Leadership

Can You Make More of Your Best People?

Hokusai (c.1830-32) - Ejiri in Suruga Province

There is a revealing moment in any apprenticeship. At first, the junior person asks the questions. Eventually, other people begin asking them.

That transition matters. The moment someone you developed can develop someone else, talent stops being something you have and becomes something you can create.

Most organisations think about talent as something they acquire. Find the best people. Pay enough to attract them. Work hard to keep them.

Necessary, certainly. But not sufficient.

The deeper question is not how good are our people? It is how much better do people become because they work here?

That is the difference between having talent and creating it. Having exceptional people is an outcome. Making people exceptional is a capability.

It also changes how you recognise potential. Credentials, titles and polish tell you where someone has arrived. They tell you less about the distance they are capable of travelling. Look for learning velocity: how quickly someone absorbs feedback, tackles unfamiliar problems and turns experience into better judgement.

Then put that potential in the right environment. Hard problems. High standards. Excellent people. Candid feedback. Real responsibility.

This is how expertise has always been built. Not principally through instruction, but through apprenticeship: working close enough to mastery to see how it thinks.

The strongest organisations take this one step further. They expect their best people not merely to perform, but to reproduce capability in others. The apprentice becomes the practitioner; the practitioner becomes the teacher. Each generation improves the next.

People can leave. Stars can be poached. Technologies become obsolete. Today’s scarce expertise becomes tomorrow’s commodity.

The durable advantage is not the talent you have. It is the system that creates talent repeatedly.

Which suggests a revealing test:

If your best people left tomorrow, could you make more of them?

When the people you develop become the people who develop others, you haven’t built a training programme.

You’ve built an institution.

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