First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

by Gallup Press

Conventional wisdom assumes either that these behaviors can be trained after the person has been hired or that these characteristics are relatively unimportant to performance on the job. Both assumptions are false. First, you cannot teach talent. You cannot teach someone to form strong opinions, to feel the emotions of others, to revel in confrontation or to pick up on the subtle differences in how best to manage each person. You have to select for talents like these. We will explain why this is true later in the chapter. Second, talents like these prove to be the driving force behind an individual’s job performance. It’s not that experience, brainpower and willpower are unimportant. It’s just that an employee’s full complement of talents — what drives her, how she thinks, how she builds relationships — is more important.