Every department knows it: attraction, retention, and talent management within the company are essential for the company’s development.
We all have a talent, a gift, something we are particularly good at that makes us shine. This also applies at work. It is a quality that, in all likelihood, draws the admiration of others and makes the world a better place: our small world, made up of a handful of tasks, duties, and people. Then there is the big world with all of us, to which we each contribute who we are and what we do.
In short, the small and large talents that all human beings have are what allow humanity as a whole to advance, to make our existence more pleasant, and to allow progress to enable us to develop a better, fuller, and more complex existence.
Therefore, our talents are not simply qualities that we generally put at the service of our professional development. They are aspects in which we stand out significantly from the people around us. As we have just mentioned, they are characteristics that can improve our lives, inspire others and foster the well-being of many people.
Think of the daily expertise of so many people performing small, admirable, and qualified actions at work or outside of work every day. These are transcendent also on a small scale, although it is only because they contribute to the well-being of all and we would not be able to do them so well.
From a more intrapsychic point of view, our talents contribute to the definition we draw up of ourselves. Therefore, they also influence our self-esteem and, from there, our coexistence and our relationships with others. This is no small thing: relationships are among the most defining things we have as human beings.
Talent management: what to bear in mind?
1. Talents are not obligations
Talent, if properly developed, can be a gift we give to the people around us, for example to our co-workers and bosses in our profession. However, it should never become an obligation we owe to the world: if we are not able to enjoy our talents and turn them into hobbies, passions, tools that make work easier, or very personal characteristics that make our life more enjoyable, then we have a problem.
Yes, what we have can be very valuable, it could be very useful, it could change our lives, it could change the world! However, our talent has to change us first and then others for the better. We are not obliged to practice it or exercise it, we are not obliged to merge with it, or define ourselves by it. I may have an incredible talent for certain things and seem obliged to use it as a channel for my professional life or to exploit it to the fullest in the job I already have.
On the other hand, I am also much more than that, and I would be an equally valid person even if we had never discovered that I have this gift.
Keep all this in mind if you feel pressured by your environment when it comes to talent management by making it the core of your identity. Through its healthy and progressive empowerment, our gifts are there to make our life better, not to become torture set up to satisfy the narcissism of our family, friends, or company.
2. Talents are double-sided
Each person has their gifts, which manifest themselves in different ways in their profession. It is good that we know what they are, that we encourage them and share them, but we must not allow it to be the other way around: that our gifts have us, enslaving us and determining the meaning of our biography. In other words, health – also occupational health – is when talent management helps us, not when it blurs our personality and our charisma, absorbing the rest of our qualities.
Truman Capote (1924-1984) was famous for his extraordinary talent for language: his thing was to memorize, write and reflect the times in which he lived through literature. We might think that talent as powerful as his would be enough to make anyone happy; in fact, almost forty years after his death it is true that Capote’s talent continues to make thousands of readers around the world truly happy.
However, it is not so clear that it served to make this writer happy. In fact, he himself wrote in the prologue of one of his last books that “When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.”
Coming from a rather eccentric and unstructured family background in the deepest United States of the twenties, young Truman eventually managed to rise to the top of New York’s high society thanks to his good (and probably also bad) arts. Unfortunately, towards the end of his life, the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s ended up falling into disgrace for using his literary talent to generate endless enmity in his social circle. His legendary gift for humor, famed for being extremely clever and ironic, eventually turned to venom and resentment as his mental health deteriorated.
Therefore, Capote does not seem to be a good example of how talent management should be handled in the professional context. In fact, although the professional arena is full of examples not to follow, we should never let our talent management mark our lives in this way, nor should we allow ourselves to use our most outstanding qualities for the destruction of others or ourselves.
3. Talent management is best done by using it for good
Let’s imagine that someone has a great talent for electronics and computers. That person will find endless opportunities throughout their life to put their gift at the service of good but also to put it at the service of evil.
For example, you can focus your talent management on the creation of an app that allows online therapy through the company’s social benefits system. This therapy will take place without having to travel or make an appointment. IT – when properly channeled by someone with the right skills – can enable thousands of people to begin a significant change in their lives with a well-trained and supervised psychologist.
Maybe you haven’t stopped to think about it but do it now: hundreds, thousands of people with little time, reduced mobility, deaf, far from the nearest psychological consultation, shy, seeking help from absolute privacy… are changing their lives for the better all at the same time and every day. Phenomena like this can transform the world. In this case, the role of individuals with the special talent we mentioned is transcendental.
However, that person with a special talent for technology can also choose to become a computer hacker. This person can invade millions of people’s cell phones and computers or deliberately facilitate others to do so; they can collapse different public and private services, annul useful information or extract confidential data and use it for mass blackmail… It is the same talent put at the service of good or at the service of evil.
4. Talent management is hard work
In any case, if you want to achieve the best possible talent management, remember that it is never enough to just have it, you have to enhance it. Discover and train your qualities, dedicate time to them, share them. Not sure if you have at least one talent, gift, skill, or quality that makes you special and helps you be the best employee you can be right now? That’s okay.
The good news is that you have wonderful parts of yourself left to discover, nurture and enjoy, both personally and professionally. The other good news is that this is possible. The third piece of good news is that you can make a good decision that will change your life and the lives of others, on a small or large scale (who knows?) but that is equally worthwhile: put yourself in the hands of a specialist, a professional psychologist who will accompany you on your journey of self-discovery and personal development. We are ready for it and will be happy to accompany you in this experience.
Emotional well-being for companies
At ifeel, we understand that it is not possible to take care of the company without taking care of the psychological well-being of its employees. To do so, we have an emotional well-being program for companies, designed by our team of occupational well-being psychologists with one main objective: to help companies place employee health at the center of their strategy to build their mission statement.
Thanks to this partnership, the people in charge of HR departments can receive personalized, data-driven advice on how to make good decisions in a company to get the most out of the teams they are in charge of and take better care of the psychological well-being of the people in them.
Moreover, this program offers employees a holistic mental health care service structured at different levels according to their needs. This service includes, if required, online psychological therapy with a psychologist specialized in cases like theirs. Try our program today so you can see how it could help you.
We hope you have found this post about talent management useful. If you want more information about our emotional well-being program for companies, simply request it and we will contact your team as soon as possible.
