Unlocking the Potential of Others

“The highest calling of leadership is to unlock the potential of others.”

This was spoken by Carly Fiorina at the recent Global Leadership Summit I attended. She is the former CEO of HP and now heads up several non profits. She was one of the most impressive speakers in a star-studded lineup.

I love her focus on leadership being geared towards developing others.

So many of our corporate, political, and even religious leadership examples are self focused. Focusing on developing others is actually is common sense.

Fiorina shared, “An organization cannot achieve potential unless people in it achieve theirs.”

Without developing people, our team will never reach the heights possible.

Releasing leaders includes delegation with trust, a humility to see the potential in others, and having a plan of succession so your organization outlive you.

Taking people on a journey is not always easy to do.

In an organization or a team, you always have different groups with different motivations. Carly shared the following groups:

20 percent are Change Warriors. They get what you are trying to accomplish and will go for it.
20 percent are “Hell No I Won’t Go” types.
60 percent are Skeptics, waiting to see what will happen. We need to move this group and convert them to Change Warriors.

She closed her talk with a really interesting series of thoughts on the benefit of faith in God in leadership.

She shared how A love of god makes leadership easier. “Faith gives us the humility to say it’s not about us, it challenges us to serve, to have empathy, and to be optimistic.””

You have to have faith in others to unlock the potential of others. Faith in God makes it easier to love people and see both their value and where they could go.

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