Get out of your way!

If you want results you’ve never achieved, you’ll have to do things you’ve never done.

Sponsoring a risky project, taking a big promotion, giving responsibilities away to increase the horsepower of the entire team etc. Challenges like these all have a tangible link to raising productivity. So what's not to love?

Well, it’s called the comfort zone for a reason, and most people don’t love being uncomfortable – even leaders. There’s an intangible reason why for example that risky project’s never been attempted, why people don’t apply for jobs they can do, and struggle to delegate.

There’s a rich seam of untapped productivity that lies inside most of your people and that’s because it lies outside their comfort zone. Your job is to help them get out there and mine it.

What’s the issue?

Turning ideas into outcomes is a road paved with resources, plans, commitments, numbers, communications and objectives. But it’s also paved with something you won’t find in any business case or project plan: self-doubt.

Self-doubt is part of the human experience, a self-protecting mechanism refined over tens of thousands of years to stop us straying too far from ‘here’. Change is perceived as a potential threat to our security, and big productivity change is perceived as a big threat.

The problem is, our ‘negativity bias’ suffocates our ability to see that it’s a big opportunity too. We find it much easier to list 10 reasons we shouldn’t aim for the stars than 1 reason we should.

The only thing a leader has to do in order to be ineffective is to avoid dealing with self-doubt. Taking someone’s self-assessment about their abilities at face-value is the quick and easy option when your ‘to do’ list is longer than a giraffe’s neck. So you default to: ‘you don’t think you can? Ok, I agree’.

But hold on. You’re prepared to spend time, money and effort disrupting the organisation to automate and digitise your business. But you won’t slow down long enough to explore people’s self-doubt to help them realise (and help you harness) more of their potential. Why?

Well, if self-doubt is uncomfortable to talk about, it’s just as uncomfortable to ask about. After all, it involves things like trust, vulnerability, emotions, and ultimately the courage needed for (quite literally) transformational change – from self-doubt to self-belief.

Against all that, productivity seems so much easier to achieve by just buying a few robots, some software and an Agile consultant.

Consider this

Firstly, look in the mirror. Are you holding you back in any way? Are you fully pushing the boundaries of what you’re capable of? Are you doing uncomfortable things to grow?

Because if you’re going to tackle others’ self-doubt, it’s a good idea to start with yourself-doubt.

And then think about how your team would answer those questions. Imagine the latent horsepower that you’re paying for that is within your control, but currently beyond your grasp because of their misguided self-perceptions.

Take the time to assess every one of your direct reports and consider how much more you think they could do – independently of what they think they can do. Think about their best work, that peak performance that briefly gave you a peak into their potential, and imagine what they could do if they operated at or near – or even beyond – that level, more of the time.

Try this

Don’t believe everything your people tell you (or themselves), because there’s a good chance they’re better than that. Help them believe in themselves by taking the time to explore and expel what’s holding them – and your team’s productivity – back.

At HPC, we developed Adaptability Based Leadership with the express purpose of raising productivity through more engaged, better led staff. If that approach resonates, contact me and let’s get you started on the next phase of your journey towards mastering leadership.