Inform Yourself

In the course of doing the research for the Genius Project, Jay Niblick wanted to find out what differentiated those who suffered from The Problem from those who did not. That was his primary objective. But he also wanted to get a better understanding for just how significant the implications of The Problem were. What were the effects of such a large percentage of people being dissatisfied with their results, frustrated with their constant attempts to improve and left feeling unfulfilled with their jobs in general? The impact is sobering!

Just imagine what The Problem means to a single company. Think of the profits left on the table by a company with a workforce that is uninspired, unmotivated, and unfulfilled. Imagine the impact if even 10% of the workforce suffers from The Problem. What does it do to service levels when those who are serving don’t feel well served themselves? When you move past one company to all the companies out there, how many millions of dollars are wasted on remedies that fail to address the real problem and how many billions of dollars are never realized in the first place because a significant percentage of the workforce’s true potential is never maximized?

Who knows how much this problem is really costing the world, but here’s your chance to tell us what you think the real impact is. If you go to www.whatsyourgenius.com you can share your thoughts on this question and check out what others think about the real impact of The Problem as well. While the problem at the organizational level is probably immense, what The Problem
does to the individual is even more significant.

At the Human Level
Today Gretchen Dougherty is one of the top sales people in her company, but this wasn’t always the case. Her company sells home security systems, and Gretchen’s job as an inside sales agent is to prospect over the phone to schedule home visits where a field sales representative gives a security consultation (otherwise known to you and me as a sales pitch). She spends her days sitting in a cubicle dialing out to homeowners trying to get them to schedule a home evaluation. Gretchen gets paid a sales commissions for every security system that gets sold to people she scheduled.

When she first took the job she was taught that sales is a numbers game. They told her that she had to make a specific number of outbound calls every day in order to beat the odds and find that one needle in the haystack who would agree to a home visit. Gretchen was told, “If you want to make money, you’ve got to call on more people.” The best sales people in the company made approximately seventy to eighty phone calls a day, and ended up scheduling three to five field appointments, out of which one would normally sign a contract. Management really stressed to her the importance of making a high volume of calls. Each sales person even had a call quota for the day.

Gretchen, however, thought differently than most of the other sales people. Unlike the majority of them she had a very high natural talent for empathy. It was this empathy that actually got in her way because while other sales people would spend no more than a few minutes trying to push for an appointment, Gretchen found herself talking to people for five, ten even fifteen minutes or more. She knew she had to generate a high volume of calls so she was constantly trying to suppress her empathy and not connect too much with the person on the other end of the phone.When she did this, she was not being true to who she was. She was awkward and preoccupied with watching the all-holy clock that sat next to her computer. The more she tried to ignore her natural tendencies and think differently so she could follow the script and stick to a time limit, the more awkward and ineffective she became. Gretchen was in trouble. She wasn’t performing well at all and the top question on management’s mind was would she quit before they fired her. She was definitely ready to quit when I first met her. I had been asked by her company to consult to them on why she wasn’t performing.

After Jay spoke with Gretchen, and did some preliminary work it became pretty clear right up front that the issue seemed to be a poor fit between her and her role. Because of this he gave her a battery of assessments to help understand what her true talents were and how well they were aligned with her existing role. One of these assessments was the Attribute Index that we used in the Genius Project.

The moment he saw the results it was obvious to him what the problem was, and Gretchen confirmed. Her extremely high empathy was causing her to want to connect with the people she was calling far more than the predetermined time limit would allow. The rest of the sales people in the company didn’t have anywhere near her level of talent in this area, so they didn’t have any problem running scripts and pushing through enough people until they found one that would agree to an appointment. Getting on and off the phone as quickly as possible wasn’t a problem for them, but it was proving to be a big problem for Gretchen. She felt bad about talking at people instead of talking with them. The result was that Gretchen was trying to be something she wasn’t and it was negatively affecting her performance in a big way.

Luckily, the company was pretty open-minded about how to fix the problem. They had spent a lot of money training Gretchen and, already suffering from a higher human turnover rate, they gave me the latitude he needed to attempt to correct the problem. What did he do? He simply told Gretchen to figure out how to be true to who she was. He told her that the objective was fixed (schedule X many appointments per week), but the way she went about doing that was up to her. He asked her how she would do the job if she were in charge. He said, “Just do you.” As a result, Gretchen got rid of the clock on her desk and decided that she would not have a daily call quota, or any call quota for that matter – just a single quota for how many appointments she scheduled.

A very interesting thing happened when she did this. Gretchen, instead of suppressing her natural tendencies, started letting them guide her. She spent much more time with those she talked with. She got to know them and understand their needs much better. She once even told him about one call where she learned about the caller’s teenage daughter, what her name was, how often she was home alone, where she was going to college and what she was majoring in. This was typical of the level of communication Gretchen was having with the people she called on. She was really connecting with these people.

Instead of trying to force herself to ignore her empathy, Gretchen was now using that natural talent to connect with people on a much deeper level than the rest of the sales reps were. Doing so meant that she spent a lot more time with each person, and only made as few as twenty to twenty five calls per day. But doing so also meant that she was establishing relationships with people, relationships that were returning results. Despite the fact that Gretchen was making less than 20% of the calls the other reps were, she still averaged to book three to five appointments each day. Even better than that, instead of the company average of one signed contract for every five appointments, Gretchen was averaging two signed contracts for every five appointments.
Pretty soon, the field sales people were fighting to see who would get to call on the appointments that Gretchen had scheduled because they knew their odds of making a sale were a lot better.

The lesson of this case study is that by being inauthentic Gretchen was hurting her performance. When she became authentic, though, not only did her performance reach the expected levels, but actually exceeded them. When she was inauthentic she was no more satisfied with her job than the job was satisfied with her. Now that she is authentic, though, she views her job as a vehicle for her passion for meeting and helping people and now she is as satisfied with the job as it is with her.

If you ask the field sales representatives who they want booking their appointments, they will tell you, “Gretchen man, she is a genius at finding people who sign contracts.”

The Long “X”
Gretchen is a good example of what Jay calls the Long “X”, which is a simple but effective way of understanding the relationship between how much effort you have to put in versus the results you get back.

When you are authentic, you are making sure that the work you do, and how you do it, is well aligned with your natural talents and the result is that you achieve more success with less effort. When you are inauthentic, you allow your success to be dependent on your non-talents and what results you get are hard won and feel like they took lots of effort.

The benefits of being authentic are significant, not only from the perspective of how well you perform, but also with regards to the satisfaction and sense of fulfillment have you got out of your life. Basically, being authentic is much more productive. You just do better when you are authentic.

The Long X is a term that describes the level of results you get when you are inauthentic as opposed to authentic. When you are inauthentic you are inverted and feel like the effort that you put in exceeds the results you get back. When you become authentic you become converted and you start to feel like you get back more results than the effort you felt you had to put in. Authenticity is the Geniuses secret to consistently high 5th level performance.

The following is more information that resulted from my good Friend Mr. Jay Niblick's The Genius Project. The findings are pretty astounding. The implications are even greater!

There is a myth about strengths and weaknesses, which states that we all possess them naturally. In reality, we don’t. No human possesses any single weaknesses. What we do possess are natural talents and non-talents. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those that think it is too negative to tell someone they have a weakness and wants to call them “opportunities for development”. He actually hates this term because more often than not it supports the incorrect view that one can fix a weakness by developing natural talents. If one of his clients is suffering from a weakness he tells them so straight up, but the key is that this weaknesses isn’t natural, it is manufactured. Weaknesses and strengths don’t exist naturally, only talents and non-talents do. If, however, one relies on a non-talent, they turn it into a weakness. Likewise, if one doesn’t rely on my talents, they are never a strength for them.

In other words, you are ultimately in control of your strengths and weaknesses. Granted you have to work with the potential strengths you have, in the form of what natural talents you possess, but it is totally up to you as to whether you allow yourself to be dependent on a non-talent – or try to rely on a talent. You may be born with talents and non-talents, and there is nothing you can do about that, but you are in charge of whether those talents and non-talents become strengths and weaknesses. If you allow your success to depend on your talents, you create a strength. If you allow your success to depend on your non-talents, you create a weakness.

This might seem like he's talking about some minor difference of semantics, but I assure you that this is much more than a simple play on words. Understanding this concept requires a total change of perspective. Most people buy into the myth that they possess their strengths and weaknesses and fail to understand that they don’t actually possess them, they create them. The power is theirs as to whether they exist or not.

The key is how you apply yourself, and the impact of this understanding is incredibly important because once you realize that you create your strengths and weaknesses, you realize that you are in control. You realize that you don’t have to suffer from weaknesses which were given to you and about which you can do nothing. You are in control because while you definitely have non-talents, nothing in the universe states that you have to depend on them and if you don’t depend on them, then they aren’t weaknesses now are they? Make sense? Both talents and non-talents are only “potential”. Natural talents are only potential strengths and non-talents are only potential weaknesses. The thing that controls how these potentials turn out is how you apply yourself.

If one fail because of their weaknesses, it is their own fault. Not because they didn’t fix their weaknesses, but because they allowed their success to depend on my non-talents. They created a scenario where their weaknesses outweighed their strengths. Either way, the control lies with them and no one else.

Geniuses understand this. Their locus of control lies internally within them. They know that they are the only ones responsible for whether they benefit from strengths or suffer from weaknesses. They manage to turn potential strengths into actual strengths by relying on their natural talents and they manage to leave potential weaknesses as just that – potential weakness. They do not allow their success to become dependent on their non-talents, which would manufacture a weakness. Their primary focus is on maximizing their dependence on talents and minimizing their dependence on non-talents. Peter Drucker said, “your job is to make the strengths of your people effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.” While obviously influenced by the industrial era mindset, because he’s talking to management not the individual, the message is none-the-less spot on. The key is the focus on minimizing dependence on weaknesses, not eliminating them.

Geniuses don’t have more talents than anyone else. They are just as flawed and imperfect in their natural abilities as the next man. Geniuses don’t have fewer non-talents, they just have fewer weaknesses because they are very aware of their non-talents and they do a damn good job of not depending on them. To quote Dr. Marshall Goldsmith again, “there are a whole lot of things I stink at Jay. I just make sure I don’t have to do them to be successful.” The level of success these Geniuses achieve is hard to argue with. They achieve significantly more success with less effort, while finding more passion, satisfaction and happiness.

The Numbers
From a pure statistical perspective, Geniuses are quite rare but they significantly outperform the non-geniuses across the board. The percentage of 5th level performers in the study was only 9% of the total population (n=300,000+) but the difference in their results was astonishing:
• The most successful people outperformed the next closest level not by 10 times, nor by 100 times, but by as much as 1,000 times in some cases
• The average level of self-awareness for the 5th level performers in the study was 92% compared to 62% for the 4th level performers and less than 47% for the 1st through 3rd level performers
• Those who were 5th level performers had levels of authenticity that were 91% versus the levels of authenticity seen in the 4th level performers of 79% and in the 1st through 3rd level performers who were at 63%
• The differences between the level of self-awareness and degree of authenticity, and the correlation of these two factors with performance, make a very compelling argument for

The data showed us that there is a direct and positive correlation between the levels of awareness you have for your own abilities, the degree to which you are authentic to them and your overall level of performance. These data showed that those who performed at the lower levels had lower levels of self-awareness and authenticity. The higher people were in performance the greater their level of self-awareness and authenticity became. The great news about this is that self-awareness and authenticity are acquired talents and as things you can develop – you can develop your ability to reach the 5th level of performance AKA The Genius Level.

This post is my continuing efforts to bring to you the findings from my good friend Jay Niblick’s Genius Project.

A Simple Problem
The problem he found was that the vast majority of people assume there is no real difference between natural and acquired talents. They assume that all talents can be developed through intelligence, training and hard work. They fail to appreciate just how fixed these neural networks really are. Instead, because they assume that all talent can be acquired, they set about identifying what talents they need for a given role and then start trying to develop them. They take training programs, they read books, they attend seminars, they get mentors and coaches and they do a whole host of things to try and develop their talents for their job.

What happens, though, is that they manage to develop only the acquired talents. They don’t change their neural networks. They don’t create new natural talents and so in the end they become one of the most knowledgeable sales people in the company, but they still don’t think like the great sales people. They become the greatest knowledge expert on the planet for the rules of accounting and workings of mathematics, but they still don’t think like the great accountants do. They become the pilot who knows more about the technical manual than the engineer who wrote it, but they still don’t meld with the controls and become one with the plane as an extension of their own body – like the great pilots do.

By assuming that training and development will develop all the talents they need many people, and organizations, fail to understand that they are only building up half of the picture. When the other half of the picture isn’t there (the natural talents half) they wonder why they continue to struggle; continue to be emotionally unengaged and continue to lack a certain passion for their work. Unfortunately, when people fail to achieve the level of performance they want, the solution is often even more training and knowledge.

People spend a great deal of time trying to put in talents that are just not there to begin with, and aren’t going to be put in regardless of the effort. They exert a tremendous amount of energy attempting to change themselves, when in reality it is the job that needs to be changed. That’s what geniuses do.

What Geniuses Do
The most successful people he studied, those who people refer to as geniuses at what they do, don’t make this simple mistake. Remember the two things that Geniuses do. First, geniuses possess a superior level of self-awareness, so they know what their natural talents are (and are not). Second, they are also very authentic, so they find ways to achieve success that rely on these talents. They find jobs that rely on their natural talents, not their ability to develop new talents. They find roles that play to their strengths, not their weaknesses. When they do this, they find that the work comes more naturally and success more frequently.

The most successful among us don’t spend their lives trying to become the A+ student in that difficult class we mentioned in my last post. Because they understand that they are who they are, instead of wasting energy trying to become something they are not, they invest it in trying to better apply that which they already are. In a sense, they stop trying to put in what God left out and instead work with what he put in! This frees up a lot of extra energy. Imagine how much more successful you would be if 100% of your energy was directed towards just using your natural talents.

By being as authentic as they are, geniuses are free to pour all of their time and energy into doing more of what they already do naturally well, instead of being distracted by trying to develop what they don’t already have. This is not to say that Geniuses don’t grow or continue to refine themselves. Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, one of the Geniuses interviewed for this study, says of refining himself, “I constantly try to refine the strengths I have, but that doesn’t mean I try to develop things I don’t already have. One danger in the message of only focusing on strengths is that people may perceive this to mean that they don’t have to improve at all. Rather within their natural talents they must always improve. The key is to find a role that depends primarily on what you do well, and then continue to get even better at it through practice, awareness and acquired knowledge and experience.”

If they need to acquire new knowledge or experience, Geniuses definitely do. But if the job calls for natural talents that they don’t possess, they either find another way to do that job, or they find another job. That’s what the very best do, and that’s what these posts are all about. Remember the formula for 5th level performance; Self-Awareness + Authenticity = Success.

The key to being “true”, however, is not about identifying weaknesses so you can turn them into strengths, which is what most theories on personal improvement would argue. The Genius Study shows that the best among us take a very different approach to their weaknesses. While the best do indeed seek to understand their weaknesses very well, they do not do so for the purposes of fixing them, rather they use this knowledge to create objectives, goals, and roles that simply do not depend on those weaknesses. Such thinking runs counter to conventional wisdom, which teaches us that the key to greater success lies in eliminating weaknesses. Geniuses wouldn’t argue that eliminating weakness is the key to success, but it’s how they eliminate them that is so different. Instead of eliminating the weakness, they eliminate their dependence on it. There are lots of things Geniuses do, so let’s let them tell you what some of those things are. Here’s what just some of the geniuses Jay interviewed for the study had to say about their natural talents, self-awareness and authenticity when it comes to being successful.

Marshall Goldsmith on Self-Awareness
“I think I am very aware of my strengths. My strengths are being very good at coaching others – specifically the teaching aspect of coaching due to my love and passion for teaching. I love teaching and I’m very good at it because, in part, I am very good at taking complex concepts and organizing them in a simple way that is easy to understand and therefore one of the gifts I have for teaching others. My job is helping others set realistic goals, evaluating them in those
goals, and teaching them how to reach them better. As for my weaknesses, I am not good at managing people, but I just don’t do it. I have lots of weaknesses, I just don’t do them and I have no interest in correcting them. I constantly try to refine the strengths I have, but that doesn’t mean I try to develop things I don’t already possess. One of the keys to my success is that I’ve been able to find a role, or create one actually, that depends primarily on the natural talents I already possess.”

Francis Hesselbein on Authentic Passion
“Peter Drucker would say all the time, ‘your job is to make the strengths of your people effective and their weaknesses irrelevant!’ I think I’ve always been very aware of my strengths and weaknesses. When I am at my best it is when I am focusing on what I do best, when I am less effective it is when I am ignoring those talents but choose to carry out those practices which rely on my non-talents. The thing to keep in mind is that success is a matter of how to be, not how to do. People like you and me have never had a job. They have been called to do what they do best. Warren Bennis calls it the leader within or the spirit within.

When you are doing things that align with your talents and strengths, you don’t consider it work. It is your passion. I think the purpose of a good leader is to mobilize people around a passionate mission, but it has to be in their way to reach their passion. Great leadership requires the best and to be the absolute best you can’t be false, you can’t be trying to be great at something you aren’t
naturally great at.”

The Genius Project: Natural versus Acquired Talents

Here is another very important finding from my good friend Jay Niblick’s Genius Project.

There are really only two kinds of talent: natural and acquired. Lots of people toss about words like skill, knowledge, competency, aptitude and a hundred other descriptors for someone’s ability to do something well, but in the end they all fall into one of these two categories.

Natural Talents: are your innate ability to do something, your natural endowment or aptitude. The key word here is natural. These talents can be physical, as in Lance Armstrong’s remarkable lung capacity (a physical talent due to his anatomy and physiology) or they can be mental as in Anthony Robbins’ ability for speaking and engaging people through words (a mental talent due to his incredibly high empathetic ability to sense other’s emotions and needs). The natural talents he was concerned with in this study are only those mental ones. Natural (mental) talents are patterns of thinking and decision-making that you were either born with or that you developed very early on in your formative years. Natural talents are the result of your own unique neural networks and how your brain works. Based on your genetics and the way your brain is structured you are naturally good at seeing certain things, while you may be completely blind to other aspects of reality. Those things you see clearly are your natural talents and those things that you do not see clearly are your non-talents. We all have our own unique mix of these two.

The differences in how our brains perceive reality are what cause one person to have a natural talent for strategic thinking and long range planning, while another person might be horrible at thinking that far in advance. Conversely, that person who isn’t good at long-range planning may be great at seeing the details of the moment and so both people are equally talented in life, just for different aspects of life. Your set of natural talents is unique to just you. In the entire world, no two people possess the exact same set or level of natural talents.

Your natural talents are also fixed and do not change much over the course of your life, so it is important to understand the ones you have very clearly because you will not be developing any more. This permanence aspect is very important because it makes the old “nature versus nurture” argument over where these talents come from somewhat irrelevant. Regardless of which side of the argument you fall on, the end is the same. Your natural talents are what they are and they aren’t going to change very much anytime soon.

If you believe the nature theory, which argues that your genetics controlled these kinds of talents, then the point is moot because you can’t change your genes; you were destined to think and make decisions the way you do before you were even born. If you believe the nurture camp, which argues that the social and environmental influences you experienced in your childhood controlled the development of these talents, the point is equally as moot because you can’t go back and change your upbringing.

The point is this; natural talents are very stable patterns that your brain has developed for thinking and making decisions, and whether these patterns have been with you for your entire life, or just most of your life, we know from research and experience that they are not something you can easily develop through conscious effort (e.g., reading a book, or training or meditation).

Acquired Talents: unlike natural talents, are those talents that we can acquire or develop. These are the knowledge and experience we gain throughout life. The person who doesn’t possess a natural talent for empathy may become, through lots of reading and training, quite competent at being sensitive to other’s needs. The person who isn’t naturally good at seeing the big strategic view may have taken classes on strategic planning and through life experience has become somewhat proficient in long-range planning. The key is that while someone might improve their ability, or augment it, through acquiring knowledge and experience, if it isn’t a natural talent for them, they will never be a genius at it.

The sales person who learns the technical steps of the sale and the features, functions and benefits of the product they sell has one form of an acquired talent for selling. The accountant who has the knowledge of math and accounting principles has an acquired talent for her work. The airline pilot who has learned the principles of flight and aerodynamics and how to master the physical aspects of piloting a plane has an acquired talent for flying. The differences between acquired and natural talents, however, are significant, and having one without the other will never deliver 5th level performance.

The sales person who has acquired knowledge and experience only has one half of the picture, but if he doesn’t possess the natural talents for being aggressive, persistent or empathetic than all that acquired talent is for naught. Because he isn’t aggressive enough he won’t apply the steps of the sale when he needs to. Because he isn’t persistent enough he is likely to not get past the gatekeeper to talk to the key decision maker in the first place. And because he lacks empathy he isn’t able to innately sense when the prospect is ready for the close and he might either push for the close to early or wait too long and miss the window or opportunity.

Without the natural talents to support him, all of his acquired talents will not take him to the 5th level of performance, the genius level. What success he does achieve will be like that of the student in that difficult class who struggles to get results. He may get them, but not easily, not passionately, not consistently and not without feeling like he has to put in a lot more effort than he gets out in results.

Sometimes the acquired talents play a large role in success, sometimes not, but the natural talents, in my experience, are always a significant factor. Every role is different, as is every person who fills it, but the one thing we’ve learned in this study is that without both natural and acquired talents being fully present, performance will be hindered. Every role, performed at genius levels, requires that the right natural talent be present.

The 5th level of performance (genius) is impossible to attain without being aware of your natural and acquired talents and relying on your natural talents for your success.