How Leaders can Maximize Employee Potential

Being a very results focused leader is a recipe for disaster because results focused leadership produces unwilling employees. Leaders achieve sustainable success when they genuinely want the best for their people and help their people grow. This is about putting people first. Effective leadership is about caring for and growing people to maximize their potential. The product of effective leadership is committed people who are very competent. But how is this achieved?

The Caring part of leadership is fairly straightforward but it is very important. A leader cannot be effective if he is not willing to put the interests of his people first. A caring leader genuinely seeks the best for his people. This is not about being nice, it is about putting people first.

This Caring part of leadership is the first condition that needs to be met. Once the leader clearly cares, she is in a position to grow her people and help them maximize their potential. The Growth part of leadership is much less straightforward because there are more things the leader needs to pay attention to.

Helping people grow is actually about empowering them. Empowerment starts when the leader has identified some role, decision or responsibility that can be handed over to an employee. If a leader wants to effectively empower his people when handing responsibilities over, he needs to do three things for them:

1. Give the Means

The most basic thing the leader must do is give her people all of the necessary means to succeed. Means include things like tools, resources, standards, authority, and time (leaders time if required). Giving the means is about making sure the person has all the stuff they would require to succeed.

If the leader does not provide all the means, the employee will struggle to succeed and the leader will not maximize the employee’s potential.

2. Teach the Ability

When thinking of empowerment and getting the best out of people, most people will jump to the idea of teaching ability.

Teaching ability involves doing two things. Firstly it involves teaching people the required know how. For example, if you were teaching someone how to fish, you would need to teach him how to bait a hook, how to cast, how to know where to cast, how to read conditions, how to respond to a bite etc.

The second thing you need to do is give the why that goes along with the know how. This is often overlooked by leaders but it is very important. When teaching people how to do something, the leader must explain to them why they should be doing it in that way. For example, when teaching someone “baiting method X”, the teacher should explain why using “baiting method X” is important.

Doing this gives the learner an understanding of what is actually being achieved by doing things in a certain way. This gives them an opportunity to master the art for themselves.

3. Hold them Accountable

Unfortunately, when thinking empowerment, leaders often stop before they get to accountability. This is very unfortunate because accountability is very important in the empowerment process. You will not get the best out of your people until you hold them accountable. If a leader does not hold his people accountable, he does not give them a reason to care about owning their responsibilities.

Accountability is really about saying to employees: “I have given you the means and the ability, if you do not succeed now the consequences are going to fall on your shoulders.”

Holding people accountable for their responsibilities forces them to take full ownership of their responsibilities. A person who has all the means and the know-how and has taken full ownership of their responsibilities will be functioning at their maximum potential in that arena. Accountability is actually about cultivating mature employees. Mature employees are employees who can be entrusted with responsibilities, without being constantly chased about it.

So, when a caring leader provides the means and ability and then insists that the employee takes ownership, magic happens. The employee will start to function at an optimum level in taking care of his/her responsibilities. If this process is repeated consistently, the value of the employees’ contribution will expand incrementally.

Getting accountability right is a delicate balancing act and I will talk about that balancing act in future articles.

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