There’s a lot of noise right now about AI and performance management.

New tools promise to automate your review process, generate objectives, summarise feedback, and cut the time managers spend on admin from hours to minutes. Some of them are genuinely impressive. The technology is moving fast and the efficiency gains are real.

But there is something important being lost in the conversation. And it matters particularly for founders of high growth/scaling businesses, where the people setup is still being built and the team is still finding its feet.

AI can build you a framework. It cannot build you a team.

Let me explain what I mean.

The businesses I work with are typically between 15 – 50 people. They’ve grown fast, hired people they know, like and trust, and the founder has been so focused on the business itself that the people infrastructure has quietly lagged behind. No clear objectives for most roles. No development plans. Review conversations that happen occasionally and feel awkward when they do.

When I ask founders why, the answer is almost always the same. There isn’t time. The team doesn’t have experience building this. It keeps getting pushed to next month.

These are real constraints. I understand them. And in that context, the idea of an AI tool that can generate a performance review template or draft a set of objectives in seconds sounds genuinely appealing.

Here’s where I would push back.

The framework was never the hard part. Most founders already know roughly what good looks like in each role. They know who is performing and who isn’t. They have a sense of who has potential and who has plateaued. The hard part is the conversation. Sitting across from someone and being honest. Talking through what’s working and discussing what needs to change. Making a person feel genuinely seen and not just processed.

That cannot be delegated to a tool. Not now and not in the foreseeable future.

What AI can legitimately help with in a growing business is the scaffolding. Use it to build a template for objectives that your managers can adapt. Use it to create a simple one-to-one structure that keeps development conversations on track. Use it to draft the written summary after a review conversation so the manager can focus on the conversation itself rather than the paperwork.

But the conversation still has to happen. The manager still has to have the skill and the confidence to lead it. The expectation still has to be set clearly before the review, not invented in the moment. And someone in the business still has to care enough about development to make sure these conversations actually take place.

This is where most growing businesses struggle. Not with the template. With the habit.

I see it consistently. A founder invests in an HR tool. The tool is good. It sits unused because nobody has the confidence to use it properly, or the culture hasn’t caught up with the process, or the managers feel the whole thing is an HR exercise rather than something that actually helps them lead their teams.

The technology does not solve the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that the basics of good people management — clear expectations, honest feedback, genuine development conversations — haven’t been established as a normal part of how the business operates.

There is a line I come back to often: business is still about people. It always will be.

AI is genuinely useful. I use it. I encourage founders I work with to use it. It can save time, reduce the administrative burden on managers, and help build consistency across a team that is growing faster than its processes.

But it is a tool in service of human judgment, not a replacement for it. The founder who thinks they can solve their people challenges by buying a better platform is going to be disappointed. The founder who uses the platform to free up more time for the actual conversations — that is a different story.

If you are building a team right now, the most valuable thing you can do is not find a better tool. It is to get clear on what good looks like in each role, make sure your managers know how to have a development conversation, and create enough of a rhythm that feedback is normal rather than annual.

AI can help you build the structure. But you still have to show up for the people inside it.

Nici

P.S. If you’re not sure where your biggest people gaps are right now, the People Blindspot Finder takes five minutes and gives you an honest picture. Link here: The People Blindspot Finder

<p>The post Everyone’s talking about AI and performance management. Here’s what it can’t do. first appeared on Talent Gateway.</p>

What Investors Look at Before They Look at Your Numbers

Originally published in the Talent Gateway newsletter.

The question that derails deals

There’s a moment in many investment processes that founders don’t see coming.

The numbers are strong. The growth story is compelling. The founder is articulate and credible. And then someone on the other side of the table asks a question — quiet, almost conversational — that the founder hasn’t prepared for.

Something like: if you stepped back from the business for six months, who would run it?

Or: which members of your leadership team could operate without you in the room?

Or simply: what happens to this business if you get hit by a bus?

It’s not a trick question. It’s one of the most important questions an investor can ask. And the founders who answer it badly — who hesitate, or who give an answer that doesn’t quite hold up — have handed over a significant piece of negotiating leverage without realising it.

The problem almost never starts in the due diligence room. It starts much earlier, in the years before anyone was asking.

What investors are actually looking for

Most founders assume investor scrutiny on the people side means: do you have good people? It’s a reasonable assumption. It’s also incomplete.

What institutional investors are really asking is something more specific. They’re trying to understand whether this business can scale and perform without being entirely dependent on one or two people — usually the founder. Whether there’s a plan, not just a team. Whether the leadership infrastructure exists to support the next stage, not just the current one.

There are five dimensions where I see this scrutiny land most often.

One: founder dependency

How much of the business runs through you personally? Not just the decisions — the relationships, the institutional knowledge, the things that only work because you’re the one doing them.

A business with a strong product and a compelling market can still be uninvestable if the answer to this question is ‘almost everything.’ It’s not a reflection on the founder’s ability. It’s a structural risk. Investors are buying future performance, not past performance — and a business that depends entirely on one person is a fragile investment.

The founders who navigate this well have usually already done the work of building the team around them, creating documented processes, and being honest with themselves about which things genuinely need them and which things they’ve just never let go of.

Two: leadership team depth

Can the people directly beneath you actually lead — or do they manage tasks and escalate decisions?

This is a harder question than it sounds. Many businesses at the 20–50 person stage have people in senior titles who are, in practice, still operating at a level below what the title suggests. Not because they’re not capable — often because the business has grown around them faster than their role has been redefined.

Investors want to see a leadership team that can make decisions, hold accountability, and develop the people beneath them. Not a group of talented individuals who are good at their specific function but haven’t been built into a team.

Three: clarity of roles and ownership

I sat with a senior leadership team recently — six people, three of them with over a decade in the business. On paper they looked like a strong, experienced team. In practice, nobody was quite sure who owned what. Things got done twice or not at all. Frustration was building quietly beneath the surface.

This is extraordinarily common at the growth stage. The business scales faster than the structure does, and the people inside it adapt by doing whatever needs doing — which works, until it doesn’t.

Investors notice this quickly. Not because they’re looking for a perfect org chart, but because ambiguity about ownership is a reliable predictor of execution problems at the next stage. If nobody is quite sure who’s responsible for something now, that problem compounds when the business is twice the size.

Four: a talent plan, not just a headcount

Most businesses have a hiring plan. Far fewer have a talent plan — a considered answer to the question of what the business actually needs from its people over the next two to three years, how it will attract and keep those people, and what happens when it doesn’t.

An investor thinking about putting money into a business is implicitly also thinking about the people that money will need to work through. If the answer to ‘what’s your talent strategy?’ is a list of open roles, that’s not a strategy. It’s a wish list.

The businesses that answer this question well have usually been deliberate about it — worked through their EVP, thought about which roles are business-critical, have an honest view of their current team’s capability versus where they need to get to.

Five: culture that can scale

Culture is the hardest of the five to articulate and the easiest to dismiss as soft. Investors don’t dismiss it.

What they’re looking for isn’t a values statement on a wall. They want to understand whether the way this business operates — the real norms, not the stated ones — will survive being 3x the current size. Whether the things that make it work now will translate, or whether they’re entirely dependent on the founder’s personal influence holding everything together.

A culture that can scale has been made somewhat explicit — people can describe it, and more importantly, they can describe what it isn’t. The businesses where culture is just ‘vibes’ tend to fragment under growth pressure in ways that are expensive and slow to fix.

The case for finding out now

None of this is terminal if you find it now. All of it is more difficult to fix under the pressure of a live process.

Due diligence is a bad time to discover you have a significant founder dependency problem. Or that your leadership team, for all their talent, hasn’t been built into something that can operate without you. Or that your talent plan is a spreadsheet of headcount targets rather than a considered strategy.

The founders who come through investment processes well are almost never the ones who’ve been lucky. They’re the ones who started asking these questions early — who did the diagnostic work, faced what it showed them, and built the things that needed building before the pressure hit.

That work takes time. Which is exactly why the right time to start is now, not when someone is asking the questions across a table.

If you’re thinking about investment or exit in the next few years, the Investment Readiness Assessment benchmarks your business across all five dimensions. It takes five minutes and gives you an honest picture of where you stand before anyone else is looking. talentgateway.net/investment-readiness-assessment

Nici

P.S. Next week I’m going to write about the one people decision that trips up almost every founder going through a growth transition — and why the obvious answer is usually the wrong one.

<p>The post What Investors Look for in your leaders that changes the terms first appeared on Talent Gateway.</p>

Most founders I meet can talk clearly about where they want the business to be in three years, revenue, markets, maybe even a raise or exit horizon. When I ask what the business will look like if they hit that plan, they can usually tell me.

When I ask, “What’s your talent strategy to get there — who you’ll need, how they’ll work together, and how that changes from today?” the answers are much less certain. We talk about loyal people, rising stars and a few nagging doubts. But rarely about a clear talent plan.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about naming a quiet gap that shows up in many high-growth businesses and helping you build a plan to address it.

Why this gap shows up (even in good businesses)

Most of the founders I work with haven’t neglected their people. They’ve hired carefully, stuck with good people, and in many cases built strong loyalty.

The gap appears because the business plan and the talent strategy have grown on different timelines. The business has hit milestones organically. Roles have evolved around individuals rather than around a long-term picture. New opportunities have been taken quickly, without revisiting the overall team design.

That works, up to a point.

Here’s what it costs you when it stops working.

You find yourself making hiring decisions in reaction to pain rather than in service of a plan. Someone leaves and you scramble. A role gets too big for the person in it and you avoid the conversation for longer than you should. You bring someone in who’s brilliant — but brilliant for a company half your size, or twice it.

The team you have right now was built for where you were. Not necessarily for where you’re going.

And quietly, underneath the day-to-day, there’s a question most founders are carrying: can this team actually deliver the opportunity in front of us? Not just keep things ticking. Actually deliver it.

Growth starts to rely on a few individuals. The founder feels increasingly central to every decision. And it becomes harder to see clearly whether the current team is set up for what’s next — or just for what’s already happened.

This is usually the moment a founder says some version of: “I’ve got a good team… but I’m not sure they’re the team that will get us to the next stage.”

That uncertainty doesn’t go away by working harder. It goes away by getting clear.

Plan: where your talent strategy gets real

In the 5P’s™ model — Plan, Proposition, Promote, Process, Perform. Plan is the foundation. It’s where you turn “we want to grow” into “this is the talent strategy we need to make that realistic.”

We start with three straightforward questions. What is the prize you’re aiming for — scale, sell, or both, and over what timeframe? If you hit that prize, what does the business actually look like, not just the revenue line, but the functions, teams and key roles? And ignoring who you have right now, what skills, capabilities and behaviours will you need inside the business to deliver that?

Only after we’ve answered those do we come back to your current team and ask: how does today’s reality compare with that future picture?

At this point, we’re not judging people. We’re looking at where you already have the strengths you’ll need, where you have rising stars who could be developed, and where there are gaps or single points of failure. That’s your talent strategy beginning to take shape.

A quick metaphor, because it’s how my brain works.

The way most founders approach people is a bit like hosting a dinner party with no guest list. You know you want a brilliant evening. You’ve invited some great people over the years. But on the night, you realise three people brought the same dish, no one remembered dessert, and you’re still the one running between the kitchen and the table trying to keep everyone happy.

A talent strategy is where you decide who needs to be at the table, what they’re bringing, and how it all fits together — before the night of the party. Some of the people you already have may simply need a different seat. Others might be brilliant, but better suited to a different dinner party than the one you’re hosting now.

That’s the uncomfortable truth a lot of founders feel in their gut but haven’t yet written down.

The 3T’s™: how you act on your talent strategy

A strategy without actions can feel abstract. To make it practical, I use a simple lens with founders: Training, Technology, Talent — the 3T’s™.

Once we’ve mapped the future team against the current reality, we look at each gap and ask: is there someone here who could grow into this with the right support? Could better systems change the shape of the work? Or is this a gap that genuinely needs new talent from outside?

The example I see most often: the initial instinct is “we need to hire a senior leader.” Once we look at the roles and capabilities properly, it becomes “we can elevate this internal person with some coaching, bring in better tools to streamline existing processes, and make one targeted external hire to fill the remaining gap.” The decisions become clearer — and crucially, less emotional. Instead of “I feel bad about changing this person’s role,” you’re asking “does this role, as currently defined, exist in the future we’re trying to build?”

How to sketch your first talent strategy

If you’ve never written any of this down before, it can feel daunting. A simple working version is more useful than a perfect model you never start.

Step 1 — Write down your prize and timeframe. In plain language: what are you aiming for in three years? Scale and stay, scale and sell, or something else? And how will your own role need to change to get there?

Step 2 — Describe the future team without naming people. List the core functions you’ll need. Under each one, note the key roles, what good looks like in skills, and what good looks like in behaviours. You’re not writing job descriptions — you’re sketching the building blocks of your future team.

Step 3 — Map today’s reality to that future picture. For each area: who you have, where they shine, where there are risks or gaps, and what they want next if you know it. This is where the quiet worries you’ve been carrying start to show up on paper in a more neutral way.

Step 4 — Apply the 3T’s™ to each gap. For each gap between the future picture and today, ask whether the best answer is Training, Technology or Talent. Be honest. If someone doesn’t want to grow into what the business needs, that’s useful information. It’s about fit, not about whether they’re a good or bad person.

Step 5 — Choose your next 90 days. You don’t need to fix everything at once. Choose three moves that will make the biggest difference to reducing risk and supporting growth — ideally one development move, one systems move, and one clear decision about a role or hire.

That’s your first version of a talent strategy: a clear link between where the business is going and the people decisions you’ll make to get there.

A starter you can use with your team

To make this easier, I’ve created a short Talent Strategy & Plan Starter — a simple worksheet you can download and use on your own or with your leadership team. It helps you capture the goals you’re aiming for, sketch the future team you’ll need, map your current people against that picture, and decide where to focus in the next 90 days.

Click here to download the Talent Strategy & Plan Starter

If completing it throws up more questions than answers, that’s normal. It usually means you’re finally seeing the talent strategy that’s been in your head for a while – and that’s exactly where the real work begins.

<p>The post The quiet gap in most founders’ growth plans first appeared on Talent Gateway.</p>

Let’s be honest, company culture has become one of those terms people nod along to in meetings without really knowing what it means. It’s been overused, misused, and at times turned into little more than office décor and mission statements.

But here’s the truth: culture is the unseen force that glues your team together or quietly pulls it apart.

Culture: The Most Overlooked Asset in Scaling Businesses

In the early stages, culture tends to emerge naturally. Founders hire people they like, those early hires mimic what they see, and without realising it, a way of working forms.

But then growth hits.

Suddenly, you’re onboarding people fast. You’re promoting individual contributors into leadership roles. The pace is relentless. And if culture hasn’t been clearly defined and embedded, chaos creeps in.

And it’s expensive.
Not just in recruitment costs or lost productivity, but in:

• Frustrated teams
• Unclear expectations
• Managers out of their depth
• And, most dangerously, a diluted identity

We’ve seen it happen time and time again.

Christopher’s Cautionary Tale

Christopher scaled his business to 120 people in just a few years. On paper, it was a success story. But internally, things were unravelling.

He described the business as a “revolving door.” New hires left just as quickly as they arrived. Engagement was low. Managers were promoted based on technical excellence, not people leadership. There were no shared values anchoring the team. Culture had become accidental—and costly.

The issue wasn’t recruitment. It was culture.

Why Culture Really Matters in a Scale-Up

When you’re scaling, you’re not just adding people, you’re multiplying complexity. Culture is what helps you scale without losing your soul.

Here’s what strong culture gets you:

• Retention: People don’t just stay for salary, they stay when they feel they belong.
• Engagement: Aligned teams move faster, solve problems better, and genuinely care.
• Performance: Culture creates clarity. Clarity drives results.
• Innovation: When people feel psychologically safe, they take smart risks and share bold ideas.

And this isn’t just theory. It’s backed by research and echoed by leaders at the top.

“If I were to start again, I would embed culture into our hiring much sooner.”
— Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat, in conversation with Steven Bartlett

It’s a lesson many only learn in hindsight.

A Quick Culture Check for Founders

Want to get a handle on your culture fast? Try this 30-minute exercise:

1. Ask your team: “What three words describe us at our best?”
2. Gather responses anonymously, especially from recent hires.
3. Spot the alignment and the gaps.
4. Turn words into behaviours. What does “collaborative” look like?
5. Choose 3-5 values or behaviours to double down on.
6. Embed them in hiring, onboarding, recognition, and feedback.
7. Check in quarterly: Is this being lived? What’s getting in the way?

Final Thought

You already have a culture. The question is: is it helping or hurting you?

If you’re growing fast, the need to get intentional about culture isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It’s a make-or-break. Don’t leave it to chance and don’t wait until the revolving door starts spinning.

<p>The post Culture Isn’t a Buzzword: It’s the Operating System of Your Business first appeared on Talent Gateway.</p>

After spending over 10 years in the corporate world building my own commercial teams, I set up Talent Gateway in 2012 with a simple mission: do recruitment better. What quickly became apparent during my first year of trading was the enormous misconception surrounding recruitment, especially during the critical scale-up phase of a business. Many founders and CEOs I spoke with would express similar frustrations: “Just find me great people,” or “I just want the pain of recruitment taken away.” These sentiments struck a chord with me, but they also highlighted a deeper issue—a misunderstanding of what’s really involved in hiring ‘great people’.

At the same time, I read a book that would significantly shape my thinking: Will It Make the Boat Go Faster? by Ben Hunt-Davis. In the book, Hunt-Davis, an Olympic gold medalist, shares how his rowing team’s success was built not on an obsession with the end goal—winning—but rather on focusing on the critical inputs and actions that would lead them to victory. Every decision they made had to answer the question: Will it make the boat go faster? If the answer was yes, they pursued it; if not, it was discarded. The outcome, their gold medal, was simply a byproduct of this relentless focus on what mattered most.

This philosophy holds a powerful lesson for recruitment as well. Too many businesses fixate on the outcome of ‘making the hire’ without recognizing the many essential inputs that drive consistent success. In truth, there’s not a chance you can consistently achieve, high-quality hires by focusing solely on the result. Just as in sports, it’s the groundwork you lay before and the support you provide after that ensure long-term success.

So, if you’re looking to consistently hire A-Players and scale your business, it’s not enough to see more CVs or interview more candidates. You must master the inputs. There are five key ingredients—what I call the 5 Ps—that are crucial for ensuring successful hires, and they must be in place before you start. Here’s what they are.

1. Plan

Your recruitment process starts with a solid plan. This is not about reacting to a vacancy by scrambling to create a job spec. Instead, it’s about being proactive—identifying what capabilities your business needs to meet its future objectives. Scaling a business means anticipating the skills, personalities, and leadership qualities you’re likely to need months in advance. By having a clear plan and anticipating requirements, you’ll be ready to hire the candidate with skills and team fit you need, when you need them. Not months later after a rushed mis-hire or two.

2. Proposition

A-Players aren’t just drawn to a salary or a job title; they want to be part of something meaningful. Your company’s proposition—what makes you unique and why someone should work for you—has to be clear and compelling. What’s your mission? What impact do you want to have on your industry or the world? As a founder you’ll be more than capable of ‘pitching’ once you’re in the room with a candidate – but as you grow, increasingly you won’t be. You need to capture your proposition and ensure that anyone involved in hiring delivers the same message. The better you can articulate this, the more you’ll attract the kind of talent that aligns with your values and is driven to succeed in your business.

3. Promote

Once you know who you need and why they’d want to work for you, you need to promote your business and opportunities in the right places. This doesn’t just mean posting job ads, or briefing an agent, and waiting. It’s about being active in the right circles, whether that’s industry events, professional networks, or even social media. Knowing where your potential A-Players spend their time and what they’re looking for is key to reaching them effectively.

4. Process

A robust hiring process is essential for identifying and selecting the right candidates. This means having a structured, consistent approach that allows you to assess candidates beyond just qualifications. Are your interviews structured to uncover cultural fit as well as assessing skills and experience? Do your assessments reflect the real challenges of the role? A weak or inconsistent process will lead to poor decisions, no matter how strong the candidates may appear on paper.

5. Perform

Finally, your work doesn’t end when a candidate signs their contract. Onboarding and supporting your new hires to perform at their best is critical. A-Players thrive on growth, challenge, and recognition. You need to create an environment where they can continually develop and make an impact. Without this, even the best hire will eventually disengage and leave.

At the end of the day, recruitment isn’t about the act of hiring itself—it’s about creating a system where great people can find you, thrive in your organization, and help propel your business forward. By focusing on the essential inputs—planning, defining your proposition, promoting strategically, refining your process, and ensuring performance—you set your business up for consistent hiring success.

So, if you’re serious about scaling your business and building high-performing teams, stop thinking of recruitment as a standalone task. Instead, ask yourself: Will this make our boat go faster? When you focus on the right inputs, the right results will follow.

<p>The post If you think it’s about Recruitment, you’ve missed the point first appeared on Talent Gateway.</p>

<p>The post 3 Tips for hiring A-Players first appeared on Talent Gateway.</p>

Let’s say you’re building a team for an epic treasure hunt. It’s in the wilderness, criss-crossed with rivers, so you need people who can read maps, swim, and climb. Instead of just picking your friends, you choose people based on their skills – what they can do. This is what skills-based hiring is all about!

What is Skills-Based Hiring?

Skills-based hiring means picking people for jobs because of what they can do, not just because of where they went to school or where they worked before. Just as the treasure hunt team needed a great swimmer to get to the clues on the far river-bank, in your business, it means hiring those whose skills match the challenges you’ll face as you work towards your goals.

Why Does This Matter for Your Business?

1. Finding the Right Fit: Just like in our treasure hunt, you need people who can actually do the jobs you need done. If you need someone to design a cool website, you want someone who’s good at designing, not just someone who says they are
2. More Talent to Choose From: If you only pick people from certain schools or with certain job titles, you’ll miss out on some amazing people who have the right skills but didn’t follow the traditional path.
3. Faster Growth: When your business is growing fast, you need people who can hit the ground running. Skills-based hiring helps you find those people quickly because they already know how to do what you need.
4. Creating a Great Team: A good team is like a puzzle where each piece fits perfectly. Skills-based hiring helps you find those pieces, making sure everyone can do their part and work well together.

How Do You Do Skills-Based Hiring?

1. List the Skills You Need: Think about what tasks need to be done and what skills are required. For example, if the key to your growth is building a large and passionate base of social media followers, they should know how to create fun posts that really engage with followers.
2. Look for Proof of Skills: Instead of just reading CVs, look for examples of their work or ask them to do a small project. This shows you what they can actually do.
3. Ask the Right Questions: During interviews, ask about their skills and experiences. For example, “Tell me about a time when you solved a tricky problem at work.” If it’s a first job, just drop the work piece.  Always remember to find out what was the problem, what were the challenges, how did you go about solving it, who with etc.  Dig deep into the answers so you have proof points that they were the one who solved the problem if that’s important in your team.

Why It’s Super Important

As a founder of a fast-growing business, you want to build the best team possible. Skills-based hiring helps you do that by focusing on what people can do, not just what’s on their CV. It’s like putting together the ultimate treasure hunt team – everyone has a special skill that helps you succeed.

Word of warning!

Just because someone has the right skills that doesn’t mean they’re right for your business, your culture, the way you work eg.. in-person vs remote over Slack, what’s important to you as a team (e.g. socialising)  all matters.  You want the individual to enjoy working for you, not just to bring their skills for you to use. 

So, remember: When you hire based on skills, it’s a piece of the hiring jigsaw puzzle. This approach does enable you to have a more diverse pool of people for the roles you have and you’re more likely to end up with the perfect blend of skills –  just like choosing the right teammates for an adventure!  But remember, they need to be able to work well with the team you already have in place, not just bring their skills. 

<p>The post Skills-Based Hiring: What It Is and Why It Matters for Your Growing Business first appeared on Talent Gateway.</p>

Everything touchpoint communicates a message throughout the talent acquisition process. Make it count!

<p>The post The importance of communicating throughout the talent acquisition process first appeared on Talent Gateway.</p>

Being able to communicate the value a potential new employee would gain from choosing to join you is vital to your hiring success.

<p>The post How to develop your employer value proposition (EVP) first appeared on Talent Gateway.</p>

What are your weaknesses?

What are your strengths?

When you are working in either zone, how do you feel?

According to Adam Grant(organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania) a strength is not merely an activity you’re good at, but something that strengthens you; it’s an activity that you look forward to, that makes you feel invigorated rather than depleted when you do it, and that you want to do more of. This view shifts the focus from proficiency alone to include the impact an activity has on an individual’s energy and motivation.

Conversely, a weakness, in Grant’s perspective, is not just something you lack competence in but something that weakens you. It’s an activity that drains your energy, that you procrastinate on because it feels more taxing than energizing, and that you want to do less of. He emphasizes that just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean it’s a strength in this more personal and subjective sense; if it drains you, it could be considered a weakness, regardless of your proficiency level.

This strengths-based approach encourages individuals to invest in what they naturally do best, promoting personal and professional growth within a supportive team framework.

I fundamentally agree with this approach and see first-hand the impact on a team when there is understanding of one another’s’ strengths and each has an opportunity to lean into these in their roles within the business.  Motivation & engagement are high with sustained energy levels, creativity and teamwork.

Using tools such as CliftonStrengths (an assessment tool developed by Gallup) as part of both individual & team development, in addition to the hiring process is worth consideration.  Trust me, I’ve seen the benefits.

Understanding individual and team strengths should sit within your ‘talent planning process,’ the ‘PLAN’ pillar in the Talent Gateway PECRO model.

Want to discuss this topic or others related to your talent strategy, get in touch.

<p>The post Unleash your strengths first appeared on Talent Gateway.</p>