Talent development—including training, career conversations, coaching, and workforce planning—is usually treated as an intellectual problem. The key question is: what will people need to know in order to be successful…in their job, in their career, in the future of this industry? That question is important, but it’s far too narrow.
The reality is that talent development is about change, not just knowledge. Effective talent development professionals think in terms of how to get people to exercise specific abilities and use specific behaviors. Teaching knowledge might be part of the solution if the reason people are behaving in a specific way is due to a learning gap, but rarely does teaching alone result in changed behaviors.
To be more effective, talent development professionals should think in terms of influencing behaviors. One of the frameworks I recommend to clients is the six sources of influence, described in several of the VitalSmarts books, including Influencer, Change Anything, and Crucial Accountability. This post will provide a quick summary of the six sources and how they relate to talent development.
There are two different kinds of influence factors. Motivation factors deal with whether people want to do something. Incentives, personal beliefs, and peer pressure are all motivation factors. The other kinds of factors are ability factors, which speak to whether the people involved can do what is being asked of them. Ability factors include skill, mentoring, and having the right tools for the job.
The two kinds of influence factors—motivation and ability—make up one axis of influence. The second axis covers the three dimensions of influence: personal, social, and structural. The personal dimension covers the influences on each individual: their likes and dislikes, their training, etc. The social dimension is made up of the interpersonal influences, such as the team dynamics and group support. Finally, the structural dimension consists of the operating environment for the change effort.
By combining the two axes, you can see the six sources of influence.
The first source, personal motivation, is one of the first places that we tend to look to influence others. The focus of personal motivation is making someone want to do it—because they personally are invested in the solution, because it aligns with their belief system, because it taps into their sense of pride, etc. In talent development, we use personal motivation to connect an individual’s goals with our development plans. For instance, I worked with a marketing manager whose direct report struggled with time management. We rehearsed how to connect the development goal of time management skills with the direct report’s personal interest in developing marketing campaigns. By learning time management skills, the direct report could spend less time handling interruptions and more time on the exciting campaign development parts of his job.
The second source, personal ability, addresses whether the individuals have the skills to accomplish the change. This source can be tricky because people tend to hide their skill deficiencies, so a personal ability barrier will often manifest as a motivation barrier. For instance, I’ve worked with police officers to develop their skills in conflict de-escalation. Initially, many officers protested that they didn’t want to learn verbal de-escalation tactics, claiming empathy was “touch-y feel-y bull” (you can fill in the rest of the phrase). After training them how to use empathy to make their jobs safer, empathy skills became tools that worked. What looked like a motivation problem (I don’t want to use empathy) turned out to be an excuse to disguise an ability problem (I don’t know how to use empathy as a tactic).
The third source of influence is social motivation. Social motivations include peer pressure and group norms. This source needs to be addressed separately from personal motivation. Even when individuals are personally motivated to change, a lack of support from the group can derail the process (ask anyone who has tried dieting when his or her peer group regularly eats out). This source is frequently neglected in talent development, to the point that many high-achievers will go out of their way to associate with outside peer groups by joining professional associations, creating practice groups, participating in Mastermind circles, and the like.
Social ability, the fourth source, is another source that tends to be conflated with the personal version. Personal ability deals with whether the individual has the skills to accomplish what is asked. Social ability looks at whether there is social support for the skills in question. Mentors and coaches are common forms of social ability; a sales coach can help their client refine a pitch and rehearse objections. This source is becoming more common in talent development, but most of the time it is treated as an ad hoc resource rather than a specific tool with planned activities, outcomes, and accountabilities.
The fifth source, structural motivation, is frequently invoked in change efforts. This is the carrots and sticks dimension—people who make the change get rewards, or people who fail to change get punished. The tax code is a great example of structural motivation: taxpayers get credits and deductions for incentivized actions like installing solar panels, having children, or donating to charity, while sin taxes encourage people to reduce their consumption of cigarettes, alcohol, and lottery tickets. Talent development professionals tap this source from two directions. First, they can give bonuses, recognition, and even promotions to people who participate in professional development, earn additional credentials, and otherwise grow their abilities. Second, they can treat learning opportunities as a carrot, giving them as rewards for high performance.
By contrast, structural ability tends to hide from our attention because these sources can easily blend into the background. Does the environment make it easier or harder to do the right thing? Hospitals in Michigan used structural ability to reduce IV line infections by bundling IV needles with the surgical drapes and antibacterial soap that should be used whenever an IV is inserted; nurses never ran out of soap or needed to hunt for the drapes after creating the bundles. Structural ability encompasses tools (like the IV bundle), the operating environment (e.g., open offices can encourage collaboration but make it easier to distract people), and even processes (for instance, using structured interviews to improve hiring results). Succession planning and performance management are the two major areas where talent development tends to use this source of influence, but it’s rare to see individual managers or coaches explicitly use this source in specific learning efforts.
Because talent development is a process of change, and not just learning, trainers, organizational development professionals, managers, and coaches can all benefit from considering how they can tap all six sources of influence in their efforts.