Tag Archives: talent

The Talent Code – well worth a read

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DNA-editing-

Every now and again I come across a book and as soon as I’m no more than a handful of pages in, I know it’s going to be a really useful one for a long time to come. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle is one of those books and I would highly recommend it for Coyle’s work on this very grey area and deep research into talent hotbeds and methods of practice that debunk the myth that talent is simply something you are born with.

The top performers in a variety of sectors, not just sport or music, across the world are using a “neurological mechanism” to aid their practice where “certain patterns of targeted practice build skill”. This creates a neural insulator called myelin which wraps itself around electrical circuits travelling from your brain as you practice and the more you practice, the more myelin insulation you create. As the myelin increases in thickness and wraps itself around the circuits building speed and skill, the better you perform in the long run. Apologies for the amateur science lesson but hopefully you get the point.

Coyle takes us on a journey around the world visiting talent hotbeds – a tennis academy in Russia and Brazilian football schools among others – and analyses the coaching methods employed to build the maximum amount of myelin, even in cases where the coaches themselves don’t even know why they are getting such amazing results with their pupils. His insights are easy to understand and the book contains very few scientific references with the ‘code’ broken down into three key parts:

  • Deep practice – pushing your training to the edges of your ability and learning from the process of making mistakes, over and over again.
  • Ignition – a breakthrough winner from South Korea on the LPGA golf tour led to a huge uptake of the game in the country and a stack of high performers around the world.
  • Master coaching – those who use deep practice and ignition to get the incredible results share some very similar traits and methods.

Get hold of a copy if you’re even a tiny bit interested in talent and understanding how people reach levels of performance that seem a long way away from the common man. Lots of great learning points and a book I’ll be referring back to for years.

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Ian Mountford is a Strategy Coach providing motivation and guidance to entrepreneurs, wannabe or fully-fledged. He draws from his own experience of building businesses from the ground up and spending many years helping clients to consistently achieve their goals and aspirations. Ian works with clients face-to-face and internationally.

Using a consultancy to provide talent is about so much more than just paying fees

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New post by me over at the 6Talent blog:
“Many organisations are doing their own hiring today because they don’t want to pay fees to agents. Many brands and businesses big and small have had bad experiences with, or feel they haven’t got value for money from, an agency and I can understand that – sadly there are many bad eggs out there and that will always be the case. Very few arguments any better than the fees one have really found their way to me and it is often the only factor against them wanting to do business. My question is, why use your own time to search for and hire people when you can partner up with a consultancy and let them help you to grow? Hiring is a skill that everyone thinks they are great at but the facts simply don’t bear this out. And getting it wrong is a huge expense, whether you have found staff yourself or not. The true cost of recruitment can be £000’s and if you make poor hiring decisions as you’re learning how to do it on your own these costs just get larger and larger.
If you have staff within your team who are key administrators or are in HR and have a bucketload of everyday work to do, is it really a cost-effective use of their time to also try to do your hiring? And if you’re a small business owner with a to-do list as long as your arm, is it really the best use of your time to be trawling LinkedIn when you could be doing chargeable work and driving new business into your firm? If you need a website, you go and get one built for your business by an agency that knows how it’s done, rather than asking your team to have a go. If you need a new car, you don’t buy it from Ford directly, you go via a dealer, and so on, BUT in each case you are paying a price and the same applies to searching for and delivering talent.
A good consultancy providing talent is a partner to your operation and is putting a great message about your business out there for all to see, promoting you at every opportunity. A good consultancy gives you market knowledge and keeps you up to speed on your industry and knows as much about it as you do. And – the big one – a great consultancy helps you make the right decision on a candidate. They help you to find the right talent for your team and assist on the process of recruitment as well as simply handing over CVs – they have this at the heart of their operating model as it’s the only thing that works. It builds a stronger relationship, strengthens the partnership and makes the process of growth so much easier for your business. You can then stick to the things that make you money and keep doing what you do best.
Is this something that’s been on your mind? Are you and your team spending huge amounts of time in trying to source candidates without hitting the mark? 6Talent are at the forefront of this service-based approach and we deliver the highest quality service to our clients and get results. If you want to put us to the test and make big long term savings, please get in touch.”