The Thinking Behind The Tweet

I heard today that assessments aimed at finding high-calibre personnel are no longer considering intelligence and talent but are now concentrating all attention on character.

While I expect this is an exaggeration of the current state of recruiting practices, I think it is wrong to underestimate the value of intelligence and talent. And, I believe the use of character assessment alone is a very troubling way to go about determining people’s wherewithal.  

Intelligence, Talents & Character: it seems to me all three of these things are critical to success. I can't imagine any meaningful achievement that does not contain portions of all of these attributes.  

Intelligence is multifaceted and can work in mysterious ways.  Regardless, it's hard to imagine anything being built without a significant level of intelligence. Intelligence correlates the success…in all endeavours.

Talents are the fundamental pieces required for mastery of task and the construction of all meaningful things. When people use their talents at work they take steps to fulfill their ultimate potential. The more they use their talents the greater their opportunity to succeed.

Character is the overriding quality that inspires thought, promotes trust, and influences action. Character is a construct of personal values, personal rules & morals, and a number of other facets, including self-control and power of will. Character is about authenticity and trueness, consistency and doing the right things. 

Clearly, character is an essential ingredient. It is easy to accept that character is the key ingredient. But, that should not confuse the facts around the importance of intelligence and talent. 

Over the last few years, I have written and talked about the communication problems that happen when business leaders use words like Passion and Integrity to lead/encourage/inspire people to be the best they can be at work. The words Passion and Integrity are laced with double entendre and have been overused and misused to the point of obfuscation. Put another way, these two words have been clichéed to the brink of uselessness. Their use has evolved and become mostly bad habit.

Like many of the words and phrases we exchange with one another, the words Passion and Integrity are shorthand abstractions. You can also think of these two words as troubled memes. The words Passion and Integrity have been passed down the generations and passed around the tables for so long and by so many that intent and meaning have been bastardized as happens in ‘telephone games’. 

Business leaders should exercise care when they communicate, especially when they use shorthand abstractions that are likely to touch sensitive territories including personal values, morals, emotions and powerful feelings. 

Why should leaders take greater care when we use shorthand abstractions?

Here’s some thoughts from Tor Norretranders’ –

“That is also the point with abstractions. We want them to be shorthand for a lot of information that was digested in the process leading to the use of the abstraction but not present when we use it. Such abstractions have depth. We love them. Other abstractions have no depth. They are shallow, just used to impress the other guy. They do not help us. We hate them.”

Article – ‘Depth’ by Tor Norretranders, Science Author. An excerpt from John Brockman’s edge.org inspired book ‘This Will Make You Smarter’, (2012)

PS: Yes - interesting use of the shorthand abstractions ‘love’ and ‘hate’ in the quote above. That goes right to the heart and brain of my message here.

PPS: Yes - much of what we communicate has the forms of both shorthand abstraction and bad habit. That's why we provide definitions of words and explanations: this is one way to help people understand what we are trying to communicate.