Liberating Potential
“the highest calling of leadership is to unlock the potential of others” — Carly Fiorina
It’s been said that we exploit a relatively small proportion of our potential. Entrepreneur James Cash Penney wrote “In every man’s life there lies latent energy. There is, however, a spark that, if kindled, will set the whole being afire, and he will become a human dynamo, capable of accomplishing almost anything to which he aspires …No matter what his position or experience in life, there is in everyone more latent than developed ability; far more unused than used power.” When it comes to professional life many people are also operating well below our capability.
In chemistry the concept of latent energy[i] describes the energy that is released (or absorbed) during the phase transition of substances, like water boiling to become a vapor or freezing to become ice. It has been described as energy “in hidden form”[ii] associated with the change of state of a substance. Discretionary energy is a similar property within teams and organisations which can be unleashed with the right leadership intervention/s.
The leader’s job is to liberate potential from their organisation. How ? The author Kent M. Keith identified one catalyst when he wrote “servant-leaders unleash the energy and potential of their colleagues”. Servant leadership[iii] is a philosophy first articulated by Robert Greenleaf as leading through service. Greenleaf wrote that “The servant-leader is servant first, it begins with a natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first, as opposed to, wanting power, influence, fame, or wealth.”
One of the best examples of a leader unlocking discretionary energy in a large organisation using this philosophy occurred when Paul O’Neill was CEO of Alcoa from 1987 to 1999. Rather than focus on a complex strategy with a multitude of interventions O’Neill triggered a domino effect “… by focusing on one thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around one thing, it would spread throughout the entire company.” O’Neill identified employee safety as the “keystone”[iv] to liberating vast amounts of discretionary energy from Alcoa employees[v]. In an interview in 2012 O’Neill revealed that you can access discretionary energy when staff are “treated with dignity and respect every day. . . A down payment on that is nobody ever gets hurt here, because we care about our own commitment to our safety, and we care about the people we work with. And it swells up to into everything you do, so it creates the sense of pride about the organization you’re involved in.”[vi] In an article reflecting on what O’Neill was able to achieve Rodd Wagner observed “when employees believe their employer is aiming to keep them safe, it unleashes the kind of reciprocity that affects more than just the accident rate.” During O’Neill’s tenure as CEO Alcoa’s market value increased from USD$3 billion to more than USD$27 billion and net income increased from USD$200 million to USD$1.5 billion.
Václav Havel, leader of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003, once said “None of us knows all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events.”
[i] Sometimes referred to as latent heat
[ii] The term is derived from the Latin word latere which means “to lie hidden”. The term was introduced by the British chemist Joseph Black around 1762
[iii] The Servant as Leader, Robert K. Greenleaf, 1970
[iv] from The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and in Business, Charles Duhigg, 2012
[v] Initially O’Neill’s strategy was met with confusion and even derision by the market as “many analysts called their clients and advised them to sell all their stock in Alcoa — immediately. One of them told a client, ‘The board put a crazy hippie in charge and he’s going to kill the company’.”
[vi] Have We Learned The Alcoa ‘Keystone Habit’ Lesson?, Rodd Wagner, Forbes January 2019
