Talent vs. grit

Adam Grant, a young tenured professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, may be the best new researcher studying organizations in many years. I have written columns in the past on some of Grant's work on prosocial motivation, which is potentially very relevant to motivating employees in government, and I plan to write a column about his new book, Give and Take, once I've finished reading it (I'm about two-thirds through now). 

This post concerns one brief discussion he has, less related to the main theme of the book, that I think is relevant to anybody leading employees.

The book details evidence suggesting that people who turn out to be outstanding in endeavors such as music or tennis (and presumably in other ones as well) are distinguished less by extraordinary talent than by extraordinary motivation. Looking at the early experiences of concert pianists who were finalists in a prestigious international competition, researchers "discovered an unexpected absence of raw talent."  These eventual bloomers did not win many of their early, local competitions. They also typically had piano teachers from their neighborhoods rather than experts.

What distinguished these outstanding pianists from others was that they practiced much more than did their peers, the researchers found.

When researchers interviewed top tennis players, they found that their first coaches "were not exceptional coaches. …What this first coach provided was motivation for the child to become interested in tennis and to spend time practicing."

There are two lessons here, one for individuals and the other for managers, supervisors and leaders. For individuals, there's a nice lesson that Edison was right about genius being 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. For managers, there is a lesson about how to improve employee performance. It's not (mostly) about finding geniuses, but about motivating employees in general. "Persistence is incredibly important," Grant quotes Tom Kolditz, a one-star general and head of the leadership faculty at West Point. Another professor, who has gotten outstanding performance from ordinary students in accounting classes, says, "setting high expectations is so important. You have to push people, make them stretch and do more than they think possible." 

Do you have suggestions for making federal managers and supervisors better at this?