Talent & Quality of Software Deliverables - 1

In Apenndix C of their book, First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, the authors briefly describe the talents that are found most frequently across all roles. They classify them as Striving Talents, Thinking Talents, and Relating Talents.

Striving talents are what drives a person. Thinking talents are thinking patterns, frameworks, view points, which come naturally to a person. Relating talents are how a person engages with others.

For entry level for business unit that I headed, the talents that I would look for are:

Striving Talent

• Ethics: Total honesty about work done.
• Belief: In the values of the organization
• Service: A readiness to put team before self
• Acheiver: A drive to meet commitments.
• Competition: This is a no-no. See relating talents

Thinking Talent

• Discipline: Structure in planning and executing commitments, and in writing code
• Focus: On meeting commitments and not getting diverted by interesting side issues.
• Problem Solving: Construct experiments to learn about problems. Devise tests to validate unserstanding. Recognize patterns.

Relating Talent

• Team: Be a team player. Support others. Be ready to take on extra work to help out others going through a difficult patch.
• Empathy: Be sensitive to feelings of others. Review comments should not be personal. Information should not be delivered in a manner that seeks to run down others.
• Persuasion: Use logic - not prejudice, nor authority, nor  politics - to convince team members during reviews of project artefacts.
• Developer: Educate new members of the team. Share information. Involve less experienced persons in the discussion and explain the discussion. Help others learn. Do not form cliques. Document code and tests so that future team members can learn.
• Multirelator: Build relations that are not based on langauage, region, caste, or political affliation.

Realting talents I hold to be the most significant.

My experience had convinced me some time ago of the kind of person we should be selecting for the business unit that I headed. I have linked that to the some of the talents mentioned in the appendix of the book. I wish I had read the book a few years back. It would have enabled me to craft a better selection, assessment and retention scheme.

So how does one identify the talents that I have mentioned? I propose to deal with that in the next post.