Fundamentally, ‘talent’ refers to a combination of ‘performance/capability’ and ‘potential’.
When we talk about ‘talent’ in a business sense, we use the term in two ways – describing individual people’s potential and describing potential across the business.
Individually, when we talk about talent, asking questions like ‘does that person have talent?’, we’re talking about whether or not that person is doing a good job AND has potential. By this, we mean the potential to do a bigger job, a more difficult job, or a job that requires more skills or a greater level of commitment, or a greater breadth of leadership capability. We’re really asking whether that person can do well in a job that is either different from or bigger than the one they have today.
