Builders With Profitability Talent: Show Them the Money

On this episode of Builder Talent Tuesday Season 1, Jim Collison, Gallup's Director of Talent Sourcing, and Maika Leibbrandt, Senior Workplace Consultant, discuss the Profitability talent with guest Tim McCabe.

People who are especially talented in the Profitability talent couple sharp business instincts and a fascination with making money. They have an uncanny ability to look at data from which they can form unique insights. Ultimately, they evaluate decisions through the prism of profitability. They establish clear financial goals and use data to measure progress. They formulate unique insights from the data that others may miss.

Individuals possessing this talent have a constant strategic nature of weighing business decisions, relationships and opportunities against the potential to make money. It is keeping their return on investment at the very front of how they run their business. They weigh decisions in the terms of the connection between their inputs, and the profitability of their outputs.

With Profitability there is a consistent emphasis on money, as well as clear goals and measurement towards those goals. They can use a business filter to judge what is going to give them the best return on that investment. There is an impatience with unnecessary cost, any detour, obstacle or potential delay. Individuals with this talent are set up well to align employee goals with the success of an organization. One of the issues that leads to employee apathy is disconnect between what they do every day and the change and impact on an organization. People with high Profitability can help connect this impact.

Individuals with Profitability tend to keep a close eye on operational costs, and are constantly filtering through that lens of return on investment. It can lead them to being quicker to jump onto great opportunities than others might be simply because they are constantly filtering them through and evaluating them. They could notice the potential in a great opportunity that others may not pay attention to.

Some potential blind spots with this talent could be losing sight of customers in your quest for profit. Because you are constantly looking at what could be the most profitable decision, you might lose track on who is on the other end. How do you strategize? How do you bake customer focus into your philosophy? Think about the habits, structures and daily routines that align your actions based on that customer focus philosophy.

Another blind spot is that you could potentially put high pressure on employees to maintain that high profitability, which can sometimes feel like you care more about the numbers than the people. Think about paying attention to the morale in your organization. Look for indicators that lead to profit. If you are speaking that language of profit and thinking about that prism of profitability, look for the leading indicators that get you there and how you can celebrate them. This may be something like people showing up for work, or stretching their own sales targets. Look for some of those pieces that are more on the behavioral economics side that are going to be great indicators of the final uptick in the end.

Sometimes you can forget to value the means instead of the end. Find your best voice for appreciating good work. Find your best way of recognizing the inputs that go into creating great high-performing results. Make this a priority so that people get a peak of what you are noticing. The Profitability talent has a way of noticing things others might miss. Allowing people into that through the vehicle of recognition could be a way to truly build morale.

How can you invest in this talent further? Think about using specific time lines and indicators to measure business goals. Pay attention to where you value your time. Think about yourself as an investment. Get really picky about where you are spending your time, and where you are investing in partners. Be choosy about where you can make the biggest impact and spend your time there. Think about how you can stretch your short and long term vision, and how you can share that with other people. Constantly learn and be curious about how you can notice the human elements of your business. The more you can lean into a recognition of what goes into the inner workings of the partnerships and engagement of your teams, the more you can recognize greatness from the very beginning to avoid any delays or hurdles.

Tim McCabe's Top 5 CliftonStrengths are Learner, Responsibility, Maximizer, Relator and Individualization. Tim's Top 4 BP10 talents are Profitability, Confidence, Delegator and Knowledge.