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What is talent?

By Peter Honey (December 2004 Issue)
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During the last few days I have found that attempting to answer the question ‘What is talent?’ is far more troublesome than you might think. Recently, I accepted an invitation to attend what was described as a ‘thinking breakfast’ organised by the Talent Foundation (www.talentfoundation.com). We sat at different tables in groups of eight or so drinking coffee (I stuck to water because I’ve heard it is better for the brain!) and eating croissants. We were asked to put our heads together and do a talent stock-take. Specifically we were asked to think of the pressing issues of the day and to suggest useful themes for the Foundation to focus on in its future work.

Inevitably someone at our table suggested we should start by agreeing what we meant by talent. My heart sank as it always does when I’m invited to partake in some communal defining. Past experience tells me that this sort of activity takes an inordinate amount of time, leads to a strangely inconclusive conversation and results in an uneasy compromise in a desperate bid to accommodate irreconcilable views. I’d much rather skip this cerebral activity (especially at breakfast time!) and look up the word in a dictionary.

So I resisted by saying something dismissive like, ‘Let’s assume we all know what we mean.’ The irony of this is that, in my days as a management consultant, I used to intervene, gently but firmly, whenever I heard a remark like this and caution people about the perils of continuing until they had an agreed understanding. Once, I even had a colleague who used to leap up, write the offending word on a flipchart, and insist it was defined to everyone’s satisfaction before allowing them to proceed. If they couldn’t agree what they meant by words such as ‘strategy’, ‘quality’, ‘competencies’ and ‘paradigm’, the words were banned!

Fortunately, I had a few allies on my table and the call for us to spend time defining talent was successfully resisted. Instead, we settled down to swap ideas about talent shortages and the war for talent, how people were undervalued, attrition rates and the challenge to retain talented people, how most organisations are not talent-friendly and so on. All good stuff – and no definition in sight.

The next day, when I met up again with my battered dictionary, I looked up the word we had bandied around so glibly. Talent: innate mental or artistic aptitude (as opposed to acquired ability); less than genius. Now, as a behaviourist, I’m uncomfortable with anything that is described as innate. I much prefer things to be (a) the product of learning and (b) observable (like dear old behaviour!). So, I tried another dictionary hoping that it would drop the notion of talents being innate. Talent: natural ability to do something well. There it is again, ‘natural’. I can feel the wretched nature–nurture controversy rearing its head yet again. Next I reach for Roget’s Thesaurus, always illuminating, to find ‘talent’ associated with words like ‘intelligence’, ‘wisdom’, ‘gumption’, ‘capacity’, ‘brilliance’ and ‘genius’.

Next (I know, I know … it should have been first!) to Google to do an advanced search on talent. Up came an array of extraordinary websites. I find a list of talents covering aura reading, healing, water divining and aligning the matrix. I find a site urging people to use their gifts and talents to ‘enrich your life and the lives of others’. It lists some talents that ‘people often have and don’t even recognise as a gift or talent’. Examples include: making others laugh or smile, creating something from nothing, making people and things beautiful, comforting others, inspiring and motivating others. I go on to read all about ‘dependable strengths’ and the work of the late Dr Bernard Haldane, the originator of career counselling, who devoted his life to ‘challenging people to find out what they do well and how they can use their talents to serve the betterment of society’. Now, totally hooked, I press on to find structured exercises designed to help people identify hidden talents.

Wow! Asking for a definition of talent is the equivalent of opening a can of worms. And to think that when I started, I was convinced that talents were skills by another name. However, the consensus of opinion suggests that a critical difference is that skills are acquired abilities whereas talents are natural abilities. But talents, I comfort myself, just like skills, still need to be identified, encouraged, nourished and developed. And despite all the evidence to the contrary, I still believe that a so-called ‘natural’ talent only predisposes people to do something well and that, left to its own devises, starved of the opportunity to flourish, it could lie dormant and fail to materialise.

My search on the web inevitably turned up some quotes. How about this one? ‘I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious’ (Albert Einstein). Ah, but being passionately curious is probably a talent.


Dr Peter Honey, FRSA, FCIPD, FIMC is a Chartered Psychologist and founder of Peter Honey Publications. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1628 633946, at peterhoney@peterhoney.com or visit www.peterhoney.com

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