Leveraging Potential

Transparency builds trust, as we’ve said. But, why would you want to do that? Really it’s around Leveraging Potential.

We have a lot of people in our organisation and we can be the one smart person doing all the thinking or we can leverage the potential of those that are around us. For instance, I do a lot of strategic planning and we put 20 people in a room and you literally have couple of hundred years worth of commercial experience, and not only commercial experience, but a whole life experience. And diverse people bring you all sorts of different backgrounds and perspectives to issues and opportunities. It’s so much more constructive than one person coming up with a random idea. Could be a good one, could be a bad one. We don’t know.

But, if you have a number of people, you can collaborate.

And transparency is very important around leveraging the potential and the experience of those around you, because if you have transparency and you’ve built trust and you’re leveraging the potential of those around you, then you’re empowering people.

And if you empower people, you get a sense of commitment.

If you’re command and control and you do the thinking they do the doing, then the most you can get is compliance and commitment will be compliance all day.

So, compliance, it’s okay. You kind of get the job done, but things are moving fast. If you need an environment that’s flexible, if you want people to engage and you want to unlock that potential, ultimately, you’re going to get a much better result. The high-performing team will beat the individual all day, and so, protecting the team and being transparent with the team is paramount, if you’re going to get a successful, successful group of people working together collectively to get the job done.

So, if you have people in your team who are rabid individualists and nothing wrong with strong characters, strong characters make great team members, but, if you have someone who’s disruptive, who’s not playing the game, who won’t engage with the team, you have to deal with that.

And the earlier you deal with that, the better.

Have the grown-up conversation and be willing to have the challenging conversation with, “Hey, you know what? We’ve agreed we’re going to do things around here in a different way and you need to work together, or you need to go and find something else to do.” And it sounds tough, but protecting the team from the individual is absolutely critical, if you’re going to create an atmosphere of trust.

And so, transparency builds that trust. It’s all about leveraging the latent potential in the team, unlocking commitment, moving beyond just compliance.