine, easily learned components. To be sure, for the better part of the 20th century, companies hired—and were happy to hire—hard-working people (mostly men) who could master a few basic skills, says Brad Bell, director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. And while companies like General Electric and IBM launched training programs in management and technology as early as the 1950s, most work remained defined by a narrow set of role-specific skills right up until the 1990s.
That’s when “knowledge jobs entered the picture,” says Bell. Knowledge jobs were more complex, requiring a wider and more diverse skill set. They demanded not only specialized technical talent, but also the capacity for creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking. As a result, hiring practices focused on education and experience as the primary predictors of success. Companies went looking for “rock stars” and “unicorns,” people with outsized talent and charisma who could change the organization—or create one of their own—with one brilliant innovative idea. It was the era of the iconoclast and the beginning of digital disruption, and companies adapted their cultures to the talent instead of vice versa.
Flash forward to today, and companies are in a sort of hybrid era, one in which they need employees who have not only the skills and talent to perform immediately, but also the adaptability and agility to transform for the new AI age. Traits like purpose and a growth mindset are just as important as training programs and hard and soft skills. “The half-life of skills is getting shorter and shorter, because change is happening so fast,” says Bell. “So even the elite performers of today are going to need to be upskilled to stay at the top of
their game.”
One-point-three seconds. That’s what American sprinter Noah Lyles needs to shave off his best 200-meter time to set a new world record at the Paris Olympics. A bronze medalist at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, six-time world champion, and holder of two American records, Lyles still wants more. His goal: a time of 19.18 seconds in the 200-meters, one-hundredth of a second faster than the current world record, set by Usain Bolt in 2009. Lyles clearly has the innate talent of an elite athlete—but he also has that intangible drive that’s needed to grind through four years of intense training and competition to get barely a millisecond faster. Or as Lyles simply told a reporter for the website Olympics.com after winning a tune-up race in Atlanta in May, “I wanted the world record.”
Ask any Olympic coach what makes an athlete great, and they’ll tell you it’s not just talent. It’s the willingness to be trained and the desire to get better that turns athletes into champions. “Talent doesn’t express itself automatically in performance,” says Jim Loehr. “It has to be brought out.” Loehr should know. As co-founder of the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, he’s worked on the psycholo-gical aspects of elite performance with (among others) Olympians, professional athletes, Fortune 100 executives, and military special-forces units.
It’s no secret, of course, that business leaders want to maximize the performance of their employees. But the challenge is miles different—and not just because it occurs in an office rather than on a field of play. Leaders are struggling to not only find the right people with potential, but also to train them in a way that works.
According to Korn Ferry data, 69 percent of CEOs worry that their employees lack the skills needed for the future; other surveys put the figure as high as 80 percent. If business leaders could just go out and find the talent they need, they would. But hiring so-called “star performers” is expensive—average salaries for these employees are 10 percent to 25 percent or more above market rate. And as with Olympic athletes, there aren’t many of them. High performers, or employees who consistently exceed expectations, account for just 5 percent to 10 percent of the workforce, experts say. The other option for business leaders—or perhaps the only real option—is to train people in the skills they need. But CEOs can’t identify and develop an employee’s engineering aptitude or coding brilliance the way Olympic coaches can train a tween in gymnastics or swimming. Survey after survey paints corporate training as woeful, with employees routinely labeling it “unsatisfactory” or “inadequate,” and saying they “lack opportunities or direction,” and that their employer “doesn’t value their career development.”
“Developing talent in business, as in sports, is extremely difficult,” says Loehr. “Figuring out who has it, where to apply it, and how to create the conditions to maximize it is the most difficult challenge companies face.”
Read more about Gold Medal Leadership
Winning…with
a Work-Life
Balance?
View Contents
Home
The (Tough) Economics of the Games
Winning It All—After Hours
The Competitive Spirit
Post Game-Day
Winning...with a Work-Life Balance?
Eye for a Star
Know Thyself
Leadership at the Top
Where Are They Now?
Snaring Medals...And Then, Consulting?
The Home Office, with Trophies in the Closet
World-Class Athletes on the Job
Every Four Years: The Challenge
of Staying Long-Term