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We live in a world that’s obsessed with raw talent. We admire child prodigies in music, natural athletes in sports, geniuses in school, but focusing on where people start causes us to overlook the distance that they’re capable of traveling.
I’m Adam Grant. I’m an organizational psychologist at Wharton and the author of Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things.
I got interested in this topic personally because I started out as a springboard diver with zero talent. I was told that I walked like Frankenstein, that my coach’s grandmother could jump higher than me. I couldn’t even touch my toes without bending my knees. Clearly the wrong sport for me. If I had judged my potential by that starting ability, I would’ve quit. With an extraordinary coach and a lot of effort, I ended up becoming a Junior Olympic national qualifier and an All-American diver. I ended up actually exceeding what I thought was my potential.
That happened to me again when I started out trying to teach as a professor. The comments from students were brutal. I remember one student writing that I was so nervous I was causing them to physically shake in their seats. Another student wrote that I reminded them of a Muppet, and didn’t even tell me which Muppet. I was not an effective teacher. I was too anxious.
But once again, I had some coaches who really believed in me and I put a lot of effort into studying my teaching, into watching great teachers, and trying to figure out how I could become a little bit more effective in the classroom, and I made radical changes. Lo and behold, the feedback was night and day different.
I care deeply about this topic of potential because we all have more capability for growth than we realize, and if we focus just on early talent and on initial performance, we’re going to miss out on the progress that we’re capable of achieving. One of my greatest disappointments in life has been seeing people squander their potential. We constantly underestimate our own capacities, and we’re also vulnerable to underestimating what other people are capable of achieving. The measure of a leader’s success is how much the groups they’re in charge of ultimately accomplish. That means that if you fail to help people realize their potential, you are failing as a leader.
When I work with leaders, I tend to see them fall into one of two traps when it comes to developing their people. One is that they’re cheerleaders and the other is that they’re critics. If you’re a cheerleader, you recognize people’s best selves and you try to harness their strengths, but there’s good empirical evidence to suggest that when we become too comfortable with our strengths, we start to use them as a crutch. And they can even become career derailers. So if one of your strengths, for example, is charisma, you are at risk for under-preparing when it comes to leading a meeting or giving a speech because you’re so good at improvising and speaking extemporaneously, you may not do your homework. I don’t think you just want to be a cheerleader because you are in danger of letting people turn their own strengths into weaknesses.
I think the problem with critics is they often deflate the people around them. If you’re constantly telling people what they’re doing wrong, people get discouraged really quickly. Their motivation starts to falter. At some point, they begin to doubt whether they have any potential at all.
I think the best leaders are neither cheerleaders nor critics. They’re actually coaches. They see people’s potential and they try to help them become a better version of themselves. They allow people to recognize their strengths but not get complacent around them. They allow people to see their weaknesses but not get discouraged by them. And they remind people, “Yes, you might be pretty good today, but you’re capable of becoming even greater tomorrow.” And that energizes people to want to become better as opposed to being comfortable with where they are or completely incapable of growing from where they’re stuck.