10 Elements of Leadership - Element 8: Developing Talent

According to Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline, the biggest sustainable competitive advantage your company can have is your people's ability to learn faster than your competition's people. In this video, Executive Coach Tom Tischhauser talks about the importance of developing talent within your organization.

In our video series, we've been talking about the 10 elements of leadership that great leaders display consistently. Today, we're going to talk about talent development.

The premise of Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline is that the only sustainable competitive advantage that any company has is their ability to have their people learn faster than the competitor's people. Anybody can build buildings in the United States, Mexico, Europe, China. Anybody can recruit from the best universities in the world. That's not a competitive advantage.

It's what you do with your people that is the competitive advantage. Embracing ambiguity and welcoming curiosity serve as the basis of a learning environment. We as leaders have to create that environment and supply the tools necessary for our people to learn faster.

Example of a Learning Culture

So let me give you an example of a learning culture.

When I grew up in Motorola, Bob Galvin -- the son of the founder and CEO at the time -- built his own university on the campus of Motorola. The reason he did that is universities and schools around the country were not teaching the things necessary for Bob to achieve Motorola's strategy.

In the 70's and 80's, nobody was teaching robotics. Nobody was teaching about being in a global economy. Nobody was teaching high-end software.

So, Bob assembled the greatest minds in the world to develop a curriculum for these types of subjects and hired subject matter experts to come to Motorola University and train his employees.

And then, he required that each one of us allocate a minimum of 40 hours per year to training. He gave us the time to invest in our education. And the deal was, as long as we were investing in our education and learning how to learn fast, our jobs were safe, and Motorola wanted us all retained.

Who does that? What a great environment.

Now this was the environment that yielded things like the invention of cellular technology, the development of GPS satellites for navigation, Six Sigma quality methods.

Talk about a rich culture! I'm so proud to have been part of Motorola during that time.

How to Develop Talent in Your Organization

So let me ask you a few questions.

What are you doing to promote and feed curiosity to yield things like GPS or cellular in your own organization?
Are you constantly seeking alternative views of the future?
Are you taking enough risk with unpopular but innovative ideas?
Are your people staying on top of industry and global events in general?

Far too often, we're so hung up on getting to the deadline and meeting our targets that we don't take the time to think about this concept of learning faster.

Final Thoughts

Okay, so I'll close with a story to get you thinking about innovative learning.

So we were at an officers' meeting, and the CEO at the time was Chris Galvin, the grandson of the founder. And Chris was going on and on about why he wanted to hire our children and our grandchildren.

Now at the time, I was running a remote site where we did have a lot of families in the workplace in a very small building, actually. Brothers, sisters, spouses, kids. And at times, it was quite stressful to have families working that close together.

So I was kind of a little bit frustrated with that and had the guts to ask a question and asked Chris, "Why are you so hung up on hiring our children and our grandchildren? Why is this so important to you?"

And he said, "Tom, if I can hire your daughters, I get a six year head start on training. They already know what it's like to be global -- your girls have lived around the United States, and your girls have lived in Germany. They understand the global nature of everything. They understand quality because they've watched you push back so many times, whether you were at a restaurant or people doing work around the house. They understand the level of quality that we should expect. And in general, our people have high ethics and integrity, and they've learned that from all of you. I want those people in the workforce because now I can focus on what's going to be important when they join the workforce."

Wow! How's that for an innovative way to get a head start on training? Hiring generations of workers who already know the basics.

In Our Next Video...

In our next video, we'll be talking about leadership courage and boldness.

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Remember: better leaders, better business.