The idea of full employee potential is largely a crock of BS, because that would theoretically imply 100% given to an organization instead of a life, and such a person would be boring as hell and probably have a heart attack on an elliptical machine at age 46. There is “full potential within contextual reason,” however, and I think that’s probably akin to how bosses think of “A-Players,” even though we all realize that many bosses anoint C-Players as “A-Players” if they get the right crap off the boss’ plate. (More on that here.)
There are a million theories on what would constitute “full potential” for employees, and I’ve blogged about hundreds of them over the years. Here’s a new article from people at some Yale Emotional Center and they claim the following:
- They are clear about what they are expected to do.
- They are willing to ask questions and feel safe doing so.
- They are not overwhelmed with rules about how the work has to be done or with unproductive meetings.
- Their organization supports creative problem solving (e.g., implementing employee suggestions for improvements) and provides rewards and recognition for jobs well done.
- Supervisors notice and acknowledge employee feelings, understand how their decisions will impact employees, and help them manage their emotions.
- They see purpose and meaning in their work and are committed to their organization.
In other words: job role, psychological safety, lack of bullshit process, ability to experiment, better management with a side of emotions, and general sense of being more than a drone.
What normally gets in the way of those bullets? These bullets:
- Managers clueless about how work gets done.
- Managers focused on their own incentives and not people development.
- An over-focus on being busy.
- An over-focus on task work as defining yourself as “someone who executes.”
- People not knowing priorities or strategy.
- Asshole co-workers.
A lot of these things can ultimately be fixed by better hiring and more logical promotion. The absolutely amazing thing about modern work is that hiring and promotion are both areas we keep claiming are data-driven, but they’re not. You get hired almost off of luck, or some shitty algorithm some tech bro wrote up. You get promoted off of proximity to the power core, ship/sell ability, and ass-kissing. There is no real “data” to either silo, but it comforts our meager minds to claim there is, so we keep doing it.
So, short answer to “helping employees achieve full potential at work” is: hire better, support them better, and advance them (and their potential supervisors) at a logical time, based on emotional connections/relationships and not how much a guy ships.
None of these things are possible in most orgs, because if you tried to promote Jim off the fact that he’s respected, Bob — who sells ice to the eskimos — could get pissed, and start talking to a competitor. Now we have significant issues. In reality Bob shouldn’t want to be a manager and just go to his bosses and change his commission structure, but Bob doesn’t always think clearly. These are the general pitfalls of how white-collar is structured: it’s all tremendously short-term and based on supposedly measurable output, but the only silos with truly measurable output are Sales and Operations, so everyone else kinda has to take a number or find a different path around the edges.
Now hybrid work has arrived at the pub. This will be messy because some people will be in-office, and you assume the execs will largely be in-office when they’re not chasing deals or chasing vacation, and the people who are in-office will be seen more, and thus get more opportunities, whereas Lucy didn’t come in because her mom lives with her and needs help on the stairs, and now Lucy is essentially discriminated against (not really, it’s not a protected class yet) for making a life choice over a work choice, and that’s why people burn out.
The essential problem, thus, is that for “full potential” to be possible, we’d have to completely wholesale scrap how organizations are managed, run, thought about, developed, built, and advanced. We keep adopting the narrative that the next generation will change that, but until we strip income from opportunity and income from relevance (Can Dogecoin do that?), it’s going to be hard. If you want three kids and a big house, you need money to do that. Without the money, that’s more challenging. The only way to get more money is managerial track, often. When you hit managerial track, are you worried about the three kids and the house, or are you worried about the emotional contagion of your direct reports? Right.
The best that organizations can realistically do is:
- Provide a diverse environment for people to work in.
- Pay them consistently and on-time, and somewhat fairly.
- Advance people with empathy periodically.
- Keep driving revenue so that layoffs aren’t a constant threat.
- Let people take time off, spend time with new children, and leave work when they’ve achieved their responsibilities.
- Remove the 11pm email badge of honor.
If an organization did even 3-4 of those bullets, most employees inside it would feel they were operating semi-near “full potential.”
It’s not simple, but it’s over-complicated and short-sighted too often, and that’s where we trip over ourselves.
