NLP podcast extract : Judith Germain on developing leadership talent

Judith Germain FCIPD is Managing Director of Dynamic Transitions Ltd and specialises in developing leadership talent. She has over 10 years experience working with wilfully independent people which she defines as mavericks or Troublesome Talent®. In this interview she explains why managing Troublesome Talent® is vital to a company's success.

"I think that it’s really important because the way that the world is going now is that you have to be very innovative if you want to grow your company, and increase market share, you’re going to have to do things that are different you need to be a bit more unreasonable and to break the status quo."

"Yes, if you think about your talent pool, troublesome talent tends to be as much as 20% of this talent pool, but they can be bringing in about 80% of your profit. So situations where they’re really, really key is where you need to make a shift change perhaps maybe after a merger of acquisition, a change management program – where you really need to have somebody, or a group of individuals that can really look at what the company has been doing in the past and see a way forward. You know, like a Richard Branson or a Ricardo Semler. "

"Because they’re very sensitive. And they believe that they’re very unique to everybody else. So the thought of being managed in the way that everybody else is being managed is not something that they like. Also, because of the way that they think, in terms of that they need structure, without structure, it means that you can’t take a single approach. So a lot of things that happen these days – people will look at things like Talent Management and believe that what they have to do is treat each and every employee the same way to be fair and consistent – but that’s not going to work for the troublesome talent, because you do need to treat them differently if you wan to get the best from them"

"Well managers tend to be very administrative, very task orientated, very ‘this is the rules, and you need to follow the rules.’ And I say that leaders are more interested in the outcome, and the best way to get that way. So a typical maverick, a typical troublesome talent would say ‘ok you want me to increase profits by giving the best customer service’, but as a manager you’re saying to me that I need to spend two minutes with each customer call. So the troublesome talent would say ‘actually that’s not really applicable, if you want me to give great customer service, you need to give me the flexibility to choose how I spend my time in that day."

Read full transcript or listen to podcast:

NLP Leadership

NLP Forum

Liam Beale
Business Development Manager
PPI Business NLP: NLP Training and NLP-based Business Training