I have watched this play out in organizations across industries and geographies. Leaders who are genuinely well-intentioned, who care about their people, and who nonetheless consistently fail to identify and develop the talent sitting right in front of them.
The Pattern
The failure usually isn’t about ability to spot talent in the abstract. Ask most senior leaders to describe what a high-performer looks like, and they’ll give you a coherent, thoughtful answer. The failure is in the application, in the gap between the espoused theory and the theory in use.
In practice, talent recognition tends to be:
- Anchored to visibility, we notice people who are physically present, who speak up in meetings, who have built a social graph with the right stakeholders.
- Biased toward familiarity, talent that looks and sounds like the leaders doing the evaluating gets recognized more readily than talent that operates differently.
- Filtered through busyness, in high-pressure environments, leaders simply don’t have the slack to observe carefully. Assessment becomes shorthand.
The Remote Dimension
Distributed and remote work has amplified these dynamics considerably. When the informal signals of in-person work disappear, the spontaneous conversation, the body language in the meeting, the visible work ethic, what remains is often a thin slice of performance data and whatever relationships were established before everyone went remote.
The people who thrive in this environment are not necessarily the most talented. They are often the most comfortable with asynchronous communication, the most proactive about creating visibility, and the most skilled at managing up. These are useful skills. They are not the same as the skills that will actually drive the business forward.
“We mistake visibility for value. In remote environments, the loudest voice in the room is often just the most comfortable with the medium, not the most capable.”
– Atin Sood, Leadership Coach & Transformation Advisor
What to Do About It
The starting point is structural, not attitudinal. Training leaders to “be less biased” is largely ineffective without changing the systems within which assessment happens.
Practically, this means:
- Calibration processes that bring multiple perspectives to talent decisions
- Explicit criteria for what performance looks like, not just outputs, but the quality of thinking and contribution
- Investment in skip-level relationships so information doesn’t only flow through a single management layer
- Regular, low-stakes opportunities for people to demonstrate capability in contexts other than their day job
None of this is complicated. Most of it is just uncommonly practiced. The organizations that get talent recognition right treat it as a system design problem, not a personality problem.