Your natural talents are gifts at birth. You had nothing to do with them. However, you have a great deal to do with becoming aware of them and developing them into strengths. It is up to you to discover your natural signature talents and transform them through focus, practice and learning into consistent high performance.
Leaders' first awareness of a signature talent comes in late childhood or adolescence. They then build on this competency in their first job or when some other transitional situation occurs that demands they use this signature talent more purposefully. Focusing on what matters helps them reach clarity.
As the years go by, they regularly practice developing their signature talents into strengths. The progression from a person's first awareness of their signature talents to the point of mastery offers a clear picture of how leadership excellence is achieved.
Formula for Success: The formula for both personal and corporate success = your human capital (what you know and can do) times your social capital (who you know and who knows you) times your reputation (who trusts you).
The social capital that accrues from such "nonessential" parts of work turns out to be quite essential indeed. One study yielded the following description of managers who advanced rapidly in hierarchies: Fast-track managers "spent relatively more time and effort socializing, politicking, and interacting with outsiders than did their less successful counterparts...[and]...did not give much time or attention to the traditional management activities of planning, decision making, and controlling or to the human resource management activities of motivating/reinforcing, staffing, training/developing, and managing conflict." This suggests that social capital is even more necessary to managers' advancement than skillful performance of traditional managerial tasks.
Genes role in building Social Capital
Genes play an important role in how people make friends and form social networks, according to a new study that may help researchers better understand the spread of ideas and diseases in a society.
In the age of and other social networking sites, the study may also help explain why one person may have a thousand virtual friends, many of whom know one another, while someone else has 40 friends who aren't connected among themselves. "Our work shows how humans, like ants, may assemble themselves into a 'super-organism' with rules governing the assembly, rules that we carry with us deep in our genes," says Nicholas Christakis, a professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School, who co-wrote the study with two political scientists in San Diego. The study appeared online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.Facebook
The researchers narrowed a pool of high school students in the 1994-1995 school year to 1,110 same-sex twins, split roughly equally between identical twins (who share all their genes) and fraternal twins (who share about half of their genes). Then they explored the twins' social networks and noticed greater similarity in the identical twins' social structure, which suggests that genes helped shape it.
The researchers found that in-degree (how students in the longitudinal study named a given student as a friend = one degree of separation), transitivity (what the odds were of a given student's friends knowing each other) and centrality (how central or peripheral to a network a given student might be) are "significantly heritable." This means that your genetic background may help determine not only how many people count you as a friend, but also how many of your friends are friends among themselves. This sheds light on the kind of social network you inhabit, and whether your presence is central to it, or not.
Networks affect the spread of ideas and innovation, and there is a study suggesting that an individual's happiness depends on the happiness of others in his or her social network.
Dr. Wayne Baker, a professor of organizational behavior and human resource management at the University of Michigan Business School, says, "In truth, success depends on two factors-what a person knows, his or her human capital, and the network of relationships he or she has developed, the person's social capital."
As you make every effort to be a good partner, in so doing, you are able to amplify your capabilities far beyond what you are capable of individually. As Professor Baker says, "I know people who have improved their social capital and increased their earnings, made more sales, more profits and improved customer satisfaction. If you change your behaviors, there is much higher probability you will achieve the results you seek, as well."
Sources: The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2009 and "Achieving Success through Social Capital" by Wayne Baker