What it Takes to Bring Talent to the Table

When you think about how you’re going to engage the right talent, it starts with having a compelling vision, because that’s what brings people to move in a certain direction. A vision belongs to a people; it doesn’t belong to just a single person. As you’re casting vision and creating vision, it’s can be a very powerful thing. Nothing keeps a team more motivated than knowing they get to be part of something that’s bigger than themselves.

One of history’s greatest vision statements comes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he said, “I see a day where a person is judged by the quality of their character instead of the color of their skin.”

Why wouldn’t you join that? It goes far beyond our own interests, and it challenges us to look past our current capacities.

The next part of engaging talent is that your vision has to be compelling. See how the two go hand-in-hand? The vision has to make you get out of bed in the morning... something that drives you to act. Whether it’s eradicating poverty or homelessness, or something at a more personal scale, like a project you’d tackle in your work, something has to compel you to make a change, and it has to have genuine meaning behind it. It is what will get your team on board.

The idea here is that you want bring people together to see how their talents and your vision align so that they get into a zone, that sweet spot where they love what they’re doing and see how their efforts are contributing. Take a moment to imagine how powerful that is!

And there’s actually a neurological side to this as well. The brain needs to see where it’s going to organize its resources for it to impose an order upon the behaviors that are going to accomplish the vision. If you don’t know where you’re headed, your brain isn’t organizing its efforts in the proper way. But when you have a clear vision, it pulls everything forward to achieving a goal. At the very least, the vision is what psychologically and neurologically gets the most out of your performance, and it’s how you’ll optimize results from your team.

Here’s the last thing: It all starts with you. You have to live it and breathe it and feel it. If it’s compelling, if it’s transcendent, if it’s reachable to you, and your gifts are poured into that, and your team can see that it matters to you in how you approach things, and you pour every bit of your all into it, then not only do you have a clear vision, but I guarantee you’re going to get the engagement that gives you the return on investment you want to see.

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