Some years ago, I was working in HR for HSBC. During my time there, I was working on a project which focused on the bank’s internationally mobile staff known as International Managers. The role still exists today. IMs, as they were called, were hired out of university specifically as generalists. The deal was that the bank would decide where to send them and what to do and they would have no choice in the matter. Given the bank’s global reach and scope it was an exciting deal.
The project I was working on was a review of that group because of a range of issues that I can’t go into here but suffice to say that one of them was the wide range of ‘talent’. Whilst everyone had an opinion as to why this might be the case, one of the major issues was that the IMs were incentivized to stay in the job until the retirement age of 52. That meant that some of the IMs were recruited in the seventies when HSBC was a fraction of its size and the needs were very different.
Nevertheless, the whole proposition of the IM and a part of their value to the bank was their ‘plug and play’ nature – that is, it shouldn’t matter who you got or what they were doing. They were recruited as high calibre individuals who were very knowledgeable and experienced not only in banking but also in the way the bank worked. They had a significant network which had grown from their time working in different countries and functions and therefore knew how to get things done.
So keep them in mind for a moment.
The fact is that talent varies. It varies from person-to-person ion different areas and different contexts bring out different strengths of talent in people, sometimes that they never knew they had. Once of the issues with my education in the eighties was that the prevailing educational philosophy seemed to be that there was only one kind of intelligence, and if you were great at English but not Physics, you just weren’t trying with the latter.
That said, when I was at school, everyone was given the same essay to do, and I knew more or less what grade I was likely to get, and where my classmates were likely to sit. Everyone knew who was likely to come in the top five in every exam subject and they were fairly consistent.
And then you leave school and all of that falls away, and everyone starts looking the same. Everyone could be capable of an A or an F and its difficult to know who gets what and why.
So back to the IMs. One of the hardest things in life, I think, is when you realise someone is just better than you. I’m not talking about the outliers like George Clooney or Bruce Springsteen. I mean someone you were recruited with the same year, or someone at the next desk. If they get promoted faster than you, it can hurt, and many people cast around looking for any reason as to why.
In large corporates it’s quite easy. No one has cracked the talent code yet – promoting the right people. Meritocracy remains a lofty vision. Luck plays too much of a part and who you know really matters. HR doesn’t help in that no one has come up with a reliable, repeatbale way of fairly assessing people in such a way to pick the winners.
The reason I bring up the IMs is that when one of them was promoted and that promotion was deemed ‘early’ within the norms and cultural structures of the bank, some of the IMs would call HR and demand to know why that promotion had happened. Luckily I was never on the end of one of those calls. I mean luckily for the caller because the answer would have been either ‘she’s better than you’ or a short lecture on sex and travel.
What I found incredible was that strong belief in the plug and play. That everyone would have performed the same given the same circumstances. No allowance was given for talent or context.
In my career I’ve come across many people who are just better than me. Some of them have not been better than me all the time in all jobs. Sometimes the circumstances of their job was just exactly right for them. There are very few people I’ve ever come across who performed well in all circumstances, and if they have, usually they picked and chosen their jobs very carefully, and all power to their elbow. Sometimes talent can be for picking the right jobs and having the right people around you.
So my core message is this. Give yourself a break. You won’t win in all situations, but I do believe all of us have talents which change over time I can work in some situations but not others. The trick is not just to understand what those talents are, but keeping doing jobs that take you out of your comfort zone and give you an opportunity to discover new ones or new levels of the ones you knew about.