Personal Desire, Capacity and Opportunity
It is often said that every one of us has a talent, but the problem may be that not every one of us is aware of the possession of such talents. There is also the possibility that some are aware of their talents but are not aware of how to turn their talents to treasures. The failure to turn talents to treasures can arise from one or more factors. The first could be the lack of a strong personal desire; the second could be the lack of a personal capacity; and the third is the lack of available opportunities. This is what I like to refer to as “the DCO Principle”.
The DCO principle simply suggests that a person that would succeed and be outstanding in any endeavour needs three things: Firstly, he must have the desire to succeed if given the opportunities to build his capacity to perform. Secondly, he must have the capacity to perform if given the opportunities to express his desire to succeed. Thirdly, he must have the opportunities to express both the personal desire to succeed and the built up capacity to perform.
In life, we find that there are people that have the desire to succeed and the capacity to perform, but may never get the opportunities that they need to manifest their desire and capacity. There are others that have the capacity and opportunities, but lack the personal desire and will to use their capacity and the opportunities that they have to make a difference in their lives and those of others. Yet, there are those that seem to have the desire to succeed and are given the opportunities, but fail to pay the high price of capacity building.
But, the people that truly succeed are those that have the talent and are committed to utilising their talent to make the desired impact in the marketplace. These are the people who seize opportunities that would nurture their talents and make them outstanding. They are the people that love the challenges of their given tasks, and possess the energy or enthusiasm for performing those tasks.
Critical Knowledge Areas (CKA)
A practical way of helping a talented person that is not measuring up to the expected standards involves the process of helping the person to find the commonalties in his goals and the environment. The first step is to ensure that the person understands the goal of performance improvement and how his goal aligns with that of the environment. The next step is to create learning experiences that produce gain through the process of absorption of soft skills through listening, questioning, reflection and interaction with promotional people.
What this means is that the best performance of ordinarily talented people can never be seen without their being helped to develop their natural abilities through 
positive environmental and human interactions.
It is true that talents may get them the jobs that they desire, but it is the nurturing of their natural abilities that builds their capacity levels. It is the correct talent nurturing that shows how talents can be amplified to engender personal transformation and transformational performance within the corporate setting.
Innate abilities have a lot to do with people having a particular talent, but that does not account for their full range of abilities. They have to be guided to develop a more detailed knowledge of their domain and understand its deeper and structural features.
This helps them to compile procedural knowledge and in turn, build condition-action rules. As a result, they are able to know when something will not work much quicker than less talented people and can change strategies much faster.
This doesn’t just happen. It is a process developed through intense and consistent coaching, mentoring and training. The people that develop these traits thus become generally more deeply devoted and committed to their calling and purpose in the organization and any environment where they are called to perform.
Naturally as well, they tend to work harder and more passionately than a person with a casual interest in the subject. These are the people that truly add value on the long run to their organisations because their talents are put at the disposal of everyone.
Talent is the manifestation of a person’s special ability through creative or artistic aptitude. In business and the corporate world, truly talented people are those with the capability to apply “Critical Knowledge Area” (CKA).
CKA refers to the specific bodies of knowledge that lie at the core of the business mission and strategy of an organisation. An organisation thus becomes successful when it effectively leverages its CKA to gain comparative advantage through brand and market differentiation. At the core of that differentiation lies the talent pool and potentials of the organisation.
Talent Management for Sustainable Success
Talent management is one of the greatest and most desirable skills that an organization that would differentiate itself must possess. The team leaders and managers of people in that organisation have to take up the responsibility of firstly identifying and recruiting people that have obvious talents into their team.
Beyond that however, they also have the responsibility of nurturing those talents 
and unearthing the real wealth in their teams or organisation – their people. These are the people whose latent potentials are unleashed for sustainable impact. That is one of the cardinal goals of organisational coaching.
Without this process, many of the people in an organisation that have the potentials to create real wealth would remain mere jobbers and survivalists in the workplace, in spite of their obvious natural abilities. But when they become exposed to the kind of challenging partnerships and performance enhancement engagements that coaching and mentoring engender, they become transformed.
Firstly, they increase their personal awareness, and thereafter become self-driven and more purposeful because they have goals to accomplish, tasks to perform and most importantly, value to create in the workplace. Their innate abilities become just the needed platform for them to develop a solid belief system and also the spring board to aim for excellence. But it all starts with the knowledge of their innate abilities or talents.
The truth is that innate abilities may give people the edge in the beginning, but it is not sufficient to bring the desired transformation of talents to treasures. There is the need for some level of techniques, raw effort and the willingness to commit more time and other needed inputs to ensure that the talents are well developed, directed, and harnessed. At the end of the day, the individual is improved, but very importantly, several others within and outside the organisation would also benefit from these engagements.
Talent engagement is the root of talent management and involves finding, training, mentoring and coaching people to be passionate about what they do as work. Unfortunately, this is where many organisations are failing. They are failing to expose their people to talent engaging training and coaching activities, which develop them beyond being technically or professionally proficient. The interventions that engage the hearts and passions of talented people should not be left unattended to in the course of developing their technical or professional skills.
The correct approach would be to add to the training of technical skills, the deliberate exposure to real human resource development programmes which emphasise greater efforts in effectively training and developing soft skills. These include such subjects as diversity, change management, communication and people skills, conflict resolutions, emotional intelligence etc.
These are what make people to understand each other and develop good team skills. They give every team member the reason and purpose of being in the team, as well as the choice to be a valued member of the team. In other words, it is not just that as a talented person, you must work for and add value to the team – there is the desire and love to work with all the other team members. You are doing it, not because you have to, but because you want and love to do it.
The first priority of human resources development is therefore that of building real strong and self-driven teams, not just groups of people with titles called teams. The starting point as has been mentioned is nurturing the available talents in the team by nurturing individual members’ talents and encouraging them to reach heights that they could only dream to attain. The ultimate beneficiary is the organisation that takes the time to cultivate talents and harness the value derivable there from.
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Dr Emmanuel Imevbore is an executive coach, management consultant and business strategist. He is the CEO of International Coaching and Mentoring Institute, a specialist coaching and coach-training organisation. He can be reached by email: emmanuel@ic-mi.com; and WhatsApp: +27 79 259 1768.
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