Everyone has the potential to be someone great or to do something great. As an entrepreneur, an employer of labour, or a manager; you might be tempted to think people working with you or ‘under’ you are mere tools to achieve your day to day organizational results, and while this might be true to an extent, you need to realize that the same people possess the potential to help you achieve your set goals and reach the promised land of enduring success. All you need to learn is how to harness people’s potential, get top performance from each individual you manage and build a sustainable culture of success.
Here are six steps you can take to harness potential and turn it into a real and sustainable success.
Have a Plan; Communicate it
A concrete plan, timeline, diligence and the right attitude will ensure you are able to measure your success from time to time. If you don’t have a clear cut periodic plan, you might just be living on past glory. Yes, people will do their jobs, money might be coming in as expected but you and your department or organization might still be where you were five years ago. So, have a clear plan, communicate it to your people, and stick to it; it will give you a clear sense of what you want from them, and where you want to go.
Prepare The Workforce
The most common mistake that most people in management make is that they don’t prepare the workforce for opportunity. They don’t give room for people to hone and practice their skills. In order for anyone to utilize their potential, they must practice, they must enhance their skills. You can do this by organizing training, seminars and talks. Also let them practice by assigning responsibilities. If someone is on leave or you need to fill a vacant position, always look inwards first and see if someone else could fill that position even if it will be temporary. By doing that, you will discover some potential you never thought could be found among your workforce.
Create Enabling Environment
No matter how much you try to motivate people, motivation still remains an inside job. This might not sound right, but it is. Know that your job as a leader is to create the environment in which each person’s internal motivator is cranked up to “high” and drives them toward accomplishing mutually agreed-upon goals. Focus on people’s strengths, let them know they can do it, and focus on what is going right at the moment while addressing other things not going as expected. Before you can turn potential into success, it must be turned first of all into performance. So when you see the behaviour that you like and want more of, help build, strengthen and grow it, and watch performance soar.
Tap Into Innate Talent
People have natural talent, and it is critical to tap into that. Don’t always put people in a box for several years. Create room for horizontal or vertical movement within the organization; because everyone has something they love to do, something that feels natural, something that brings excitement and passion while they’re doing it. They may love to sit and analyze numbers, nurture and care for others, innovate and invent things, build things, sell products, develop other people, or do any number of other things. Your job is to find a good match between what they are naturally good at and what you’ve employed them to do. When someone’s natural talents, abilities, and interests mesh with what they are doing, their results are stellar, and it leads to organizational success.
Set Their Mind Free
It sounds logical to keep doing things the way we have been doing them especially if the results have always been favourable. And it is reasonable to expect others to just follow suit, since the model hasn’t failed even just once. But there is always a better and faster way to do things; you might not know this unless you try out new ways of doing them. Let people know what is expected of them, define the end result and the outcome, define clear challenging goals and objectives, define how results will be measured and rewarded, and watch your people suggest new ways of achieving those results – new ways you never thought of.
Know your people. Know what gets them excited; what challenges them, what fires them up. Create opportunities for them to do things their own way once you define clear objectives and expected outcome. Free them up to bring their unique ideas, approaches, and creativity to help the organization reach its goals. Customize your leadership style for each individual.
Help Individual See The Impact of Their Work
If you really want to turn potential into performance and create a culture of success, you need to value individual for who they are and what they do. You need to create a culture that can maximize their contribution. Let’s face it. Not every job is challenging. Not every job is exciting. How then, as a manager can you help people be enthusiastic about their job no matter what their job is? Help them see the benefit of the work they do. Knowing and valuing the importance of work increases commitment, increases job satisfaction, and enhances performance. Helping your people see how they make a difference helps you build a culture of success. Each person on your team is an individual, different from every other. This might include such differences as where they’re from, their values, their sex, their beliefs about work-life balance, their perceptions of leadership, their race, their life experiences, their cultural background, their gender, their previous work experience, their expectations, and their motivation. These are only a few of the attributes that make each of them unique. You can’t treat all of them the same and get maximum performance from each individual.
About the author: Chris Bamidele is a passionate and unapologetic Nigerian, who believes in God and humanity. He is a writer, blogger, and an aspiring Television Director; and an optimist to the core. He blogs at www.chrisbamidele.wordpress.com and tweets @Chrisbamidele. He currently lives in Lagos.
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