How to unleash hidden capacity in your organization
When was the last time an employee surprised you with a capability you weren’t expecting? Let’s say someone on your leadership team, known for their technical depth of understanding, but not for their presentation skills or visibility in the industry, creates a video about the value of your cloud platform technology in the energy industry. The video generates hundreds of positive responses. Now sellers in the organization have a better understanding of how to storytell and sell the outcomes of running your platform. This leader is exercising their capability, the capability is getting attention industry-wide, and collectively the organizations’ capacity for storytelling has grown. Wow! Completely unexpected.
Examples like this shatter our perspective. They can take our breath away. Perhaps because we were unaware of this talent, our perspective was uninformed and therefore our capacity was constrained. We didn’t know what was possible until someone generated a new perspective for us.
Most of the time we have no idea what capacity and capability exists within our organizations unless we accidentally stumble on it. The inability to take time to reflect, to invite and integrate multiple skills and perspectives, is holding organizations back in processing increasingly disrupted and complex environments.
What’s more, many people don’t know what they’re capable of until they are in a position to practice it. There’s one key reason our current systems and processes aren’t set up for this kind of deeper developmental progress.
We can’t stop running, running, running.
So much of our culture is built around achievement. Achievements can be measured objectively – you either delivered the report on time or you didn’t. You met your goals for diversity in hiring or you didn’t. Because it’s so easy to measure achievement, we tend to put an awful lot of energy into this area. Humans are easy targets for immediate gratification – it just feels so satisfying to tick the box on a to-do list.
But achievement can come at the expense of deeper development. An over-reliance on short-term achievements can create problems – literally changing our brains, distracting us from more meaningful pursuits. Our brains are constantly changing in response to what we do and the things we pay attention to.[1] If we’re not actively being pushed to dig deeper, look further, investigate more, we simply won’t. Which limits our abilities as leaders who (are expected to) cope with and create transformation.
Personal reflection and experience in coaching hundreds of leaders has taught me that an achiever mindset is important. But to chart a more deliberate course, and to develop your leadership capacity in a world of increasing complexity, it’s important to not let the necessity of achieving get in the way of deeper development.
Transforming in complexity and chaos.
As we step up in levels of competence and capability, our range of skills serve us well to a point. Skills are essential for personal progress. But there is a limit to how many skills we can master and use. At a certain point, we must shift our focus from skills development to thinking development. Which is to say, we elevate our order of thinking so we can unleash our full potential.
Here’s an analogy: You’ve got a lot of apps on your phone. Think of them as skills. Some you use constantly. Some you use so infrequently that you forget they exist. And if we’re being honest, some skills are just taking up space, being distracting and bloating your operating system.
But we are so caught up and socialized into paying attention to the skills that we aren’t able to make time to upgrade our operating system.[2]
To develop as a leader, we need to shift from individual output (skills/apps) to being able to bring in different perspectives to solve problems (thinking/operating system upgrade). In order to deal with the complexity and chaos, we need to elevate our order of thinking. We need to shift from achievement to exploring meaning more deeply.
When we are able to understand how we make meaning out of the events and relationships around us, our capacity for holding different perspectives and being a transformational leader increases. And this moment—making sense of what’s meaningful to us—opens the door to new capabilities. This upgrade to your own operating system paves the way to operate more effectively in complexity and chaos.
Unleash the capacity you didn’t even know existed.
All of this can start to sound complicated. There’s a lot to digest. Achievement, complexity, meaning and capabilities—it’s a little overwhelming.
Of course it is. People have devoted rigorous study to these concepts and their application in real life. There are frameworks, courses, panels and discussions on the topic. You’re not going to understand how you deepen your development and unlock capacity, unless you do the self reflection, and take time to process and integrate different perspectives.
One leader I coached recently, made the observation, “John, we have to transform but continue to perform— and it’s really tough to do that.” Essentially, he was saying it was hard to spend a lot of time in his apps while simultaneously developing a higher order of thinking and behavior.
My hope is that you’ll recognize that coaching your order of thinking can have a profound impact for leadership in a world of complexity and chaos. This approach to leadership coaching is designed to uncover capability and capacity you never knew existed. For organizations looking for new ways to compete, developmental inquiry can be the key that boosts talent—and your organization—to new levels of leadership.
What is your experience with being surprised by capabilities in your colleagues? What provoked your colleague to demonstrate this capability?
I appreciate the time you’ve spent with me, reading this post. If you haven’t subscribed to Sparks yet, please consider joining. It’s the one-minute read to set your launch on the right course.
[1] Psychology Today, “The real issue with instant gratification,” Austin Perlmutter, MD, September 2019.
[2] Upgrade, Building your capacity for complexity, Richard Boston and Karen Ellis