The Five Talents That Really Matter, with Barry Conchie & Sarah Dalton – Episode 469 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Barry Conchie, Founder and President of Conchie Associates, and business partner Sarah Dalton, discuss their research taken from over 58K executive leaders, including insights on holding two conflicting truths together, how people don’t change, but the context they exist in does, being both rigid and flexible like an air traffic controller, why likeability is not an indicator of job performance (but it sure informs a lot of hiring), the ROI of a tortoise vs. a squirrel, identifying the 5 talents that REALLY matter in leadership, and how sometimes leaders just can’t be made.

About Barry & Sarah:

Barry Conchie is Founder & President of Conchie Associates. He has consulted and partnered with leading global organizations and has been ranked as one of the top 50 leadership thinkers in the world by Leadership Insights magazine. Previously, he headed the Gallup organization’s Global Leadership Research and Development business and served until 2013 as a Senior Scientist.

Barry is the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling co-author of Strengths Based Leadership (Gallup Press, 2008). Most recently, Barry and Sarah co-authored the book The Five Talents that Really Matter: How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance (Hachette Go, 2024). He has appeared as author and contributor to magazines, newspapers, business journals and media programs throughout the world.

Born and educated in the UK, Barry graduated from the University of Bradford (UK) with a degree in Educational Psychology. He progressed through a Masters in Cognitive Psychology to doctoral degrees in Cognitive Neuroscience and Statistical Modeling (Oxford University). He is also a George Washington University certified survey research methodologist.

Barry’s current research is in the science of decision making, heuristics and cognitive bias. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Sarah Dalton is a Partner at Conchie Associates. She has worked extensively in developing processes and training teams across a variety of industries and has managed complex operational logistics for a global company. Joining Conchie Associates in 2016, Sarah serves as Partner to Barry Conchie. Leaders and managers partner with Sarah to better understand the attitudes and behaviors that drive performance, and how to select for talent in the hiring process. She is an expert at training teams on interpreting talent assessments and using those insights to facilitate a superior candidate experience, greater confidence in hiring decisions, and world-class performance across all levels of an organization.

Sarah is uniquely positioned to provide leaders and teams with the tools to evaluate their effectiveness and further develop their leadership strengths. She is certified in conducting executive level talent assessments and regularly advises leaders on the dominant ways in which they can achieve success while raising critical questions to help them become more effective.

Sarah graduated with a degree in Business Administration and is a Master in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Colorado State University. Originally from San Francisco, California, she is currently based in Denver, Colorado.

Learn more at ConchieAssociates.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Stephanie Maas
So let’s start there. We rarely have two folks at the same time, so let’s start with that. How did the two of you guys come to be working together share with me a little bit of that history.

Sarah Dalton
Barry and I worked together at the last company that I was with. He was one of their major clients, and when it came time for me to leave that organization, I’d reached out to Barry to ask him if he could help me get another job. And he just said, over, over, my dead body. If you’re leaving this company, you’re you’re coming on board with me.

Barry Conchie
In my version of that when I set my own company up in 2013 My aim was to do interesting work with interesting people. So my expertise is an Assessment and Selection. I’d had a career spanning nearly 40 years before I set up my own company. So I had a lot, lot of background, a lot of experience in leadership, and I quickly got to the point where we were growing so quickly that I couldn’t handle it on my Hill, and I needed to bring people on board. And being an expert in select sheet, nobody came up close to what I was looking for. And then when I started working with a company where Sarah was at, it kind of dawned on me pretty quickly that if there was ever a possibility that she became available on the market, I’d slap her up in her heartbeat, because she checks so many boxes. You know, I had a very successful book that came out sold a ton of copies. And, you know, I’d always had this idea of a book in my mind for our old one money based on the work that we did. It was time to write that book, and I thought, Sarah is going to be a part of this.

Stephanie Maas
So you had a book 16 years ago, came out. Did incredibly well. Tell us about this one, the difference. Bring us up to speed on that.

Barry Conchie
The last book I wrote was while I was at Gallup. I used to lead Gallup’s Leadership Research and selection. When I left Gallup was set up, my own company was completely different focus to what I did in Gallup. I was relentlessly focused on top level selection, whereas in Gallup we were a bit more of an all round consultant. So we had to, you know, cover a whole gamut of different things. But in my own business, I just became relentlessly focused on leadership, and I built my own leadership assessment. So researched it, validated it, and that assessment, in and of itself, tells a really interesting story. So it became a story of itself, and it was a story that needed to be taught. So if you could imagine my wife existing in three big chunks. The first shot was like pre Gallup work. There’s a senior professional in education in the UK I spent about 10 years ago, and they managed 13 years in lower business. And this particular book catches the last 13 years. Now, here’s an interesting thing to think about, Stephanie, two things can be true at the same time, even though they sound contradictory. So here are two things that sound contradictory, but both are true. The first is that human beings are infinitely variable, but our experience of this is every person we meet, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re professionally, it doesn’t matter whether they’re fairly doesn’t matter whether they’re in the neighborhood or community or whatever, person by person by person, these folks are infinitely variable. Notting people are upset, contradictory Fact number two, humans are eminently predictable. Even though there’s such a variability, we can predict aspects of human behavior, aspects of human performance, pretty accurately. But what we do within our business is we try to marry both of which facts so we measure the variability in people. We can see, you know that you’re different from Sarah and you’re both different from me, but we can work in a way that enables us to build up accurate statistical predictions of success in terms of performance. So when you think about that at a leadership level, that sounds value.

Stephanie Maas
So I’m going to ask you a question, and then I’m going to ask a similar one for you, Sarah, and you probably know the questions, because, as we just determined, humans are predictable. But just in case, in your tenure, Barry, the more you’ve seen Have you seen that people really stay the same, or have you seen people as whole and as individuals change?

Barry Conchie
It’s an interesting question, but there’s a question you need to ask before that, and that is what can change. So I think about myself. I haven’t changed that much of 40 years, but what has changed is the context. So when you think about where I was 40 years ago, what I was doing, characteristically, I wasn’t that different to how I am now. I was still a relentlessly competitive it just manifests itself in slightly different ways. I don’t cry when I lose, but I used to, used to hurt me that much I couldn’t bear to lose. You know, I’ve always been very deep thinker that I’ve never been over all by a particular problem, because I knew, I knew eventually I could probably find a solution. Those characteristics have remained very, very constant. You know, what changes are the experiences that we acquire over the course of our careers, and that teaches us to either moderate or extenuate certain characteristics that we’ve got. I no longer try when I don’t win. An interesting question to us, you know, certainly if you’ve got a partner or a significant other, but the question to ask yourself is, you know, if you do have a partner in life. What success have you had in changing their characteristics over the course of the time that you’ve known them? See if they’re irritating things that your partner does, you know and you’ve tried to change it? How much, how much look have you had with that? And most people at that point crack out in laughter, because of course, the idea that you’re going to change is ridiculous, but here’s what does change. You learn to accommodate certain things. You learn to live with it. You were dead, so the characteristics of the person don’t change, then your attitude towards those characteristics don’t change. They’re still irritating. What changes is how you handle it, and if you think about that from a leadership perspective, then you know, we’ve got a whole world out there thinking that you can train people to do anything you can’t, but we should stop lying to people about this, because that’s what it is. We’re lying to each other. No, you can’t train people to do anything. If you want to pick nuts off a tree, don’t hire a tortoise. Hire a squirrel. Squirrels are brilliant at picking nuts on the tree. Now you could teach a tortoise to them, and maybe they could pick one or two before they fell off. But what’s the return on that effort? It’s really, really limited. We don’t change any way near as much as we thought we do, and so we live in this pretense, and that pretense is I manage myself differently. Then I’ve learned, over experience, not to say this in this environment. I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut and let other people speak before I speak. We’re just managing them in more effective ways.

Stephanie Maas
Wow, that is food for thought. So flip side of that similar question to you, Sarah, when folks reach out to you and say, Hey, we need some help improving our hiring processes, improving our retention, all the all the myriad things, how receptive Do you really find that folks are to changing their mindset? I mean, in your experience, walk me through what that can look like.

Sarah Dalton
It’s always a journey. It doesn’t happen overnight, because when you think about a typical hiring process that you lead any candidate through the factors that we’re usually looking at have to do with the person’s background and career experience. So what companies they’ve worked in before, how long they’ve been around in certain jobs, we look at the kind of skills and expertise that they list out on their resume, and then we get them in a room, and we have we try and have a human conversation with them, and at that point, what you’re really doing is thinking about how you build chemistry with that person, whether or not you like them, whether you can see yourself working with them. But likeability isn’t a predictor of future job performance, and neither are the companies that you’ve worked in, how far you went in college, or any other things that people typically list on their resume, none of those things predict future job performance. So it’s the very reason why we can get someone who might be brilliant in an interview where we build up a ton of confidence about what we think they’re going to be like in the job, and then we plug them in, and then we find out otherwise every manager has had this experience where they’ve had this brilliant candidate in an interview. Everyone may have interviewed felt really good, really positive about them, but yet, how they perform in the job isn’t what we thought it was going to be. So none of the things we typically look at are a really good indicator of future performance. You know, one of the first questions I ask some managers that I’m working with is, tell me what kind of candidate you’re looking for. Describe it and always describe aspects of talent. So when they talk about, I need a really good problem solver, or I need someone who’s going to be the relational glue in an organization that’s otherwise really dissatisfied right now. Know, or they talk about someone who can put good processes in place, these are all illustrations of very specific talents that we can measure in people. The difference is we put them through an assessment, we can ask way more questions in an assessment and get a much more reliable read of how people think and whether or not they have the talents that you might think they do in an interview, but they really don’t. It’s way too easy to fool someone in an interview where you’ve got no real experience with them. They’re not exactly sure what questions to ask. So what I’ve got to do in my job is to wind people back and try and get them to hold back their own gut instincts and decision making about the candidates that they like, and say, Look, I know you might think this because you met them once or twice, but here’s what the assessment results tell me about how they actually think, and here are the questions that you should be asking. It’s a journey. It doesn’t happen overnight, and they don’t always listen to us so they don’t always take our advice. They don’t always listen to us when we say, do not move them forward. We just look at what happens. We’re usually right.

Stephanie Maas
Do you have a stack of I told you so cards?

Sarah Dalton
We definitely have those. And that’s, you know, that’s what helps us tighten up some of our predictions and our understanding of what characteristics drive better performance in a role.

Stephanie Maas
Okay, so let me shift gears and talk about the book, The Five Talents That Really Matter, How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance. And I think what’s just so just catching already is we are definitely seeing an emerging emphasis on a different kind of leadership than probably existed Barry when you first started in your career, the way that people are really embracing this idea that you know, Leadership isn’t just about climbing the corporate ladder. It’s a lot of responsibility, not just to those north of them, but to the folks that they’re leading and managing, etc. So tell us a little bit about how the book came to be, and maybe give us a couple of nuggets to entice us there.

Barry Conchie
Well, the book came to be because there isn’t a book out there like this right now. And the book does four things. First, it describes as the title suggests that there are five talents that really matter. So when people ask the question, what is it about leadership, and what do we need to know about leadership in a way that drives high levels of performance? The answer to that is the five talents. Now the five talents, I’ve just very quickly rolled through that. The first one is setting direction. So establishing a course heading somewhere, right? You need to be heading somewhere. The second thing is harnessing energy, and that means you’re going to motivate people. You got to motivate yourself. Third component is exciting pressure. Leaders need to change people’s minds, and in our view, without the capacity to do that, your organization will really go nowhere. Not everybody’s going to agree with you that you’re still going to get there. The fourth element is improving connectivity, and that means organizations are associate as well as professional. It’s about the connections between people. If your organization is supremely well connected, it predicts strategic agility. And if it isn’t, you’re going to get silos, trenches and divisions. You’re going to get missteps, poor animals and so on. The Fifth Element is controlling traffic. And controlling traffic is how you think about the way that you manage complex operation. And the controlling traffic that we describe in the book is like an air traffic control. There are rigid roads that, my goodness, you’ve got to change on a dime in a heartbeat, and things change, playing malfunction, angry passengers, the drug pilot. I mean, whatever it is, you know, you got to be able to deal with it. So you got very, very strict rules that guide certain parameters, like how far planes you’ve got to be apart, how fast they go, how quickly they descend, how you move them around the taxiway. Then everything after that is managing them to the road. Goodness. Has so much unpredictability, you’ve got to be able to go with that too. So the five talents that really matter is our explanation of the critical elements that predict the top performing leaders. Now not everybody is going to be good at all of them, but you need to be good at enough of them. And what the book does is describe that balance, because I’ve got to tell you, there are some things I’m no good at, absolutely hopeless.

Stephanie Maas
Sarah, did you want to chime in on this?

Barry Conchie
She’s got a book of these things. And as I think about my career, Step B, I’ve learned to do more and more of less and less. So I’ll let certain things go, and that’s how. Actually a really interesting model The book describes, because we’re not saying everybody has to do these five things. We’re saying these five things need to be taken care of, so you need to contribute sort of them, but maybe the way you build your team fleshes out the rest. So first element of the book, five talents that really matter. Then there are three other things. First two. Number one, the way we’ve talked about leadership in the past is immature, inaccurate and ineffective. We’ve either said leadership is a million things and we’ve complicated it, or we’ve been even more silly and said it really only boils down to this one thing, like, I don’t know humility well. Goodness me, that’s just not true. So we deconstruct a lot of nonsense that’s been written about leadership over the last 40 years or so. The third element of the book is the companies get a lot wrong about selection. Sarah highlighted a few novels a little bit earlier with respect to face to face interviews. So what we do is we analyze what they get wrong about selection and then put in place a series of things that will help correct that. What which, of course, is the assessment that we describe in the book. If you use a well calibrated predictive assessment, you’ll make far fewer selection errors and far more selection hits. So the third element of the book describes what companies are currently doing wrong, how to fix it. And the fourth element of the book is the most exciting, and that is we give people a chance to take the assessment. So the book covers those four issues. One of the things that we’ll be saying to folks before we even think of taking the assessment is not everyone is cut out to be a leader, but not everyone is going to make it as a leader. Be prepared.

Sarah Dalton
I mean, just to add to what Barry is already saying, the idea with the five talents that really matter is that there are unchanging elements of who people are that drive very good performance in leadership roles. Now very said, not everyone will have them, or people will have them to different degrees. So what we wanted to do with this book is give people a means of very give people a very clear language and a means of identifying the characteristics in themselves that might lend to more effective leadership and to help them think about where they spend their time if they’re going to develop those usually, I think one of the mistakes we make in our culture is thinking that we should be well rounded people who are who are just good at everything, or that we should focus on the weaknesses that we have and try and coach those to just get a little bit better. But that’s not how you get the best performance out of people, we got to help people understand how they’re unique and what talents make them stand out. And we know through research that if you want to get the best out of people, if you want to help them perform better, you’ve got to give them a way of understanding the natural talents that they have and the things that they naturally do really well. Because the more interesting question is, How good could you be in those areas? We want people spending their time in the areas where they’ve got the greatest potential to develop and grow as leaders.

Barry Conchie
Sarah’s point about self awareness and helping people understand more about who they are, recognizing that they won’t be brilliant at everything. We do have people in our database, by the way, who think they’re brilliant. You might even have met one or two in your career. But here’s something really interesting. When you ask leaders about the trait or characteristic they must admire in themselves, the most common response we get is how good they are at strategy. Here’s the problem. Strategy is the rarest element in our entire database. We find it at a lower level in relatively few people, and at a high level in a tiny number of people, and yet nearly everybody claims it. Disconnect is not only worrying to us, but it’s also potentially damaging for the individuals who claim that and for the organizations that they need. So we have to spend time on picking those perceptions of self and saying, look, I think what you really mean is you pretty smart, but there’s a difference between being intellectually smart and being very good strategically. So a lot of the time we’ve got to pull people away from low levels of self awareness and try to shine a light on what they really mean about themselves in ways that is much more helpful to their goals and development.

Stephanie Maas
So maybe a good piggyback to your book would be self awareness for dummies?

Barry Conchie
Yeah. That might be a good precursor to this. I don’t think there’s any virtue in being always wrong, but never in debt. Those two things worry me, and I think too many people have got an inflated view of their capabilities, where covid. To interviews and selecting people. So I’ll give you an illustration. One of the questions I often ask the CEOs we work with is, how would argue leaders? Nobody’s ever said, I’m bad. And then I’ll say, so what’s your hit rate when they look at me and say, Well, what do you mean by that? Of your last 10 appointments? How many turned out to be above average performance? Well, they look at me and they say, Well, yeah, maybe, oh, maybe six, I said. So what you really said is you don’t know, because people don’t track this information, and we wish they would. You should have a number, and you should be able to say six of the last 10 people are appointed with the average performance. It’s remarkable the lack of specificity that organizations communicate with us about their hit rate when it comes to hiring. These are people, by the way, who measure widgets to microns of tolerance. They can tell you, you know, with a nanometer of, you know what the tensile strength of a steel beam is, they can tell you how many widgets are in transit between Indonesia and Cape tech, right? They go into this inordinate detail. Most important thing of all. Well, I think it’s about six out of 10, just good as they can get, that we think it’s embarrassment, and we need to change it.

Stephanie Maas
We hear all kinds of books and stories and feel goods about what made somebody a great leader, or, you know, a certain characteristic, or something happened in their life, or some kind of professional event or whatever. And I’m not saying there’s not value in them, there’s stories, there’s inspiration, but in terms of really modeling a formula, a research based way of approaching leadership, it sounds like you’ve got the corner on that.

Barry Conchie
And we think we’re doing a big public service Stephanie, because if we stop the person in their tracks and make them think maybe I don’t want to be a leader that’s actually really good for them, because there may well be another role that isn’t a high level leadership role, where they could be utterly brilliant. But if we can encourage people who’ve got measurable leadership potential but have either not been encouraged or, you know, a little bit on, you know, unsure of themselves, if we can build their confidence to take on these bigger jobs and to unleash their talents on the world and be a great success, you know, we think that’s phenomenal, So we take that really, really seriously, just because you might not be cut out being a top leader doesn’t mean there is a role out there where you can shine and be fantastic. And if we can help people in those kinds of discoveries start only good for them, good for the people they work with, good for organizations, actually good for society.

Stephanie Maas
Yeah, that passion definitely shines through. Thank you both so much. This has been super fun and really a fascinating topic. I can really hear the passion and the mission making the world a better place with better leaders.

Barry Conchie
Well it’s been great talking to Stephanie. Thanks for the opportunity.

Sarah Dalton
Thank you so much.