The premise?

• Your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness.
• You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years.
• Understand that talent doesn't mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It's an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well.

How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields.

The conclusions:

Tsun-yan Hsieh is the chairman of LinHart Group which specializes in CEO leadership, here he suggests six highly effective tips which anyone can apply and become a talent magnet. These include cultivating and maintaining relationships with talented people much before you actually need them, creating the right expectations about yourself and your enterprise, looking beyond talented individuals’ accomplishments into what actually drives them, getting them into your company in a planned and thoughtful manner and then mentoring them for success.

Here we are not talking about poor performers but smart talented people who can be poisonous for your company. The author classifies them into two types, the Heretic who is always on the lookout for weaknesses simply to feel empowered and prove that the company is being run by morons and the Jerk, who is always hostile and aggressive so much so that he can singlehandedly breakdown communication across the executive and eventually through the company.

Source: Forbes

Hiring based on experience and skills is passé, at least in the companies discussed in this article which cater to totally differently areas, they are Specialty Care Center (health care), ING Direct (retail banking), and Southwest Airlines (airlines). These companies look for the right attitude while hiring and train them for skills in-house. Their common reason is that’s the only way to re-energize and renew an industry.

The author has had significant experience running hands-on workshops on disruptive innovation. He has found, contrary to the general beliefs of CEOs that most organizations have enough creative people already working with them and the senior leaders need not look outside for innovative ideas. The problem, in most cases lies with the organization itself, or more specifically, its systems which constrain the collective creativity of workers in subtle ways.

In the times of crisis majority of the companies use one size fits all retention policies, which usually involves expressing confidence in some senior executives and star performers by providing them with cash incentives. This strategy is quite often not only expensive but also ineffective. The reality is that many people who stay back after being offered cash incentives would have stayed back anyway. Moreover it is erroneous to overlook normal performers who have nevertheless become essentials parts of their departments and processes.

Issie Lapowsky digs through management literature on motivation and comes with 10 nuggets of wisdom including providing employees with the chance to make real difference, trusting them with autonomy and flexibility, giving them attention and guidance, allowing them opportunities for innovation and of course compensating them fairly.

Source: Inc. Magazine

All employees are not equal; some are more talented than the rest. Most companies understand this even if they do not express it. There are organizations that identify such “high potentials” and develop them by giving them better opportunities, investing more time, energy and other resources on them compared to the rest of their employees. This article addresses such hard-working and talented employees and tells them how they can get themselves identified as a high potential.