To begin this brief reflection, I would like to invite you to answer the following questions: Is a competent person also talented? And can talented people succeed without a team to back them up?
Teams in organizations have been the preferred objective, in the last decades of gurus and consultants who conclusively conclude that it requires "highly effective teams" to be successful in business management, models and methodologies have been developed that They train the main skills required to achieve superior and outstanding performance in the "high performance" teams. Techniques such as Outdoor training, experiential learning and others capable of building and promoting collective learning experiences have been promoted.
Since the 1970s, mainly, specialists in the areas of teamwork, business leadership, competencies and especially in matters related to the best techniques for developing talent in organizations have multiplied exponentially.
This wealth of authors and the conceptual multiplicity on these topics that are related but that are at the same time diverse, have made that on many occasions the models and tools are contradictory and not necessarily complementary as we who would have the responsibility to offer the company a training and development plan that meets the real need to be increasingly competitive in a market that evolves every day and that forces us to be at the forefront of innovation.
The theory of competences, for example, which arises from Mcclelland's intention to train collaborators for "superior performances", ended up becoming a complex network of meanings and experience that come to distort the very origin of the term and that if It is true that most authors accept that the THREE basic components of all competence are knowledge (knowledge), doing (Skill) and being (Attitude), conceptual reductionism has led to the instrumentalization of each of these components and cause confusion in those who intend to pass as learned in the matter.
The definition of the term, for example, finds its own axioms depending on the author or the current of thought to which it belongs. The confusion has reached such a point that some speak of competencies of being, knowing and doing as if this were possible without losing the original essence of what a competence means and what it is for.
For many years, the methodology for building competencies has involved linking company managers to the process as guarantors of the spirit of their own culture, which was expected to be strengthened with a competency management plan. Today, the design of the model, including the dictionary of competencies, is carried out by an external consultant and, at best, by the human resources professionals who are involved in the reflection process.
Returning to the intention of the reflection, it is worth noting that the competent people in the organization are valued because their results are outstanding and make a difference with average collaborators, however it must be recognized that their work is not done alone, that Although it is true that he has the ability to do things from the best and obtain superior results, these are not born solely from individual effort but (and here I support my thesis in the definitions proposed by Pilar Jericó), to offer his results requires the support and support from other people on your team, that is, your skills, abilities and knowledge applied to a job are shown to be outstanding not only because of your ability but also because at least one person from your team participated in your management.
Now, for the work team to function, we need to have identified the competent people who make the difference in what they do and therefore we offer them the resources and supports they need to achieve the expected results.
In general, successful work teams have capable people and so the talent consists of knowing how to make the most of those strengths that not all of them have developed. It is evident that it is the contribution of each of the team members that allows achieving superior and differentiating results, accepting that each contribution is definitive when it comes to achieving organizational goals.
For all those responsible for the selection processes in companies, there is a call to consider that it is not enough to choose the most competent but also the most talented and that implies evaluating their capabilities from the organizational culture to which they will enter, that is to say that Its management can be successful to the extent that it integrates in its way of doing things the identity of an organization whose collaborators will be its fulcrum to achieve the great successes for which it was hired.
Talent is developed in work teams from the competence of its members, you can be competent individually (perhaps) but talent will always be the consequence of collective management and the result of the sum of the contributions of collaborators of those who put their strengths and competencies at the service of the expected result.
I hope that these brief reflections encourage us to deepen this discussion, which will undoubtedly have different approaches that enrich the concept.
