The Art of Spotting and Developing Talent

When you’re just starting out as a founder in business or indeed if you’re jumping onto your next venture after seeing some success with a previous venture, it can become rather easy to take too much of a hand-on approach to everything. After all, it’s your “baby” which you’re trying to raise and a business is indeed like an infant.

Nurture Your Business

In the very first few hours, days, weeks and even months which can run into a couple of years or so, an infant (your business) requires all your attention all around the clock, otherwise it’ll die. At some point however you will need to learn to stop trying to do absolutely everything, even if you think or you know that you’re the best person around for the job. That is where it becomes imperative to be able to develop the art of spotting and developing talent because the most successful businesses are those which have the owner or founder working on the business as more of a rainmaker than working within the business.

Take the Next Steps

If you can delegate all the tasks associated with the business, so be it so that you can rather focus your attention on developing your skill of spotting and developing talent.

In most cases someone who has a particular skill or talent doesn’t really know they possess it until someone else either points it out or creates a platform for them to discover and develop that skill or talent.

If for whatever reason you had to take only one piece of advice out of all the personal experience I share on my road to success in business, it should definitely be that of developing your own skill of spotting skill and talent. That’s how the most successful businesses flourish because what’s essentially happening is that the profit-generating processes forming part of the business are automated as much as they possibly can. Try to strive for a business that can keep running should you for whatever reason need to be away from it for three months and even more, as challenging as it may be.

Naturally the owner or founder of a start-up needs to have some skills associated with the processes in the business, but that’s usually something that forms an inherent part of the formation of the business or start-up idea itself.

Invest in Employees

Developing the art of spotting and developing talent takes nothing more than putting yourself out there and iterating through a skills-matching process based on your existing knowledge of the market you’re active in through your business. It doesn’t take much to spot someone like a cashier who is clearly in the wrong field, based merely on your interaction with them and the effortless manner in which they make your customer experience a great one.

That’s just one example, but the important thing is practicing — practice matching people with a position or opportunity in your business you think they would excel in based on your interaction with them in a different setting and a different scenario.