Forget Being The Best. Get Good At Getting Others To Be The Best.

One of the skills that the World's top employers want most is one we rarely explicitly teach and struggle to model.

The WEF's 2025 Future of Jobs Report ranks "talent management" 9th on its list of most in-demand employee skills.

Talent management is the capacity to recognise, develop and elevate the capability of the people around you. The ability to raise other people up is being identified as a core professional skill. Not a leadership add-on or a nice-to-have. But a fundamental human capacity employers need in their workforce.

This deserves serious attention from schools and parents because it really runs in antithesis to our traditional practice of promoting individual achievement. It's a mindset shift. It's about:

- Walking into a room and asking "what does this room need, who here has what it takes, how can I help them?" rather than "how do I fit here?".

- Seeing what someone else is good at, even when they can't see it themselves.

- Investing in someone's growth without needing credit for it.

- Building together rather than competing.

- Sharing knowledge rather than guarding it.

- Genuinely wanting the people around you to succeed - not just saying you do.

Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson's decades of work on psychological safety found that the teams that perform best are not the ones with the most talented individuals. They are the ones where people feel safe enough to contribute fully, take risks and recover from failure.

Developing those mindsets and environments isn't about policies or frameworks. It's about relational practice. Built over years, in the earliest relational environments a person inhabits. They're shaped by whether:

- The adults in a child's life modelled collaboration or competition.

- The family and school cultures they grew up in treated other people's success as a threat or a resource.

- They learned that there is enough (recognition, space, worth) for everyone.

Children who grow up in environments where love and approval are conditional on achievement do not naturally develop an orientation toward raising others. They develop an orientation toward survival and being the most impressive person in the room.

That is not a character flaw, it's a logical adaptation. But it is also, increasingly, a professional limit.

If talent management is now a top-ten global workforce skill, then the question is not how do we teach it in Grade 11. The question is what kind of environment (at home, at school, in every interaction) produces a person who is genuinely orientated toward the flourishing of others.

Some schools are beginning to understand this. The ones that do tend to be asking hard questions not just about curriculum, but about climate - and not just about students, but about the adults in the system.

The relational culture of a school community is shaped by everyone in it - including parents. I work with international schools on exactly this. Reach out if you'd like to explore what that looks like.

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