By Stephen Tweed
What’s your talent? What are you better at than anyone else? What are you passionate about that makes you distinctive?
Last Friday evening, Elizabeth and I went to hear the Louisville Symphony Orchestra play George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. It was a fabulous performance and a wonderful way to relax and enjoy some time together after a very busy week. And we were mesmerized by the performance of the pianist, Kevin Cole. Kevin is an award winning musical director, arranger, composer, and vocalist who has garnered the praises of Irving Berlin, Marvin Hamlisch, Stephen Sondheim, and the family of George Gershwin.
Despite his amazing musical talent, he’s like a lot of other pianists out there. Except for one thing. His focus. Kevin has spent his musical career studying the works of George Gershwin, and in particular his world renowned piece, Rhapsody in Blue. Howard Reich, the arts critic at the Chicago Tribune says of Kevin, “When Cole sits down at the piano, you would swear Gershwin himself is at work … Cole stands as the best Gershwin pianist in America today.”
As we sat enjoying the concert, Elizabeth leaned over and whispered, “There’s a newsletter article for you.” And she’s right. What a lesson we all can learn from this young man who has focused his amazing talent on becoming the best in the country, and maybe in the world at doing one thing … Playing Gershwin on the piano.
What’s Your One Thing?
As we begin to apply this lesson to our roles as leaders in home care, what can we learn and apply? What can you learn about being the best in the world at one thing?
First, it begins with talent. What is your greatest talent as a business leader? What’s the one part of your job that you do better than anyone else? What’s your one greatest strength?
In his best selling business book, First Break All the Rules, Marcus Buckingham and his co-author Curt Coffman say that “talent is a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied.”
The key here is the word recurring. Your talents are the behaviors you find yourself doing most often.
Buckingham and Coffman also say that “the key to excellent performance is finding the match between your talents and your role … every role performed at excellence requires talent. Every role performed at excellence requires certain recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior.”
At Caregiver Quality Assurance®, we are studying the recurring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that make up talent in various jobs in home care. By defining the roles of your caregivers, your schedulers, or your sales people, you can then measure their patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior to see which candidate has the talent that is the best fit for the job you have at hand.
Once you have found the talent, then it’s a matter of focusing that talent on a narrow niche of potential clients in order to be the best in the world, or at least the best in your local market, at providing care for those clients and families.
For more information on how you can measure the patterns of thought, attitudes, and behaviors of potential caregivers or office staff, take a few minutes to visit Caregiver Quality Assurance. Then click on the link for a FREE Demonstration of the CQA Pre-employment Assessment.
