Human Potential

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“What percentage of your personal potential are you currently delivering in your work?”

Made you think, didn’t it? It’s a question that raises so many different issues for us:

What is our potential? Do I really want to give 100% at work, or do I want to save some for home? Can anyone ever get to 100% of their potential? My brain hurts just thinking about it, so can’t I just be happy as I am?

After we’ve all thrashed around a bit, I guess what we can all agree on is however much of our potential we are delivering, there is more to come. We all have a sense that we could be achieving more; giving more of ourselves and all the passion, enthusiasm and sheer depth of capability that we possess. We might be working as hard as we can, but we could probably all be working smarter. So what is stopping us?

When we are under pressure, the easy place to go to answer the question of what is stopping us deliver more of ourselves into our work, is to list the external factors that are holding us back. And these factors are of course very real on a day to day basis. However, when we get ourselves into a fixed belief that only when certain things happen outside of us will we be able to fulfil our potential, we have entered a dangerous zone.

When we step back and breathe and analyse things, we realise of course that the key to delivering more of our potential lies squarely within ourselves. We must change ourselves, and that takes 2 things: courage and having a great coach!

“When someone asks their boss what they should do about a problem, how often does the person asking actually know the answer?” 

At the very least, how often could they work it out or find the answer for themselves? Although we might struggle to put a number on the first question, when we think about it we do know that it is a pretty high proportion of the time. With the second part of the question, the answer might even be pretty close to 100%. We know this, and yet it is a constant source of frustration to us. How much more efficient our businesses would be if only people did the job we paid them to do, and if they only ‘got’ the fact that part of what we pay them to do is think for themselves and solve problems, or do we have to end up doing everything ourselves; thinking of everything; worrying about everything? 

The critical question of course is not how often people come and ask, but why they come and ask if they really know the answer or could easily work it out for themselves? Yes, you’ve guessed it – maybe it’s more to do with us than it is to do with them. Blaming them is easy and often quite enjoyable, but the answer is to look at the way we manage them. If we genuinely want our people using their initiative, thinking for themselves and solving their own problems then we need to change the way we manage them – we need to become genuine Coaches.

The reality is that people come and ask because we reward that behaviour. It’s a habit they’ve learned. Maybe they are seeking reassurance, or maybe they’re fearful of getting it wrong, but why would that be the case? Unless of course their experience of us is that we can be predatory at times? Us? Surely not……

The reality is that our habits have created their habits. If we want them to develop new habits, we have to start with ourselves. 

And remember the key word in the question above is ‘problem’ - we are not talking about technical facts or processes that people need to be taught. If it’s their first day in the business and they come and ask where the bathroom is, there is very little point in saying “Where do you think the bathroom is?” Teach them what they don’t know. Now if they come and ask on Day 2, they’re just being lazy and using us as a crutch……so coach away! 

If coaching is about growth, and if taking the risks is going to be worth it, just what could this ‘untapped potential’ in people look like? And if we are going to release it, how do we know that it will come out in an orderly and appropriate (controllable?) fashion?

The question about personal potential is one I have asked hundreds of times to individuals and groups of managers. And in any group the average answer invariably comes out to about 65%. The range of course is often huge – from 20% to 100%, and we all interpret the question slightly differently, yet it’s as if we all instinctively know that there is ‘more to come’.

Now if I asked the question in terms of effort or work rate or hours worked, I know I would get answers of 100% and maybe more! Because we all know that we can’t work much harder or put many more hours in. Recent advances in technology have pushed management ‘productivity’  to new levels. We can all now work more hours per day on more things, and the latest daily ‘holy grail’ for managers is an empty Inbox. What insanity!

The other thing we instinctively sense about our potential, is that we don’t need to tap into much more to give a step change – the sense that another 5% could transform our confidence, our skills, our performance, our achievements.

When we are fearful of judgment, we stop ourselves from trying something different.  It’s as if we have to be guaranteed of success before we’ll even try something. Thank God that business success is not dependent upon managers learning to ride bikes. Remember what it took for you to learn to ride a bike – basically you had to make a fool of yourself by falling off hundreds of times and by having to have a parent or carer run along behind you grabbing at your saddle and shouting inane encouragements at you. But of course you were not conscious of this, or if you were, the desire to ride was greater than your desire to look ‘cool’.

I remember going surfing with my son Tom when he was 15 when neither of us could surf. He learned much quicker than me, due simply to the fact that he had more goes than I did in the same amount of time we were out together. My strategy was to wait for a really good wave that would give me a chance of a decent attempt – he just tried every wave that came along. I spent most of my time standing up in the water waiting for a ‘great’ wave. He spent most of his time falling off. I probably had about 10 attempts. He probably had 100. He wanted to learn to surf. I wanted not to look stupid.

We say that people are our biggest asset, and then we don’t invest the highest standards of leadership in them. So how do we bring out that extra 5% of people’s potential? Great question, and having the awareness to ask it of ourselves means that we are half way there! As a coach, my job is to help people perform at their peak, as much of the time as possible, and certainly more often than they would if I was not around. In doing so I help them extend their peak beyond what they believed it to be and beyond any level they’ve yet achieved.

9 times out of 10, when people come and ask us as their manager what they should do, they know the answer. They certainly know where to look for the answer, even if the solution is not obvious. How inefficient is that?  Now I hear you saying that your people don’t just come and ask you. No they probably don’t – they are far too subtle for that, nevertheless they do know how to put you in a position where you will give them the answer.

So the real question is why do they come and ask?

We need to realise just how important it is for any employee to please their boss – yes, even you. So when they are about  to hit the edge of their comfort zone, instead of risking a unilateral  decision to go outside, they come and see you. 

They have learned that this is the safest thing to do, and not only that, but that they will be rewarded for coming. Yes, rewarded. They have learned that if they venture outside their comfort zone and it goes wrong, you will give them that funny little judgmental look that says “you did what?!” and you will be all hurt and cross that they went ahead without  clearing it with you first, because if they had you could have saved them

Actually the saddest thing here is that maybe our people have learned that if they venture outside their comfort zone and take a risk (showing the initiative that you are always exhorting from them) and it goes right, you might still sanction them! It sounds like this: “….you took a real risk and actually you were  lucky it worked this time, but in future you need to run that sort of thing past me, or at the very least inform me in advance so I am prepared  in case I get challenged by my boss….”. We say that we trust people and that we want them to use their initiative, but do we actually reward that behaviour when they do?

But do we ‘reward’ mistakes? Maybe the reality is that the reward for coming to ask what they already know is of course that you treat them well. You are in fact flattered that they have come to you in such circumstances because it reinforces your position in the hierarchy. You do after all possess greater wisdom and experience and what’s the point if they don’t come and ask you sometimes?

There is something a bit Machiavellian going on here. If they come to you and you engage and give them the answer, then you are on the hook when it goes wrong. They manipulate you into being co-responsible for their objectives. 

So if we want to stop this behaviour we have to change the risk-reward paradigm. Instead of rewarding them for coming when they know the answer we have to make THIS the situation they do not want to experience, and conversely reward them for coming to us when stepping outside their comfort zone. If someone comes to me as their coach when they are still inside their comfort zone, they are going to get short shrift. If they come when they need me to hold them outside their comfort zone, they will get rewarded. They will quickly come to understand the behavior that gets rewarded. And for me that means I have to work hard to be ruthlessly consistent in my ensuring my words and my actions match.

“A coach takes a person outside of their comfort zone and holds them there while they learn and grow”