What did this mean? "You need to start at the source. When most people are recruited, the method is primarily a concentration on academic performance. Our research however shows that there is no co-relation between academic performance and performance in the field. Minsberg did a famous study on Harvard University grads and his research found that there was no correlation between performance in the classroom and management in the field, " Debashis clarified.

You need only take a look at Richard Branson, he adds. Apparently, Branson can't tell the difference between gross profit and net profit yet runs one of the largest businesses in UK, the Virgin Group, an internationally recognised and immensely successful brand. So, you know that the talent we're looking at is therefore not in terms of academic intelligence alone. When you focus on this, the tendency then is to ignore and miss out on those with an entrepreneurial mindset, for example.

"These psychometric tools and classic tests are not useful in my opinion because we can't distinguish between problem-solving on paper and problem-solving in the field. The real test is the apprenticeship model. Put him there in the workplace. All these psychometric and other tests should be done afterwards. The test is action and putting him through the paces and different challenges," Debashis adds. Talent, as he puts it, is transferable from one context to another but not from one person to another.

It begs the question, why does HR focus on psychometrics and profiling and the lot of it? Well, it seems to work. In some ways. But can you correlate it - Debashis argues that you can't. Take Jack Welch and HR assessments of him, back in 1971. At the time, Welch was being considered for a senior appointment in GE and the senior HR lead noted that despite the strengths Welch brought to the table, he also carried with him considerable risk. "What prompted the HR person to say this, is really an assessment of conventional skill. He didn’t have the ability to anticipate what Welch could be and what Welch indeed did become. What turned out to be bad for Welch then turned out to be good for him much later. You need an intuitive sense to see how ability can translate itself out there in the workplace," Debashis explains.

But surely, the downside of the apprenticeship model is the amount of time spent grooming and training. Wouldn't we all much prefer to get it right from the start by assessing exactly what we're after in terms of competencies and ensuring we have what it takes to judge the person at the interview table accurately? Well, you could also ask yourself this : What is the effect of 20 years of this person in your organisation not being effective instead of just the first three months? Therein lies the value of the probation period.

Even MBAs go through probation periods. "We're trying to take this cog and fit it into this slug. Talent doesn’t work like that. Talent could be something else. You just need to create the scenarios…. and the reality is that HR needs to know the whole business and not just one department. You know quality is lost if its departmentalised, don’t you?" he adds.

You need to see that talent is truly expanded on when you possess the right mindset. And the job of leaders should be about crafting the right mindset. Having been in the teaching line for more than fifteen years, Debashis points out how he doesn’t teach skills. He models humility and expects students to do the same. It's about behaving as if you don’t know everything there is to know. As Welch once said, true self-confidence is the courage to be open; to welcome change and new ideas regardless of their source.

"My job is to emplant that we are constant learners. I guess it's based on old, almost traditional values. Do you really think that there was no talent 500 years ago? There was, you only need to look at the value sets. If you look at the business schools now, you will see that they're bringing in soft skills. MBAs are irrelevant if they harp on only analytical issues and I see that the business schools are adapting well in this area," Debashis clarifies.

So let's look at how we need to view talent. Think of talent as a recurring pattern of thought and feeling. That's an interesting perspective. You’re not looking at innate ability but more at conduct, recurring conduct. Could we call that habit? Uh no, says Debashis. Well, there are all kinds of words to describe the phenomena but it is a little deeper than a habit.

"What I can do for one hour is an indication of what my talent is", he says. "I know someone who since childhood, could take a car apart and put it back in two hours. He wouldn’t realise the time had gone by. I look at this and I get my students to write about what they enjoy doing. Its about describing things that show off your talents. The talent is inside you."

"The thing to remember is that talent can't be grown or developed. You need to spot it. It's there - effective people are able to bring it to bear, to unleash what is already within, through contextualization," he adds.

What does this mean? Take someone whom some of us may call a congenital nagger. You might find surprisingly, that he or she would do extremely well at tele-marketing or selling insurance. It's about one thing being negative in one context yet, positive in another. The stubbornness that Gandhi displayed in class is also what helped him fight the British. You need to see : what can I persistently do? And the difficulty we face is that we tend to follow a particular road. We get stuck in a rut and its easy enough to stay there. If you look at jobs nowadays, if it can be de-coded, it will go the way of the computer. Debashis points out an interesting fact : it takes only 20 minutes to finalise a non-contested divorce in the US. Great stuff, but you need talent for what the computer cannot do. The question to ask is how do I find a vocation for something consistent with my talent? Because the reality is that if you could find that one thing, you could do it forever. You would love it. And excel at it.

What does Debashis see as the nature of a mindset? Its simply how we receive information. A question of whether you have a learning or learned mindset. Do you approach things with curiosity or with disdain? Put it this way : you can take a musically-inclined person and you stand the chance of getting a Grammy someday but there's no chance of moving closer to an Olympic medal. You need to see that you can make a disproportionate contribution when you're true to your calling.

So what is the solution then? Perhaps, we could consider this. Instead of fixing someone into a role, you could consider re-creating a role based around the person. Yes, but it doesn’t work, does it? We all have defined job specifications and work requirements. Someone leaves, you need to replace him. You don’t really want to get a person in and find what fits with that person. You want to get someone in who can fit the job specification. Or do you? To which Debashis had this to say : it's not been working for the last fifty years, but it has in the last couple of thousand. You've only done this for the last five years because you are in your comfort zone. The fact is that you unconsciously slip into it but these models won't work in the future. There are so many ways to work with a person. This is how Silicon Valley got created. Look at consulting houses calling their people partners instead of Vice Presidents. Why? There are no cogs and specific structures. Organisational design will change. HR needs to move beyond the whole argument about talent management and about the organisation of the future. Get past talk about talent to what's after.

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About Dr Debashis Chatterjee
Dr Chatterjee has taught for more than a decade at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) at Lucknow and Calcutta. He pioneered and founded the global centre for Leadership and Human Values at IIM Lucknow. Currently Dean of the Leadership Centre at the SP Jain Centre of Management in Singapore, Debashis is author of several internationally published books. Dr Chatterjee has been described as one of the "thought leaders" of the world by Professor John Kotter of the Harvard Business School for his contribution to the theory and practice of leadership.

Dr Chatterjee was in Kuala Lumpur in November 2008 to present at the MIHRM Summit, which was co-organised by MIHRM and CDC Consulting Sdn Bhd. The Malaysian Institute of Human Resource Management (MIHRM) is the national institute for conducting training and certification for HR professionals and CDC Consulting is a business, management, organisational and leadership training and development consultancy.