Refining Top Talent from Innovative and Progressive Lens

At today’s digital dynamic, top talent are both “experts” and “explorers.”

As our society has continually taken an evolutionary journey from agricultural to industrial to digital-techno-logical-social era, the masses of workers have progressed from being farmers, then factory workers to being knowledge workers, where the primary skill needed to conduct work is their brain power. In fact, we are on the advancing journey moving from information scarcity to knowledge abundance to creative economy. People are always the center of changes. it’s important to refine the competency model, assess the talent's overall capability to solve problems, demonstrate learning capability, character, skills, communication, and energy. To put simply, refine top talent from the creative and progressive lens.

Scrutinize mindset: We are what we think, Mindset differentiates top talent from mediocrity. There is no doubt we live in the digital era with advanced technology and the rapid speed of changes. However, most of the mindset of contemporary leaders today shaped a couple of decades ago, haven’t got updated enough yet. The one thing to differentiate talented people (either high performance or high potential) from mediocrity is MINDSET, which further drives attitude. The advanced mind is the brainpower and driving force behind any kind of societal progress. Thus, top talent today needs to  have sufficient skill set, but more importantly, they should be selected by the most advanced mindset. Many say we are still in the era of information-rich and insight poor. Real societal progress is made through the work of progressive and foreseeable minds and responsible behaviors.

Top talent is often the leader in their profession or industry. Only the most advanced mindset can accelerate change and fuel innovation. Generally speaking, advanced mindsets are positive, forward-thinking, creative, and inclusive, etc. People with positive thinking convey a strong will to make changes and have a future orientation that make them more prone to overcome barriers and handle adversities. Top talent is creative because creativity as high-level thinking evolving different thought processes for thinking differently and solving problems innovatively. The power of the mind is the force to change the business or even the world for better. Therefore, the big leap of advancement can be accelerated when we follow the most advanced mindset and participate in advanced activities and movement in a consistent way.

Break the rules, not just follow the rules: To be truly creative, it's important to challenge the status quo, conventional wisdom, and outdated beliefs, Top talent is not just the one who can perfectly follow the rule; top talent today needs to change the rules or co-create new rules to make collective progress. There are good rules and bad rules, visible rules and hidden rules, local rules or global rules. Therefore, it take leadership, vision, courage, and character to break down the old rules and make progressive leadership influence. Due to the creative and progressive human nature, from one generation to the next generation, the outdated rules have to be broken down, and the new “rules” should get updated to reflect the new normal. High talented people are creative “disruptors” who can think outside the traditional box, and do something outside of the confines of the traditional construct.

To quote Peter Drucker, knowledge is the most valuable commodity. Top talent keeps learning, innovating, adapting, and evolving. They do not work within the box, but across the boxes, broaden their perspectives, and connect wider dots to spur creativity. Identify top talent who love the clash of ideas, love listening, love being wrong, and love learning. An individual that over time through learning and practicing has become an ”T-shaped” expert and build creative problem-solving skills.

Recognize top talent based on unique competency, quality, and maturity, not stereotype or conventional fit: Being unique means to be authentic. Being authentic is defined as being real or genuine. Through authenticity lens, it is much clearer to discover an individual’s capabilities and potential to innovate and assess his/her professional quality and maturity. The quality of a person is often decided by the quality of his/her thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. Maturity is the combination of capability and potentiality. Top talent has the positive mental attitude to build strengths, capture opportunities, and take inspired actions. They build their own set of unique competencies which are the combination of cohesive professional capabilities with a focus. Each of these same capabilities may be combined in different fashions to yield multiple competencies.They are proactively exploring, innovating and evolving by driving progressive changes and bringing new digital paradigms.

At today’s digital dynamic, top talent are both “experts” and “explorers.” The forward-looking organizations across industrial sectors and geographical boundaries are now looking for top talent that have the growth mindset, strong characters, positive attitudes, and unique competency, They can demonstrate the ability to drive change forward, catalyze creative climate, do the work innovatively, not just based on the previous experience, but through recombinant capability and integral talent competency.

Posted in: Leadership Master,Mindshift,Talent Master