Hidden potential

Everyone has hidden potential, but how do we unlock it?

Character

Is it about building character skills, like how often do you take initiative to ask questions? Do you react to what enters your field of vision, or are you proactive in seeking new knowledge, skills and perspectives? Do you focus on feeding your ego or fueling your growth?

Perfectionism

Unlocking hidden potential is not about the pursuit of perfection. Be disciplined in deciding when to push for the best and when to settle for good enough. Don't obsess by details and to find the right solution on tiny problems that don't matter. Find the right problems to solve instead.

Passion

Although it takes deliberate practice to achieve greater things, we shouldn't drill so hard that we drive the joy out of the activity and turn it into an obsessive slog. Persistence is more likely to translate into performance when passion is present.

Breaks

Take breaks. They help you unlock fresh ideas, deepen your learning and sustain your harmonious passion. Even micro-breaks of five to ten minutes are enough to reduce fatigue and raise energy.

Side hustle

When asking people what it takes to achieve greater things, one of the most common answers is that you need to be laser focused and single-minded in your dedication. Get in early, go home late. Put your hobbies away. But the evidence tells a different story. Hobbies or a side hustle can be a source of energy - if they are in a different area from your job.

Learn from experts?

Do we learn more from experts? If you are taking a new road, the best experts are often the worst guides. One reason is the distance they have traveled - they have come too far to remember what it's like being in your shoes.

You need to make experts' implicit knowledge explicit. Ask them to retrace their route. Get them to drop pins - the key landmarks and turning points from their climbs, the crossroads they faced, skills they sought out, advice they took or ignored, or changes they made.

A sense of progress

The strongest known force in daily motivation is a sense of progress. Achieving this doesn't require huge gains. Fuel can come from small wins. With a few small wins, you start to gain speed.

A rocky start followed by later success

It's a mistake to judge people solely by the heights they have reached. We need to consider how steep their slope was, how far they have climbed, and how they have grown along the way. Early failure and a rocky start followed by later success is a mark of hidden potential. The key question is not how long people have done a job. Find out what they have learned and how well they can learn to do a job.

Read

A love of reading often begins at home. If we want our kids to enjoy reading, we need to make books part of their lives. That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and letting them see us read. 

Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we value.

"Hidden Potential" by Adam Grant

Say Less and Ask More

That's the coaching habit. Coaching is today a commonly used term, but the actual practice of coaching doesn't seem to be occurring that often. And when it does, it doesn't seem to work.

The essence of coaching lies in helping others and unlocking their potential, but we all have a deeply ingrained habit of slipping into the advice-giver/expert/answer-it/solve-it/fix-it mode.

There is still a place for your advice and answer as a leader, you should just try to slow down the rush to it as your default behavior.

A little more asking people questions and a little less telling people what to do. Here are the seven magic questions to ask.

What's on your mind?

An open question that invites people to get to the heart of the matter and share what's most important to them.

And what else?

A question that creates more wisdom, more insights, and more options because the first answer someone gives you is almost always never the only answer, and it's rarely the best answer. When someone says "there is nothing else" you have succeeded.

What's the real challenge here for you?

It's time to focus. When people start talking to you about the challenge at hand, what they are laying out for you is rarely the actual problem. The "for you" pins the question to the person you are talking to.

What do you want?

This one is difficult to answer. We often don't know what we actually want. The illusion that both parties to the conversation know what the other party wants is pervasive, and it sets the stage for plenty of frustrating exchanges.

How can I help?

This question is forcing your colleague to make a direct and clear request. That may be useful because she might not be sure why she started this conversation with you. 

Second, this question stops you from rushing into "rescuer" mode where you offer advice or start to take over responsibilities.

If you are saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?

This question is more complex than it sounds, which accounts for its potential. It puts the spotlight on how to create the space and focus, energy and resources that you'll need to truly do that 'Yes'. 

It's all too easy to shove another 'Yes' into the bag of our overcommitted lives.

What was most useful for you? / What did you find most valuable about this chat?

This one gives you feedback, it will give you guidance on what to do more of next time. It gives your colleague a chance to recall and reflect on key takeaways from the conversation. That's when we start learning.

Drop the "Why?" questions

In a coaching conversation, don't ask the 'Why' questions. You put them on the defensive. Rather than "Why did you do that?", try "What where you hoping for there?" or "What made you choose this course of action?".

And by the way, don't forget to ask the questions with genuine interest and curiosity and acknowledge the answers.

"The Coaching Habit" by Michael Bungay Stanier.

The Trillion Dollar Coach

What do Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Donna Dubinsky, Shellye Archambeau and the boys and girls flag football teams at Sacred Hearth have in common?

They, and many others, had Bill Campbell, that passed away April 18, 2016, as a coach, mentor and perhaps most importantly, as a friend.

He was Silicon Valley's best-kept secret.

Without Bill, Google would not be where it is today. After Bill passed away, Google started teaching his principles via internal seminars to emerging leaders.

He worked side by side with Steve Jobs to build Apple from near bankruptcy.

Spending his first decade of the career coaching football, Bill learned that great teams need to work together, and he learned how to make it happen. Being a good coach is essential to being a good manager and leader.

Bill taught business leaders that the path to success in a fast-moving, highly competitive, technology-driven business world is to form high-performing teams and give them the resources and freedom to do great things.

The book is loaded with his lessons and simple, yet powerful, practices and principles. 

Here are some of my favorites.

"It's the people!"

"It's the people" he said. People are the foundation of any company's success, and the primary job of each manager is to help people be more effective in their job and to grow and develop.

Make people flourish through support, respect, and trust. Leading teams become a lot more joyful when you know and care about the people. Believe in people more than they believe in themselves.

Structured 1:1 meetings

Have a structure for your 1:1 meetings and come prepared. Start with a brief small talk, then move to performance: 

  1. What are you working on?
  2. How is it going?
  3. How can I help?

Bill also included peer feedback and relationships, teams and innovation on the agenda. For him, the 1:1 meetings were the best way to help people grow.

Strive for the best idea, not consensus

Get all authentic opinions and ideas on the table for the group to discuss. Sit down with individuals before the meeting to find out what they are thinking.

Failure to make a decision can be as damaging as a wrong decision. If you have the right conversation, then eight out of ten times people will reach the best conclusion on their own. But the other two times you need to make the hard decision and expect everyone to not only accept, but to commit.

Listen

Listen to people with your full and undivided attention. Don't think ahead to what you are going to say next, and ask questions to get to the real issue.

"Don't stick it in their ear"

... he said. Don't tell people what to do, tell them stories about why they are doing it. When people understand the story, they can connect to it and figure out what to do.