generativeness – Talent Revolution

Another thought on listening

I wrote about listening a few days ago. Then yesterday, I came across this paper by way of HBR. The paper studies psychological safety and its correlation to how teams learn and adapt. Unsurprisingly, the study finds many positive correlations between psychological safety and team performance. I list a few below.

Direct relationship with performance. Team psychological safety was positively associated with team learning behavior (seeking feedback, discussing errors, experimenting, adapting, improving).
Reduced friction caused by power and team dynamics. Teams with higher psychological safety give back greater returns to their employers in the form of learning, adaptation, output, and feedback to upward feedback.
Teams that are high in “team learning behavior” have high psychological safety and perform better… in fact, it reshapes our earlier thoughts on efficiency.
Team efficiency may be less important for helping teams learn than we thought. Psychological safety may be the friction reducing mechanism that enables more learning and productivity.

You saw the concept “team learning behavior” a few times. The concept describes how a team works. Seeking feedback, continuous improvement, and shipping work are all hallmarks of high performing teams and teams high in “team learning behavior.” It just happens to follow that teams that demonstrate high team learning behavior also are more likely to be high in psychological safety.

One Useful Thing

As a savvy leader, the best thing you can do is create space and time to get better at interpersonal communication.

Listen more and better.
Wait a beat before decision.
Ask more “what if” and “how might we” and “ooh, that’s interesting, how did that…” style questions.

These behaviors act as signals that communicate your desire for more openness. When your team perceives openness, they’ll begin feeling confidence to be more generative. Generative teams ship work. You only grow if you ship.

I hope I’ve shown that three simple behaviors above can start you on a path to increasing team learning behavior and improving the psychological safety of your team.

What is generativeness?

Simply: An expression of drive and curiosity that helps others.

Generativeness is a function social skills, depth and breadth of knowledge and interests, connectiveness, and social awareness. Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross discuss it at length in their book, Talent.

Social skills and depth and breadth of knowledge are self-explanatory factors. Connectiveness is the ability to connect ideas — even ideas that are seemingly unrelated. And social/group awareness is the ability to see how those ideas benefit the culture/group.

Steve Jobs is a generative person. When he spoke about the iPhone he spoke about the idea almost as if it was real now. Stuart Koffman calls this The Adjacent Possible.

The reason a manager would talent high in generativeness is because they need to design and build a thing. It could be a product, a service, or a success plan. I’ve hired people to design and (now) lead a Digital Customer Success program. Generative people on my team now built CS Operations teams and functions. Generative people identify, refine, design, and execute implementable ideas that benefit a firm and its customers.

If a manager, like yourself, desired generative talent and want to interview for it here’s how.

Ask a candidate what they’re really into outside of work. (Let them know it’s an optional question).
Ask what they would change about the thing they’re into.
Challenge their reasons for change. Ask “Why” and “What Else”.

What the person is into doesn’t matter. And, you should be aware that you’re not biasing for that. Instead, what you care about is:

Frequency a candidate brings up potential real-world applications or impacts of their ideas.
Frequency a candidates tries to engage me in the ideation process.
Quality of how the candidate handles the limit of their knowledge.

If you feel more comfortable asking a work-related question, then have a generous discussion around a business problem you’re trying to solve and ask the candidate how they might address the problem. Challenge and ask “Why”, “What do you base your ideas on”, and “What else”.

A generative discussion does not feel like an interview question+answer session. A generative discussion feels engaging, fun, and judgment-free… it’s an exploration.

And if that’s not enough consider that generative talent is often overlooked talent. Firms may pass over this talent because they might be just a bit “out there” or they don’t represent the “mean” candidate. That’s good for you! Because that means the market has made a mistake and it’s your opportunity to seize a great investment opportunity.

Imagine a world where you find great talent that others pass over. You create an environment where they can make real impact. They grow your business, they grow their career — and you were the one known for spotting and cultivate that talent.

Cultural Stagnation = f(AI, and Creative Output)? And why team managers should care.

I’m thinking about the connection between AI and human creativity. The question is: what’s the connection creativity stagnation and AI’s transformative potential? And what can managers do about it?

I observe two things.

Scott Buchanan of Economists Writing Every Day writes that investors had high hopes for AI-related investments. The thinking is that AI would revolutionize the world. Recently, analysts wonder if they’ll see an ROI.
Ted Gioia of The Honest Broker writes that the entertainment industry is stagnating creatively. Music preferences are regressing to the past, the New York Times 100 best books of the 21st century contained writers who were mainly known in the 20th century.

Here’s what I think I know.

AI is built on human knowledge.
Human knowledge is an output of humans — largely from some creative/scientific (they can be the same) production function.

Is it possible that we’re realizing that AI is not as revolutionary as we thought because we’re not as revolutionary as we hoped?

This is not the blog for people to learn how to adopt AI into their workflows. Plenty of smarter people are writing about that.

This is the blog for people who obsess about talent and want a (often contrarian) perspective. And because you’re a person who cares about talent, here’s how I believe like us act.

We do all we can to find generative talent. We open our minds to people who are different or don’t have the “perfect” resume and look for people with skills we can use. We increase the breadth and depth of our human capital!
We adopt management styles that promote creativity. We engage in brain storming, ask for talent to give us inputs into decisions, we give inputs, we let people experiment, and we help coach decision-making versus coaching outcomes.
We stop talking and listen more. We let talent give their ideas and we engage with their ideas. We say, “I think you’re trying to accomplish z, and you got outcome y, and and if you take path x your process may get you closer to z.”

Happy generating.

Prioritizing generativeness over practical skill?

Generativeness – the ability to produce new ideas that benefit the whole team. Combined with the ability to executive, having high generative capital on your team sets you up for growth.

Generative talent is often overlooked talent. Often mistaken mislabeled as ” a creative”, generative talent demonstrates social awareness, broad knowledge, and the ability to connect disparate concepts using their extensive mental models. If you’re talking to someone who looks like a “generalist” it’s possible they are high in “generativeness.”

To spot generative people, I ask candidates what they’re passionate about, then probe deeper with “why” and “what else” questions. I’m looking for real-world applications, attempts to engage me in ideation, and how they handle knowledge gaps. Click here to read more about my interview process.

The use case for needing to hire generative talent is simple: it’s for firms seeking to grow. And growth will likely be a function of tech, infrastructure, labor, and education. A multiplier on this growth production function is ideation. I created this Perplexity page for you with more information.

You might encounter a roadblock — talent high in generativeness may be low to practical skills. You could optimize for finding talent high in both — but but that talent could be pricey due to being in short supply or already employed.

If you are skilled at enabling and launching talent, optimizing for generativeness over practical skill may generate long-term gains for you and your firm. Practical skills are easily taught through observation and generative talent will likely figure it out quickly — that’s why they’re special.