The Five Talents That Really Matter, with Barry Conchie & Sarah Dalton (Leadership, Hiring, Research, Business)
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The way we've talked about leadership in the past is immature, inaccurate, and ineffective. We've either said leadership is a million things and we've complicated it, or we've been even more silly and said it really only boils down to this one thing, like, I don't know, humility. Well, goodness me, that's just not true. A lot of nonsense. Not everyone is cut out to be a
top leaders, meaningful conversation, actionable advice, bulldoze complacency, ignite inspiration, create impact. Produced by the Southwestern family of companies, this is The Action Catalyst. Are you interested in advertising with The Action Catalyst? Our listeners could be hearing about your brand right here, right now. For details, shoot us an email at info at theactioncatalyst.com. On today's episode, Barry Conchi and Sarah Dalton, both of Conchi Associates, discuss their new book, The Five Talents That Really Matter, How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance, taken from research on over 58,000 executive leaders in a variety of industries representing everything from small companies to global enterprises. The takeaway? Leadership isn't for everyone.
So let's start here. We rarely have two folks at the same time. So let's start with that. How did the two of you guys come to be working together? Share with me a little bit of that history. Well, Barry and I worked together at the last company that I was with. He was one of their major clients. And when it came time for me to leave that organization, I reached out to Barry to ask him if he could help me get another job. And he just said, over my dead body, if you're leaving this company, you're coming on board with me.
In my version of that, when I set my own company up in 2013, my aim was to do interesting work with interesting people. So my expertise is in assessment and selection. I'd had a career spanning nearly 40 years before I set up my own company. So I had a lot of background, a lot of experience in leadership. And I quickly got to the point where we were growing so quickly that I couldn't handle it on my own. And I needed to bring people on board. But being an expert in selection, nobody came up close to what I was looking for. And then when I started working with the company where Sarah was at, It kind of dawned on me pretty quickly that if there was ever a possibility that she became available on the market, I'd slap her up in her heartbeat because she checks so many boxes. I had a very successful book that came out, sold a ton of copies. And I'd always had this idea of a book in my mind for our old company based on the work that we did. It was time to write that book.
And I thought, Sarah's going to be a part of this.
So you had a book 16 years ago, came out, did incredibly well. Tell us about this one, the difference. Bring us up to speed on that.
The last book I wrote was when I was at Gallup. I used to lead Gallup's leadership research and selection. When I left Gallup and set up my own company, it was a completely different focus to what I did in Gallup. I was relentlessly focused on top-level selection, whereas in Gallup, we were a bit more of an all-round consultant. So we had to cover a whole gamut of different things. But in my own business, I just became relentlessly focused on leadership. And I built my own leadership assessment. So I researched it, validated it. And that assessment in and of itself tells a really interesting story. So it became a story of itself and it was a story that needed to be taught. So if you can imagine my life existing in three big chunks.
The first chunk was like pre-Gallup work as a senior professional in education in the UK. I spent about 10 years at Gallup and then I spent 13 years in lower business. And this particular book captures the last 13 years. Now, here's an interesting thing to think about, Stephanie. Two things can be true at the same time, even though they sound contradictory. So here are two things that sound contradictory, but both are true. The first is that human beings are infinitely variable. But our experience of this is every person we meet. And it doesn't matter whether they're professional, it doesn't matter whether they're family, it doesn't matter whether they're in the neighborhood or community or whatever.
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