Inform Yourself

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.

What He Didn’t Find
Before we talk about what my good friend Mr. Jay Niblick did find in the Genius Project, let’s look at what he did not find because it’s actually quite important as well.

After crunching all of that data, and conducting all of those interviews, what he did not find was a single attribute, or natural talent, that showed up as being more responsible for success than any other, at least not on a universal scale. It turns out that being better at seeing the big-picture (the natural talent known as Conceptual Thinking) is not more likely to make everyone successful than being better at seeing the small picture (the natural talent for Attention to Detail). Neither does being better at understanding others (Empathy) have any greater impact on success across the board than does being great at doing what you are told to do (Following Directions).

Sure, in some roles a specific set of attributes may be more critical to success than others. We see this all the time in the job benchmarking work we do with our corporate clients. For example, possessing the natural talents for understanding and persuading others is crucial in most sales roles, but when you look at non-sales roles those talents may have little impact on success. Yes, some natural talents may indeed be vital in certain roles, perhaps even lots of roles - but not all roles.

While finding out which talents play an important part in any single role is beneficial, that’s not what the Genius Project was designed to do. The Genius Project wasn’t meant to understand what talents might make someone successful in any single role. The question he wanted to answer was, “could he find natural talents that are a common denominator among all successful people, in all roles, industries, markets, levels or locations?” In order to answer this question he was looking for natural talents that showed a high correlation with success in all the roles and all the successful people we studied. And guess what…he didn’t find any.

That’s right. He failed to find any single natural talent that was the key differentiator between success and failure in all cases. This is great news, however, because if this was the case, and he did find talents that must be present in order to succeed, and you happened to not possess such talents, you would pretty much be out of luck. If he had found certain talents as mandatory for all success then only people with those certain talents would be able to achieve the 5th level of performance and become geniuses at what they do. But thankfully that’s not what he found.

What He Did Find
When I say that he didn’t find any natural talents, however, that doesn’t mean he didn’t find anything at all that correlated with the most successful people, just no natural talents. What he did find in the Genius Project were two acquired talents, and these two acquired talents were present in all of the successful people, and quite absent in those who suffered from The Problem, individuals who struggle with feelings of frustration, lack of fulfillment and dissatisfaction with their personal performance and success.

These two acquired talents are called self-awareness and authenticity. We’ll get into the differences between natural and acquired talents in my next article, but suffice it to say that natural talents come from the way you think and make decisions and acquired talents are the knowledge, experience and skill that you develop throughout your life. If natural talents are engrained in you early on in life, acquired talents are added later.

Acquired talents are just that – acquired. They are those things that you do very well because you learned to do them very well. You weren’t born with these talents. You acquired them through gaining knowledge and experience. Unlike the natural talents we studied, the two acquired talents we found to be so common among the most successful people can be developed through conscious effort. These talents can be learned, and in so doing, you can become much more successful.

As I said, all of this is great news because it simply means that regardless of the natural talents you do possess you can take whatever those fixed talents are and become more successful with them. This means that the playing field is level. Genius performance isn’t reserved for just those with IQ’s above 140. It isn’t just for those who were lucky enough to be born with certain talents. Everyone possesses his or her own unique set of talents, so anyone can become a genius at something. It just requires that you develop the acquired talents we discovered in his study, and I’ll show you how to do just that in my future articles.

Let’s look at those two acquired talents now, and don’t worry if the following brief definition seems a little shy because you will become a whole lot more familiar with these two acquired talents as you progress through this and my future posts.

Acquired talent #1. Self-Awareness
Self-Awareness looks at how aware people are of their own natural talents and non-talents. For example, does John know he has a great natural talent for strategic thinking that makes him a genius for seeing the big-picture and making accurate long range plans? How aware is Mary that her greatest natural talent is for empathizing and understanding others? Self-awareness also looks at how well a person understands their non-talents, so while John knows he has a natural talent for strategic thinking, is he also aware of his lack of natural talent for paying attention to details, or being empathetic.

Being self-aware is being aware of your own true potential and this is a beautiful thing. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is described as having, “something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” When a person has high levels of self-awareness, they too seem to hold a heightened sensitivity to all the promise they contain. They know very well what they are and are not good at, and what potential lies within them. When a person has low self-awareness, on the other hand, they do not have a clear sense of their natural abilities. They do not possess a significant level of sensitivity to their own true potential or promise.

If self-awareness is knowledge and understanding for your natural talents and promise, than in order to realize that promise you must possess the second acquired talent we discovered, which deals with the way you apply those talents. We call this second acquired talent Authenticity.

Acquired talent #2. Authenticity
Authenticity, at its simplest level, is “being true to you.” Knowing your strengths and weaknesses (self-awareness) is only half the picture. Properly applying that knowledge to your life is the other half. Setting goals that capitalize on your natural talents is being authentic. Finding a job that depends primarily on your natural talents is being authentic. Working from your strengths is being authentic.

The opposite of being authentic is being inauthentic. When you are aware of your natural talents and non-talents, but fail to incorporate this knowledge into what you do and how you attempt to achieve success, you are being inauthentic. When you allow yourself to fill a role that requires you to excel in your non-talents, you are being inauthentic.

So, of all the people he studied and all the various aspects of those people we looked at, the only two things that showed up as being really different between the most successful and the rest were their level of understanding for the natural talents and their ability to act on this awareness, to incorporate it into what they do and how they do it. The message in this study then becomes, the more completely you know your own natural talents and non-talents (i.e., are self-aware), and the more honest you are about this awareness, and the more you use it to determine what you do and how you do it (i.e., are authentic), the greater your satisfaction and performance will be.

Figure 1 below demonstrates the simplicity of this concept.

Level of Self-Awareness + Level of Authenticity = Level of Performance

Philosopher G.E. Moore puts it as simply as anyone could. He said, “Everything is what is it, and not another thing.” In other words, we are what we are, and not what we are not. We are our natural talents and our non-talents, and the more aware of these we are, and the truer we are to this fact, the better we perform. Trying to be something we are not is fruitless. If your natural talent is not for strategic thinking than the more your success depends on this ability, the more you are likely to suffer from The Problem.

~ Only when we are what we are, and our roles and objectives are true to that - only then
can we reach the 5th level of performance ~

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

The Genius Project grew out of a desire to better understand two things:
1. What was the cause of the problem he was seeing with many of his client where they were frustrated and underperforming.
2. What were the real implications of it for those effected by what he call “The Problem”

The Genius Project spanned seven years and involved hundreds of thousands of individuals across twenty-three countries. Each individual was given a scientifically validated instrument to measure their ability in a wide variety of attributes relevant to individual performance. These attributes were naturally occurring talents that people possessed based on how they think and make decisions. The science behind this instrument had been rigorously validated and proven in business use for more than fifty years. The study itself was designed to compare the level of these natural talents in the most successful people against the levels in non-successful people. Our hope was to see if we could find out what differences, if any, could be found that might answer our questions.

One of the reasons he chose the Attribute Index, an assessment based on the science of axiology, for this study was because it measures natural talents for thinking and making decisions. As such, these natural talents are pretty much hard-wired, which means they are permanently set or fixed. In other words, they are the result of the way the neural networks in our brains operate, and as such they do not change much over the course of our lives. As a result he was very interested in finding out if having any of these attributes (Talents) was significantly linked to achieving greater levels of performance. It is because of their permanent nature that he refers to them as natural talents (as opposed to learned or acquired talents which I’ll cover in a my next post). He also chose these attributes because his company had lots of experience with them, which is important when you are trying to understand what these data are or are not telling you. And finally, he chose to work with these attributes because we already had over 75 PhDs and 900 certified professional consultants and coaches around the world with the experience and understanding required to accurately administer and interpret the results as well – which was vital if he was going to be able to gather good data.

All good research follows the basic principles of the scientific method. Those steps are:
1. Ask a Question
2. Do Background Research
3. Construct a Hypothesis
4. Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
5. Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
6. Communicate Your Results

1. The question he asked was, “why do some people seem to succeed frequently and with much less effort while others, who put in similar amounts of effort, have similar abilities and intelligence and exist in the very same environment, fail to succeed to the same degree.”

2. The initial background research he conducted was that we began talking with as many people as we could about this question. He interviewed people who were and were not satisfied with their level of success. He spoke with industrial and organizational psychologists, thought leaders, educators, and experts in personal development. In the consulting work he did, he was already using the Attribute Index to actually measure individual thinking and decision-making styles so he started monitoring the results of those profiles to see if any trends popped out

3. The hypothesis he developed was, “based on observation and anecdotal evidence, the more self-aware someone is of their natural talents, and the more they incorporate this knowledge into the work they do the more successful they are.” In other words, the truer someone was to their natural talents - the more successful they were

4. The experiment he did to prove or disprove this hypothesis became the heart of the Genius Project itself wherein he profiled over 300,000 people around the world and statistically compared their scores with their level of performance to see what correlations would show up. He was interested in knowing if there were any single talents, or sets of talents, that only the most successful people possessed in high amounts.

5. Hisr analysis of all of this data (over 24,000,000 bits of it) revealed some significant
findings that I will reveal in my future posts..

What’s a Genius?
To be able to statistically compare the differences between the most and least successful
people, we needed to separate them into categories of performance. We started with a
fairly universal set of four levels of performance:
• 1st Level – below average
• 2nd Level – average
• 3rd Level – above average
• 4th Level – excellent
•
Very early on, however, as he started interviewing people and looking at the best performers, he began to see the need for perhaps yet another level of performance. Those who were describing the absolute best performers they knew were having trouble with the four levels of performance we were using. The interviewees were telling him that these people were better than excellent. You’ve no doubt seen this yourself. Think of someone who is so damn good at what they do that they are better than “excellent.” The word falls short of conveying just how good these people really are, and you want to give them aneven stronger description.

“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind”
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Time and time again, as he interviewed people, the most common word they used to describe this level of performance was “genius”. They would say, “John is so great at seeing the big picture, he is a genius” or, “Mary is an absolute genius when it comes to understanding the client’s problem.” Because we heard this talk of “better than excellent” so much, we decided to add another level of performance on top of excellent.

This became the 5th Level of performance and because we heard the word genius so many times, that became the nickname for this new Level of performance.

The revised rankings then became:
• 1st Level – Below average
• 2nd Level – Average
• 3rd Level – Above average
• 4th Level – Excellent
• 5th Level - Genius

Finally, since he was searching for what explained some people’s ability to achieve the 5th level of performance, and become a Genius for what they do, it only made sense to call the whole thing the Genius Project.

When he says Genius, by the way, we aren’t referring to a person’s IQ. Our use of the term genius has nothing to do directly with how intelligent a person is and everything to do with how well they perform. Our use of genius is descriptive of a person’s ability to perform, not their ability to acquire facts or information (the more classical definition of genius).

His definition of a Genius is: a natural and joyful ability for delivering the highest levels of performance. The natural part of this definition comes from the fact that these abilities are driven by your natural talents, and the joyful part comes from the fact that being true to your natural talents is not only more comfortable, but also more productive (both of which are more joyful).

I will provide you with the findings from The Genius Project over my next few posts. I will also provide you information on what the results mean to you and how you can use the findings to achieve your own genius.

Responses from “DISC-ing Out A Thanksgiving Meal”
Based on your Behavioral Style this was probably your response to yesterday’s post:

High D – Look how long this is! Doesn’t he know I have things to do and people to meet? I’ll read it later (or not!). Send me the “Cliff Notes” version! Darn, I did forget the ice – I’ll call Andy and have him pick it up.

High I – Cooool! This is funny. Hmmm – a pot luck Thanksgiving meal – I gotta try that next year. Sounds like fun! Hey, that’s Aunt Nellie and that is Uncle Fred. OMG! This is me. He hit me spot on! I’ve gotta send this to Jane and John – They’ll get a real hoot out of this!

High S – Printed out the email and quickly circled the typo at the beginning of the second paragraph. (Yes it was put there on purpose just to satisfy the High S and C people. The one in the High S section really was a typo – congrats on finding that one too!) Started making notes in the margins on how to properly identify styles during the holiday meal. Why is this a narrative rather than a set procedure? Couldn’t he just tell me how to apply this step by step in my business? I’ll outline it and post a response, I know he is busy and could use the help.

High C – Also printed out the document – gotta save it for future reference! Also circled the typos, probably in red and maybe underlined them too! Why did he send out something with this obvious error? I bet the rest of it has errors too. Read the rest of the in proofreading mode – I know there are more mistakes in here. Never really read the document the whole way because their eyes kept being drawn back to the big red circle around the typo! I wonder why he didn’t list statistical proof for his conclusions? Probably disagreed with several points – NO SUPPORTING DOCUMENTATION! - so decided it was inaccurate and tossed it in the trash. (Note to High Cs – You probably think my use of “gotta” two times in this email is inappropriate and improper – two times or three? You can’t help yourself – you’ll go back and count.)

For the non-High I’s in the group, these two emails were just for fun with some training wrapped around.

You’ll notice that the responses above get longer with each style – just like in life. Whether a holiday dinner or a business, Behaviors can tell us exactly what to expect and how to react. Are you using Behaviors to help yourself and your organization?

Again, thanks to my good friend Dr. Dennis Hocker! Behaviors can have a huge impact on how effectiely you interact with others.

Who style are those with whom you are communicating?

How flexible are you in your communication style?

How effectively do you communiate with each style?

A possible resolution for 2009?