Doing the biz

In business or sport, there is one thing managers and coaches crave above everything else.

Consistency.

You want to know that when you give someone a job to do, they will do it. "Get this report done." "Stop that guy from scoring goals." "Complete the project on budget." Having someone in your organisation you can rely on to do the job is wonderful. There's that old idea that in any organisation 20 per cent of the people do 80 per cent of the work. The 80/20 theory. It's probably fairly true in a lot of larger places. In smaller organisations it's harder to hide.

In sport, there is nothing more frustrating than a mercurial player. Ie, a player whose talents go up and down, for no particular reason. They are capable of doing the amazing, but rarely deliver it. They usually do the job just often enough that coaches and fans never quite give up on them. They are usually a coach's nightmare.

Much more enjoyable to coach is the player who achieves his or her potential and performs consistently every time. The coach knows what they can and can't do, and gives them jobs accordingly.

The same is true of any organisation in the world. Any boss will tell you that a reliable employee who gets their job done with a minimum of fuss is better than a prima donna who may deliver the exceptional, but more often will just be unable to.Here's where we find the difference between talent and ability. I saw Nathan Buckley, former Collingwood captain and reliably amazing player, put it like this in a newspaper article once. The journalist was using the two terms interchangeably, and Bucks stopped him.

"You're confusing talent with ability," he said. "Heaps of players have talent. But what they need is the ability to use that talent consistently."

It's very true. Heaps of people have talent. What they need to develop is the ability to use it consistently, whether in sport, work, or life. Becoming reliable is, I think, a key part to being a happy and productive human being.