Unlock the potential of your team

It is a joyous observation to bare witness to a team in ‘flow’, almost effortlessly performing at their best. Sports or business teams executing to near perfection consistently are rare but within a culture that truly supports performance excellent performance can become the norm with a few, rare exceptions.

It is a challenging feat to actualize objectives and key results. Each team member and each team within an organization must unlock their potential, individually and collectively in order to perform consistently at a high level of excellence

Individuals combining their skills, unlocking their potential, complimenting each other, and understanding each other come together like a rare piece of near-perfect art that is pleasing to every set of eyes.

Everyone has potential yet as Vince Lombardy exclaimed: “Potential just means you have not done it yet”.  Continuous learning, the willingness to learn from failures, strategy, and execution, and unfaltering commitment to a shared cause, as well as other factors, are combined and molded into the ‘key’ that unlocks potential of your team.

Objectives and Key results are stretch goals and not simply easy to achieve, the leadership of any organization will do well to thoroughly investigate what blocks the potential achievement of teams and individuals.

It is simple to author a vision such as ‘ We will be global market leaders by 2030 and Objectives such as to effectively enter new markets, it is a totally different matter to galvanize a team around these goals and to achieve them.

Read more about unleashing your potential as an individual:

https://hbr.org/2008/07/reaching-your-potential

What blocks potential?

Limiting beliefs

Limiting beliefs such as I am not skilled enough, ‘ This team is good but not as skilled as….., we are just a small company and cannot compete, stand in the way of performance and limits your ability to achieve. 

Whether it is individual or collective beliefs that need to be addressed very good questions to ask to pinpoint the source of these beliefs are:

Who told you so? Who told you that you are not good enough? Often limitations only exist within our own minds as it is ‘the inner critic’ that tells us we are not good enough.

As leaders, we cannot afford to limit beliefs to fester within a team. It is up to us to model the behavior of confidence, speak accordingly, and to coach our teams to break through limiting beliefs.

Entitlement 

When the belief has settled that in general all owe us something and we are entitled to everything given to us, and entitled to things not given to us, we are creating conflicts and we are waiting on others to perform before we do.

A sense of entitlement blocks performance and stifles collaboration. The world owes us nothing instead what we owe others is the very best form of ourselves.

Bestowment

Some believe that when a title is bestowed upon them, they must deserve it and already possess all the required qualities required for the title and therefore do not have to earn the title and give it meaning through hard and smart work.

When an individual ‘suffers’ bestowment the belief has the unfortunate side-effect of thinking that he or she can do whatever he/she wants as the title is ‘above the law’ so to speak.

A sense of bestowment results in people ‘resting on their laurels’ which is a big detractor to performance

Arrogance (Ego)

There is nothing wrong with having high confidence levels, instead, it is a requirement for sustainable success, but believing that you are better than everyone else and cannot make mistakes it means your confidence has transformed into arrogance and will negatively affect your performance at some stage.

What unleashes potential?

Empowerment

‘As we look to the next century, leaders will be those who empower others”

Bill Gates

Empowerment is to create an environment or culture to enable others to achieve sustainable success in the simplest way possible. It is not to do work for others, instead, it is creating a collaborative, creative, and teamwork-driven environment underpinned by needed resources.

Empowering others is also to provide the support, coaching, and mentoring required to achieve. Empowerment is also about ‘getting out of the way, meaning avoiding micromanagement as much as possible.

As an example, the co-creation of Objectives, key results, and supporting tasks, gaining and appreciating everyones’ input, is an empowering exercise.

Commitment

The opposite of commitment is the state of apathy. Apathy simply means the individual does not really care and will only attempt to do just enough to not get fired. An essential element of the engagement levels of team members is their commitment to the organization and its objectives.

It is an individual decision to what degree an individual will be committed. This decision is however influenced by several factors that the leadership of an organization has control over such as, but not limited to :

Purpose

A company in the beauty industry’s collective purpose might be to make people (the consumer) feel confident and beautiful and enjoy life more. If this purpose is sincere, often discussed, and a large percentage of the companies’ employees carry this purpose in their hearts, it will drive up the energy levels of team members to perform as –

A sense of purpose provides meaning to work and makes it more impactful.

Confidence

It is essential that team members are self-confident, but also confident in each other and in the organization as well. When self-doubt prevails performance is drastically affected and it becomes increasingly harder to achieve the objectives and key results of the company.

Team members must be guided toward high self-confidence levels and coached when it is low.

It is our duty as leaders to create impactful companies and to be impactful we must unleash the potential of our team members.

Learn how to unlock the potential of your team members by joining our courses:

https://okrinstitute.org/course-calendar/

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