Matching Your Talents Vs. Your Skills On The Job

IMG_5396, a photo by mhowry on Flickr.

Yes—everyone has natural talents; those innate responses to tasks at work that are performed with minimal effort. When you perform them for the first time you laugh to yourself, realizing these where the traits your parents said they watched you gravitate toward as a child. Your talents reflect who you are—and bring you so much satisfaction that you can’t wait to do them again.

In his popular book Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham points out that our talents are intrinsic to our nature.  Our talents are in our DNA and we can’t change them. He states that we have to accept our talents, and instead of fighting against the tide we should refocus our work lives around them.

But your job, your bosses and your clients expect more from you than showcasing your natural-born talents when they hire you.  Specific skills are required to keep the machine running. You may excel at creating client presentations, for example, but you have to balance the department budget as well. Everyone in your finance team considers you an ace at spotting revenue streams and cost drivers, but they need you to crunch the data with accuracy as well.

So how much effort should you put into developing your skills, when your talents are screaming to be heard?

A lot. There are two things you need to remember:

These skills are necessary to your job survival, and they will always come harder than your talents will.

You start by acquiring rudimentary skills for your chosen profession at school. Over the years, you fill in the rest from your bosses and your colleagues. You take additional courses, attend seminars and read books. Since there’s little budget these days for on the job training, you add more skills on the fly. These skills are so important to keep your job, that the ones you’ve added in the past year are a key topic of discussion during your annual review. 

Developing your skill set is a requirement for not getting fired.

But it’s your underlying talent that makes you soar. It’s your natural aptitude that will give you the strength when you’re challenged with learning a difficult skill. Using your talent helps you find the fortitude to come back to work when you have a bad day, and gives you the courage to find partners and others whose talents complement the areas where you aren’t great.

Your personal talents combined with your skill set are an unstoppable partnership. And in those instances when you are good at what you do but you are miserable at work, one of two scenarios likely exists:

--You’ve developed your skills but you aren’t using your natural talents.

--You are using your talents but the environment and the mission of your company is not in line with your own.

When you get an opportunity to add to your skill set, always grab it. But the majority of your efforts should be spent on finding a role where your talents and your values align.

In recruiting, for example, the knack for sourcing hard-to-find candidates, a largely sought after talent that comes naturally to some but is a chore for others, might be lost in a large company that relies on strong branding to lure new candidates. In management consulting, your reputation for meeting client deliverables will offer you little personal satisfaction if you really prefer the mission of a non-profit organization.

Embrace your natural talents. Don’t try to change them because you can’t. Try to find the environment where they are welcome; even embraced. If that’s not an option in a narrow job market these days, then try to adjust your outlook and find a kernel of alignment within your company where your talents can shine and you can feel good about what you are doing.