During the summer of my sophomore year of college, I was a First-Year Orientation Leader. My job was to lead groups of incoming first-year students at new student orientation throughout the three day session. This was a role that was a mix of educator, cheerleader, therapist, mentor, and camp counselor, but at its core relied upon being able to build connection and trust with a bunch of 18 year olds, many of whom weren’t entirely sold on being there in the first place.
Each week the 40 of us orientation leaders got assigned a group of 8-10 individuals and led them through a 3 day session. It was a mixture of lectures, tours, social hours and academic activities, but ultimately served the purpose of helping incoming students get ready for their college experience. I really enjoyed the opportunity to serve as an Orientation Leader. It was a great summer job, I got the chance to represent a school (Boston College) and experience (college) that I loved, my co-workers were great, and generally speaking, students were fun to be around. But while those were great for a summer job, that experience taught me more about myself, and my own talents that would serve me well for the rest of my career.
One day, while leading a group through a series of facilitations around diversity, equity and inclusion a Jessica, a first year student, came up to me to ask me a few more questions. We chatted for a few minutes, and afterwards, she asked me, “have you done this before?” I told her I hadn’t and that I was new. She said, “oh, well you’re pretty good at it.”
I was taken aback, and thanked her for the compliment and decided to ask her a follow up question about what she meant by that. She said, “I don’t know, I can just tell that you enjoy being around people, the inflection in your voice and body language just lights up when you’re talking to others, and every time I ask you a question, you seem to either have an idea of what the answer could be, or you know someone who has the answer.”
After finishing up my summer as an Orientation leader, The next spring (the spring of 2008) I had a choice: I could return as an Orientation Leader, or work a traditional summer internship at a large company. While I enjoyed my experience as an Orientation Leader, I was getting a lot of pressure from my family as well as my career counselor to get a formal internship. We were in the depths of the great recession and my guidance counselor was encouraging us to get as much real-world experience as possible.
Despite this, I kept thinking about the conversation I had with Jessica who said to me about being good at the role, and her feedback around what I was doing that made me excellent at being an Orientation Leader. Even though it was against the wishes of my parents and career counselor at the time, I decided to return as an Orientation Leader for another summer.
I knew this was a risk, I knew that going to college meant not only getting a degree, but getting a good launch pad into the working world, and setting myself up for career success. But I also had this underlying belief, that when I could put myself in situations where I could use my talents and strengths, I would do a great job, which in turn, would potentially unlock opportunities, even if I couldn’t see them.
The decision paid off. I returned as an Orientation Leader for a second summer, and as luck would have it, when I started the recruiting process my senior year (the fall of 2009) companies actually started to hire again.
Furthermore, while grades were still important, being an Orientation Leader gave me plenty of STAR stories to talk about in interviews. As luck would have it, a number of former orientation leaders worked at Deloitte, and helped me navigate through the recruiting process, even when I didn’t meet all of the stated requirements, and despite never having formal internship experience, still landed a great first job out of college.
The Importance of Talent Spotting
The point of the story to me is not that I was able to land a job without ever having internship experience, but rather, I would have never had the confidence to keep going with being an Orientation Leader if it weren’t for Jessica spotting the goodness and talents that I had, and giving me the feedback of how she saw it helping other people, including herself.
While all of us intuitively understand that using our strengths is critical to success, it’s easy to be blinded by our limited worldview. It often takes the feedback of others, and understanding how others see us or how others are impacted by us to understand the strengths, talents, and skills that we have that make a positive impact.
Jessica practiced what I called talent spotting – or the ability to identify a specific talent or skill of someone, and to let them know in context to help them learn and grow. This skill that Jessica showed me is something that I have taken with me to this day, and something I try to practice in my interactions inside and outside of the workplace.
As leaders, and managers, we need to acknowledge and practice talent spotting on a regular basis, to help our teams understand their strengths, and to use them in their job. Furthermore, we also know that when we as managers do provide in-context and timely feedback, our people feel more engaged and empowered to do their jobs.
But managers are not the only people who benefit from talent spotting. If you work in a cross functional role, or in a large organization which requires you to work on projects with other people, talent spotting is a great way to be a good teammate, help others learn, and build a culture of psych safety. This makes your job easier, makes you someone that people want to work with, and helps you grow your own career.
Talent Spotting and Self-Awareness
Talent spotting also helps us build self-awareness. Tasha Eurich, a researcher and professor who studies self-awareness tells us that there are essentially two types of self-awareness. Internal self-awareness, which measures how we see our own internal passions, interests, and skills, and external self-awareness, how others see us. With some intention and space, we all sort of back into some measure of internal self-awareness, but external self-awareness can be hard to cultivate solely on our own.
The upshot? We’re not great at understanding how others perceive us, so we need others to help us see how we are seen, and how we can contribute in meaningful ways. We can help our teammates, employees and direct reports build their own self-awareness and understanding of their skills, strengths and talents, we find more ways to link those to projects, initiatives and programs that align to those strengths and skills, which helps us achieve goals, improve employee engagement, productivity and team goals/outcomes.
So how do we get started with talent spotting in the workplace? Here are a few suggestions:
#1: Proactively look to find the strengths that others exhibit – Whether you’re a manager or individual contributor, building in time to think about where you’ve seen others exhibit talents and strengths will make this a muscle and skill of yours that you can consistently do over time. As a manager, I would argue that this is one of your most important jobs to do, so it needs to be muscle memory for how you do your job. But even if you are not a manager this is extremely valuable for helping you on your projects and initiatives when working with others in your organization. I also think that the more you do this, the more others around you will try to do the same.
#2: Provide in-context and timely feedback when you see it – Telling someone a year after they worked on a project that they did a great job isn’t nearly as helpful as telling them in the moment when they used their negotiation skills to lead the project to a great outcome right after it happened. As the saying on the MBTA goes, “if you see something, say something!” (note: if you want help learning how to give feedback, check out this great resource)
#3) Align talent to opportunities – If your manager, this is a core part of your job, and you should constantly be thinking about “how do I align my people’s strengths to projects that drive business outcomes?” For those of you who are not managers, you can think about this on your own individual level of thinking more deeply about how you are using your own talents in your existing set of responsibilities, and how you could use them in new projects or responsibilities. Even just doing an audit of how you are using your strengths today can be a great discussion point in your next 1:1 with your manager.
For those that are still following along or curious, in addition to serving another summer as an Orientation Leader, I also became a Resident Assistant in a freshman residence hall, led retreats for first-year students, mentored analysts and consultants when I was an experienced consultant, became a career and leadership coach, advised Senior IT Leaders on role transitions, and coached numerous individuals through job and career searches.
While I’m confident that I had a decent understanding of my skills, setting me on the path I have taken would have never happened if Jessica hadn’t used talent spotting to help me see something that was hard to see myself, and for giving me the confidence to use those skills even more in what I did each day. Now, whenever I join a new company, project, initiative, get a new client, or operate in a new team setting, I think back to Jessica’s talent spotting feedback, and think about how I can bring it to life for my teammates and colleagues.
Talent spotting exists because we as humans are not always aware of how others see us in the world. By investing in talent spotting like Jessica did, we can help the people who need it most (teammates, direct reports, etc) see their strengths and talents, help them improve, and help them use those talents to drive greater outcomes in the workplace.