The Gartner Talent Angle

Andy Walshe is a globally recognized leader and expert in the field of elite human performance. For over 20 years the Australian native has been focused on the goal of "de-mystifying talent" by researching and training individuals and teams across a vast network of world-class programs in sport, culture, military and business settings.

Dr. Walshe is currently the Director of High Performance for Red Bull, where he works with hundreds of international athletes and cultural opinion leaders; supervises a team of industry-leading scientists, engineers, physicians and technologists to develop and implement elite performance models. Dr. Walshe was the Performance Manager for Red Bull Stratos, leading the performance plan for Felix Baumgartner's record-breaking jump to Earth from the stratosphere in 2012.

Prior to joining Red Bull, Dr. Walshe designed a highly successful performance program for the U.S Olympic ski and snowboard teams, guiding their athletes to victories on the world stage. Dr. Walshe has also held senior consulting roles at the Australian Institute of Sport, NSW Institute of Sport and Queensland Institute of Sport.

Dr. Walshe consults directly with numerous organizations and institutions in his field, including the Armed Forces, Fortune 500 companies, technology companies, artists and athletes worldwide. Dr. Walshe has been invited to participate and share his learnings at a number of global events and conferences, and has had projects featured in numerous US and global leading publications.

Dr. Andy Walshe joins to CEB Talent Angle to discuss how principals from elite athletics can be applied to developing executives and leaders. Teams will invest money and energy into athletic talent to get the best out of them; Dr. Walsh advocates we apply the same model to business and treat business leaders like the elite talent they are. By focusing leaders on becoming better at who they are before becoming better at what they do, organizations can make leaders the best version of themselves so that they can set the tone and culture across the organization.

Morning Espressos are 5-minute insights and lessons to help you build the skills researched by some of the top minds in the world. Charles Duhigg recommends that you spend time creating your own narrative and visualizing your day.

"One of the things that we know is that the key to building mental models, to being able to sort of sharpen your focus, is to be able to tell yourself a story about what's occurring as it occurs.

One of my favorite examples of this is a series of studies that were done with people like for instance firefighters. They found that the best firefighters are the ones who walk into a burning building. As soon as they walk in, they start telling themselves a story about what they expect to see. And so as a result, when they walk into a room that's on fire, they tell themselves, okay, I'm walking into this room. I expect to see in that corner flames. There's a staircase over there. I expect to see that there will be a bunch of flames on that staircase because staircases burn quickly. And then when they walk in and they looked in that room and what they don't see is they don't see a bunch of flames on that staircase, it sets off alarm bells in their mind, and it tells them, look, there's something wrong with that staircase. Don't go walk on that staircase because it doesn't look like what you expected it to look like.

Similarly, we know that people who are most productive at work, who tend to almost have this ESP about what they should be paying attention to and what they can safely ignore, they tend to be people who tell themselves stories about what they expect to have happen during meetings or what they expect to happen in the morning versus the afternoon. This is a really important lesson which is that our brain tends to make sense of the world by finding some narrative that it can grasp onto.

The best way for us to try and determine what's going to happen next or what I expect to happen this afternoon or what I should focus on tomorrow morning is by telling ourselves a story about it because when we tell ourselves stories, our brain has this ability to take that story and to expand upon it, to use it as a template for determining this is what's important and this is what's not important. Once we do that, we've sharpened our focus to a degree that we have the ability to decide almost within milliseconds that, oh, when someone comes in and they interrupt me during my meeting, I can safely say, no. Let's put this off until tomorrow because I don't have time to talk about it. But when the phone rings and it's someone I've been trying to get ahold of, I should pick up that call because that fits into the story about what I've been telling myself about what I expect to get done today."

Traditional management often assumes that motivating people at work is simply about paying them enough--but Barry Schwartz, the author of Why We Work, believes the real motivation to work comes from finding meaning. Everyone--whether they're a lawyer or janitor, painter or salesperson--can perform at a higher level by finding meaning in their work.

Listen to this episode of the CEB Talent Angle to hear Barry discuss how our conventional wisdom on motivation at work is wrong, and how managers can help their employees connect to the good they do in the world.

What anyone desires most is to be understood and respected. Chris Voss shares techniques that work in the boardroom every bit as well as across the high stakes world of hostage negotiations. Kidnappers, however ill-intentioned, are prone to the same human reasoning as the rest of us.

What if your company had no physical office at all? Is maintaining a completely remote workforce even remotely possible?

Brian De Haaff, author of Lovability and CEO of Aha!, believes that the remote workforce can function just as well, if not better, than the traditional office workforce. He joins the Talent Angle to discuss how business leaders can drive and sustain high performance from their remote workforce.

How do you motivate a factory worker vs. and artist? Dan Pink explores his own motivation as well as the roots of motivation of humankind in this 20 minute spotlight excerpted from our 50 minute podcast with Dan in 2016.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ceb-talent-angle-with-scott-engler/id1066056346?mt=2

It's time to stop thinking of your talent in terms of Type A or B personalities. Instead, seek Type Rs – the individuals that turn challenges into opportunity in times of upheaval, crisis, and change.

Ama and Stephanie Marston, Co-authors of Type R and dynamic mother-daughter team, join the CEB Talent Angle to discuss their concept of Transformative Resilience. They offer advice on how to identify and develop the talent in your business who not only embrace change and disruption, but also emerge from it in a stronger shape than before.

In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made a risky call with only 26 seconds remaining that lost his team the game. It has since been heralded as the dumbest play in football's history. Was Carroll's decision really that bad, or was it a smart move just ruined by bad luck?

Annie Duke, author of Thinking in Bets, believes that the key to long-term success is to think in bets. She joins the CEB Talent Angle to discuss how business leaders can be more like good poker players: less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in decision-making.

One of the world's leading experts on the connection between happiness and success. His research on mindset made the cover of Harvard Business Review, his TED talk is one of the most popular of all time with over 11 million views, and his lecture airing on PBS has been seen by millions.

Shawn has lectured or worked with over a third of the Fortune 100 companies, as well as the NFL, the NBA, the Pentagon and the White House. Shawn is the author of New York Times best-selling books The Happiness Advantage (2010) and Before Happiness (2013).

He has now lectured in more than 50 countries speaking to CEOs in China, doctors in Dubai, schoolchildren in South Africa, and farmers in Zimbabwe. His Happiness Advantage training is one of the largest and most successful positive psychology corporate training program in the world.

Shawn's research has been published in the top psychology journal for work he did at UBS in partnership with Yale University to transform how stress impacts the body, and he recently did a two-hour interview with Oprah at her house to discuss his mission to bring positive psychology to the world.

Nancy Duarte is an expert in presentation design and principal of Duarte Design, where she has served as CEO for 21 years. Nancy speaks around the world, seeking to improve the power of public presentations. She is the author of Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations as well as Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences and the recent HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations.