The untapped potential within organisations
What if the challenge isn't finding better people or better ideas — but creating the conditions in which more of the potential already inside the organisation can emerge?
Most organisations I encounter don't suffer from a shortage of intelligent people. Nor, usually, do they lack ideas. Walk around almost any organisation and you'll find people who can see opportunities, recognise problems and have thoughts about how things could be done differently. Yet remarkably little of that collective intelligence routinely finds its way into how the organisation operates. Why? I increasingly think this is one of the most interesting questions in leadership. And it has led me to think differently about what leadership development is actually trying to achieve.
The ceiling we create
Leadership is often described in terms of setting direction, making decisions and delivering results. All of those things matter. But leadership is also about creating the conditions in which other people can contribute. That introduces a rather different question:
What if the potential of an organisation is constrained not simply by the capability of its people, but by the conditions in which those people operate?
Think about what happens when people learn that challenging the prevailing view isn't particularly welcome. When decisions routinely migrate upwards. When being certain is valued more highly than being curious. When failure carries greater consequences than experimentation carries rewards. Or when the senior leader is expected to have the answer.
People adapt. They become more cautious. They wait for direction. Decision making and control migrate upwards. People learn which questions are safe to ask and which aren't. Eventually, some stop offering ideas altogether. The capability hasn't necessarily disappeared. Access to it has.
From performance to awareness
One of the influences on my thinking here comes from transpersonal psychology. At its simplest, transpersonal means going beyond the individual self. Much traditional thinking about human development focuses on developing a stronger and more capable individual: greater confidence, better skills, clearer goals and improved performance. Transpersonal approaches invite another dimension. They ask us to become more aware of the assumptions, conditioning and habitual responses through which we experience the world — and ultimately to see ourselves as part of a wider system.
Ken Wilber's work provides one useful lens through which to consider this development.
We can find ourselves operating from conditioned or habitual responses — the parts of ourselves developed over time to help us navigate the world:
We often operate autonomously based on our prior conditioning - our shadow
We can also operate strongly from ego: our own needs, opinions, identity, security and desire for achievement
We can begin to ask more existential questions about meaning, purpose, impact and legacy
And we can sometimes move beyond the individual perspective altogether — becoming more able to hold multiple perspectives, tolerate ambiguity and ask“What is really going on here?”
These aren't boxes into which people can neatly be placed. We move between ways of being according to circumstances. Pressure, uncertainty and threat can quickly pull any of us towards familiar behaviours. The important variable is awareness. Can I notice what is happening? Can I notice my own response to it? And can I create enough space between those two things to choose how I respond?
Now put the leader back into the organisation
This becomes particularly interesting when we move from individual development to organisational leadership. Imagine a leader who unconsciously needs to have the answer. They may genuinely tell people they want empowerment. But what happens when somebody proposes something they disagree with? Imagine a leader whose success has historically come from taking control in difficult situations. That capability may have been enormously valuable. But what happens when the organisation now needs distributed ownership rather than heroic intervention? Or consider the leader who says they want innovation but instinctively stifles autonomy, risk taking and demands a payback. The formal message and the experienced message are very different. People pay attention to the latter. This is why leadership behaviour can create an invisible ceiling within organisations. Indeed, the potential of the leader may ultimatley create a performance ceiling for the entire organisation. Not because leaders deliberately suppress potential, but because their behaviours help establish what feels possible, permissible and safe.
From instruction to agency
This has significant implications for how we think about leadership development. If the objective is simply to make individual leaders more effective, we may miss something important. The bigger opportunity is to help leaders become more conscious of the conditions they create around them. That means becoming curious about questions such as:
How much genuine challenge do I invite?
What happens when somebody disagrees with me?
Where are decisions really made?
Do people bring me problems, or thinking?
How much of my organisation's capability am I actually accessing?
What behaviours do I unintentionally reward?
And perhaps most importantly - What am I doing that might be getting in the way?
These aren't comfortable questions. But they are potentially powerful ones.
Creating the conditions for potential
None of this requires an elaborate organisational development programme. Sometimes relatively simple changes begin to alter the system.
Creating genuine space for reflection.
Building coaching into everyday leadership rather than treating it as something provided by external coaches.
Developing psychological safety so that challenge and uncertainty can be voiced.
Moving decisions closer to the people with the knowledge to make them.
Creating opportunities for experimentation.
Replacing some answers with better questions.
And helping leaders become increasingly aware of the effect they have on the system around them.
The shift is subtle but significant. Leadership becomes less about getting people to perform and more about creating the conditions in which people can perform.
Review. Release. Reimagine.
This thinking has become one of the foundations of the way I now work with leaders and organisations. I think of it through three connected conversations.
