“Hidden Potential” Deep Dive: Are You Keeping The Door Open?

Creating opportunities on a larger scale requires us to build better systems in our schools, teams, and organizations.”

In the last section of Hidden Potential, Adam Grant looks at the systems we can create to open doors for people with hidden potential—in other words, for all of us.

He starts with the schools taking inspiration in Finland—the country with one of the best education systems in the world known for creating opportunity for all kids, not just the ones who manage to demonstrate their talents early on.

But since this is a business blog, today we will dive deeper into team management and recruiting.

Hidden Potential Of Teams

Team building and bonding exercises are overrated… What really makes a difference is whether people recognize that they need one another to succeed on an important mission.”

It’s no news that a well-performing team is more than just a number of skilled individuals assigned to work together on a task. The level of cohesiveness that distinguishes a good team from a great one is often intangible, and a good leader knows that a few team-building activities will not be sufficient for a group of people to work as a whole.

In fact, I once was a team member on an agile project where we never met in person throughout the entire sprint (it was the year 2020, and we all know what happened then). We didn’t even have a “team-building activity” in its classic sense till we were almost done with a sprint. Yet it was one of the best team experiences I’ve ever had.

Adam, of course, has a perfect explanation for it—the best teams have the most collaborative members.

When even one individual fails to act prosocially, it’s enough to make a team dumb and dumber.”

Below are a couple of suggestions from the book on how to reach your team’s hidden potential.

1. Brainwrite before you brainstorm.

Brainstorming is a beloved technique used to generate ideas quickly. For many years it was seen as the best way to unleash creativity within a team: everyone says their ideas out loud and a facilitator writes them down on a whiteboard. When the time is up, the group moves on to a discussion where the best ideas are selected.

Although this sounds fun and creative in theory, when it comes to practice, the latest research shows that in its pure form (everyone shouts their ideas right away), brainstorming doesn’t allow the collective intelligence to reach its full potential.

For instance, one person can be louder than the others, the group might run out of time before all ideas are shared, or you might forget or reject a good idea before saying it out loud if someone next to you brings up something that you immediately consider to be better.

To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we’re better off shifting to a process called brainwriting. The initial steps are solo.”

In other words, give your team 5 minutes to write down their ideas on a piece of paper or on the Post-it squares. Collect them and share anonymously among the team members. Let the team members conduct individual judgment before everyone comes together to discuss the most promising ideas.

2. Create a lattice system within your organization.

Adam compares a hierarchical ladder system with a lattice one. A lattice system is not a matrix organizational structure. You don’t get more managers on top of you. What you have instead is more leaders that you are allowed to pitch your ideas to and who are willing to listen.

Hidden Potential cites a story of a medical device engineer Dave Myers from W. L. Gore & Associates who went outside their direct chain of command to receive management approval and sponsorship for his idea of improved guitar strings that totally awed the acoustic guitar market. (I bolded out the keywords on purpose just to highlight how far the product idea was from the actual job of its inventor.)

But Adam Grant gives a simpler example too:

I see these systems often in innovation tournaments—contests to generate novel solutions to problems.”

In my previous company, we had regular Poster Competitions. The contestants would bring the continuous improvement projects that they conducted as a part of the Yellow Belt Six Sigma certification. The posters were displayed in the open space accessible to everyone in the company so anyone could take inspiration and learn for the sake of their respective departments.

In Search Of Diamonds

When we fail to see hidden potential, along with shattering people’s dreams, we lose out on their contributions.”

In the final chapter of Hidden Potential, Adam Grant takes a look at the recruiting systems we use to select the best candidates.

It’s not a coincidence that an HR department tasked with candidate search and recruitment is called Talent Acquisition. Nobody wants subpar workers—every employer wants real talent capable of achieving great things.

The issue is, however, how we identify this talent and whether we are keeping our doors open to it.

Algorithms have some fundamental limitations: they rely on data from the past to predict future potential, and there will always be important information that they overlook.”

Now that the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) lies between the applicant and the recruiter, job seekers end up with a new challenge—to beat the ATS algorithm. As a result, resumes become “word salads” of the most common terms used in the job description. And if candidates use ChatGPT or other AI tools, it doesn’t get much better: chances are their resumes and cover letters will look largely similar. Now the recruiters find themselves bombarded by the similarly looking applications from the people who might or might not be actually qualified for the job.

In some cases, this is just an AI vs. AI competition: ChatGPT vs. ATS.

But Adam goes further claiming that even the interviews aren’t often designed to detect human potential and verify how well any given candidate will perform in a new job.

Selection systems need to put performance in context.”

Just like Strategy Safari repeatedly pointed out that you cannot elaborate a successful strategy by performing a simple extrapolation of past events into a predictable future, Hidden Potential warns us that we cannot do justice to a given candidate by simply extrapolating his or her past performance into a new job.

Here are a few alternatives.

1. Real-time work samples: give your candidates the same problem to solve and see who does it best.
   Warning though: do not take this as an opportunity to get free work out of your candidate (something that happened to a couple of my former colleagues looking for a job this year). When you treat people fairly, your reputation goes a long way.
   
   
2. Assess your candidate’s character.
   One of my former managers would always say that he would hire a candidate demonstrating higher emotional intelligence over someone with pure technical skills (even if they are more technically qualified). You can train a person to use a piece of equipment or perform a process. It is way harder (if possible) to teach someone to talk to people or develop a proactive approach to problems.
   
   
3. Give your candidate a chance to put their best foot forward.
   This seems somewhat counterintuitive because aren’t we supposed to put people under stress to see how well they perform under pressure? Shouldn’t we try to trip them to see if they raise any red flags? In reality, though, doing so often leads to intimidation of the well-qualified candidates while paving the way for those who are simply good at interviewing, not at doing the actual jobs.
   
   What if instead, you created a friendly interviewing environment? What if you went even further?
   
   Adam gives an example of Call Yachol, an Israeli call center whose entire staff are the people with disabilities. At Call Yachol, after the job interview is done, interviewers ask the job candidate if there is anything they can do differently to know him or her better.
   
   Would you do the same if you were a hiring manager?
   What would you answer if you were the one being interviewed?

In Conclusion

It’s best to conclude this article with the quote from Hidden Potential that, in my humble opinion, applies to finding potential not just in our job candidates, but also within our kids, our teams, and finally—within ourselves.

When we evaluate people, there’s nothing more rewarding than finding a diamond in the rough. Our job isn’t to apply the pressure that brings out their brilliance. It’s to make sure we don’t overlook those who have already faced that pressure—and recognize their potential to shine.”

So are you keeping that door open?

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This article concludes my series of deep dives into Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential. Next week, I will do my usual book overview before we will take a further look into our potential (hidden and revealed) with our next read promising to land us a dream job – What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard N. Bolles. Stay tuned!

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Title Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash