What is your team's hidden potential?
One of the biggest challenges in leadership is getting the best out of your people.
Last week I wrote about the power of productive tension. And I had a chance to put my own musings to the test not long afterward.
In one conversation, a business leader told me that "...people are intrinsically lazy. There are a small percentage who will be top performers no matter what. The rest will perform at 50-80% capacity no matter how cool you make it."
I found myself thinking: what a depressing worldview. And how different to my own starting point.
In their book Shift: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath explain that it's not about laziness.
"When you hear people say that change is hard because people are lazy or resistant, that's just flat wrong. In fact, the opposite is true: Change is hard because people wear themselves out. ... What looks like laziness is often exhaustion."
Starting with strengths
I prefer to start with an assumption that people are intrinsically smart, strong and good. But often the systems around them make it hard for them to achieve their potential.
So they learn strategies for coping.
A woman learns to keep quiet because she keeps getting labelled as "bossy". (This keeps happening to my confident daughter, and it drives me nuts.😠)
A person with ADHD avoids meetings because they're too loud and intense.
A highly-competent (and shy) person gets passed over for promotion in favour of the other loud guy.
This lost potential frustrates me no end.
Facts and feelings in the field
But how do we get the best out of our people?
The Heath brothers suggest three areas for investigation - analysis, emotions and environment.
Analysis (data, facts, and logic) can help people justify the need for change.
Emotions (feelings and intuition) drive our actions.
And our environment enables (or disables) us from achieving our aspirations.
These three interconnected elements can guide you in supporting your team to achieve their potential. Look at the data. Embrace their emotions. And cultivate their environment.
Sadly, it's easy to do the opposite. We get overwhelmed by data. We ignore the emotions. And we take our environment for granted.
Moving beyond exhaustion
I'm seeing and hearing lots of exhaustion of late. One friend put it bluntly: "Basically, we’re all a bit grumpy these days and tend to talk at rather than with people."
When the world's not doing what we want, we often default to more. More effort. More hours. More meetings. More emails. More documents. More posts. More, more, more!
(I know this tendency far too intimately.)
It's a natural, but exhausting, response.
But it doesn't bring the best out of people - not in the long run.
What we usually need is more of the right stuff and less of the unhelpful stuff. Figuring out which is which is the challenging piece.
I know that I can't do this on my own. Every month, I invest heavily in mentoring to clarify my own thoughts, feelings and actions. It's expensive, but invaluable.
If your team doesn't yet have space to sort the wheat from the chaff, then let's talk. I'd love to help you bring the best out of your team in 2024.