Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

They know that the key to nurturing hidden potential is not to invest in students who show early signs of high ability. It’s to invest in every student regardless of apparent ability.

Our experiences in school can either fuel or flatten our growth. Using whatever resources they have, some schools and teachers manage to create learning environments that bring out the best in us.

In organizational psychology, culture has three elements: practices, values, and underlying assumptions. Practices are the daily routines that reflect and reinforce values. Values are shared principles around what’s important and desirable—what should be rewarded versus what should be punished. Underlying assumptions are deeply held, often taken-for-granted beliefs about how the world works. Our assumptions shape our values, which in turn drive our practices.

Dozens of experiments have shown that early interventions can help students facing disadvantages and learning disabilities make leaps in math and reading. But in America, students in many under-resourced schools don’t have access to the individualized support they need.

They told me that although experiential learning programs are a start, there’s another key ingredient for intrinsic motivation. “Reading is the basic skill for all subjects,” Kari explained. “If you don’t have the motivation to read, you can’t study any other subject.” Cultivating the desire to read nourishes individual interests.

Although filling our homes with books might be a start, psychologists find that it’s not enough. If we want our kids to enjoy reading, we need to make books part of their lives. That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and letting them see us read. Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we prize.

One night, over an hour past their bedtimes, I caught all three of our kids with their lamps on—they were sneaking extra reading time in. I could barely contain my delight.

Reading is a gateway to opportunity: it opens the door for children to keep learning. But books face increasingly stiff competition from TV, video games, and social media.

Interest is amplified when we have the opportunity to choose what we learn and share it with others. Intrinsic motivation is contagious.

Unlocking the hidden potential in groups requires leadership practices, team processes, and systems that harness the capabilities and contributions of all their members. The best teams aren’t the ones with the best thinkers. They’re the teams that unearth and use the best thinking from everyone.

In a meta-analysis of 22 studies, Anita and her colleagues discovered that collective intelligence depends less on people’s cognitive skills than their prosocial skills. The best teams have the most team players—people who excel at collaborating with others.

Being a team player is not about singing “Kumbaya.” It’s not about getting along all the time and ensuring everyone’s cooperation. It’s about figuring out what the group needs and enlisting everyone’s contribution.

You can see the bad-apple problem in a study of NBA basketball teams—a setting where players who lack prosocial skills stand out as self-centered and narcissistic. Psychologists coded players’ narcissism from their Twitter profiles. Yes, I’m flexing, and no, I couldn’t find a shirt. When I look in the mirror, all I see staring back is greatness. My biggest regret is that I’ll never be able to watch myself play live. If teams had many narcissists or even one extreme narcissist, they completed fewer assists and won fewer games.

When they have prosocial skills, team members are able to bring out the best in one another. Collective intelligence rises as team members recognize one another’s strengths, develop strategies for leveraging them, and motivate one another to align their efforts in pursuit of a shared purpose. Unleashing hidden potential is about more than having the best pieces—it’s about having the best glue.

Prosocial skills are the glue that transforms groups into teams. Instead of operating as lone wolves, people become part of a cohesive pack.

Putting people in a group doesn’t automatically make them a team. Richard showed that the best groups of intelligence analysts gelled into real teams. They were evaluated on a collective outcome. They aligned around a common goal and carved out a unique role for each member. They knew their results depended on everyone’s input, so they shared their knowledge and coached one another on a regular basis. That made it possible for them to become one big sponge—they were able to absorb, filter, and adapt to information as it emerged and evolved.

Research shows that groups promote the people who command the most airtime—regardless of their aptitude and expertise. We mistake confidence for competence, certainty for credibility, and quantity for quality. We get stuck following people who dominate the discussion instead of those who elevate it.

They know that the goal isn’t to be the smartest person in the room; it’s to make the entire room smarter.

The more reserved leaders came across as more receptive to input from below, which gave them access to better ideas and left their teams more motivated. With a team of sponges, the best leader is not the person who talks the most, but the one who listens best.

Extensive evidence shows that when we generate ideas together, we fail to maximize collective intelligence. Brainstorming groups fall so far short of their potential that we get more ideas—and better ideas—if we all work alone.

The problem isn’t meetings themselves—it’s how we run them. Think about the brainstorming sessions you’ve attended. You’ve probably seen people bite their tongues due to ego threat (I don’t want to look stupid), noise (we can’t all talk at once), and conformity pressure (let’s all jump on the boss’s bandwagon!). Goodbye diversity of thought, hello groupthink.

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. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise.

The brainwriting process makes sure that all ideas are brought to the table and all voices are brought into the conversation.

It takes collective judgment to find the signal in the noise.

A lattice system rejects two unwritten rules that dominate ladder hierarchies: don’t go behind your boss’s back or above your boss’s head. Amy Edmondson’s research suggests that these implicit rules stop many people from speaking up and being heard. The purpose of a lattice system is to remove the punishment for going around and above the boss.

Weak leaders silence voice and shoot the messenger. Strong leaders welcome voice and thank the messenger. Great leaders build systems to amplify voice and elevate the messenger.

If we listen only to the smartest person in the room, we miss out on discovering the smarts that the rest of the room has to offer. Our greatest potential isn’t always hidden inside us—sometimes it sparks between us, and sometimes it comes from outside our team altogether.

In life, there are few things more consequential than the judgments people make of our potential. When colleges evaluate students for admission and employers interview applicants for jobs, they’re making forecasts about future success. These predictions can become gateways to opportunity. Whether the door swings open or slams shut hangs in the balance of their assessments.

NASA missed the markers of José’s potential because their selection process wasn’t designed to detect them. They had information about work experience and past performance, not life experience and background.

The lack of accomplishments in his early applications seemed to reveal the absence of ability, but it actually indicated the presence of adversity.

It’s a mistake to judge people solely by the heights they’ve reached. By favoring applicants who have already excelled, selection systems underestimate and overlook candidates who are capable of greater things. When we confuse past performance with future potential, we miss out on people whose achievements have involved overcoming major obstacles.

We need to consider how steep their slope was, how far they’ve climbed, and how they’ve grown along the way. The test of a diamond in the rough is not whether it shines from the...

schools and workplaces, selection systems are usually designed to detect excellence. That means people who are on their way to excellence rarely make the cut. We don’t pay enough attention to these people and their paths—which are often filled with speed bumps and roadblocks.

Our errors in identifying potential come at multiple stages of the assessment process as we struggle to contend with limited time and large applicant pools.

Evaluators end up making life-altering decisions for candidates who have been reduced to thin slices of information.

The key question is not how long people have done a job. It’s how well they can learn to do a job.

Past performance is only helpful if the new job requires similar skills to the old one.

This is an example of a phenomenon known as the Peter Principle. It’s the idea that people at work tend to get promoted to their “level of incompetence”—they keep advancing based on their success in previous jobs until they get trapped in a new role that’s beyond their abilities. In this case, the best salespeople went on to become incompetent managers, and the best potential managers got stuck as mediocre salespeople.[*]

Even if a candidate’s past performance is relevant to the current role, this metric is designed to detect polished diamonds, not uncut gems.

It’s often said that talent sets the floor, but character sets the ceiling.

If natural talent determines where people start, learned character affects how far they go. But character skills aren’t always immediately apparent. If we don’t look beyond the surface, we risk missing the potential for brilliance beneath.

The system wasn’t designed to identify and weigh the adversity candidates had overcome.

We all know that performance depends on more than ability—it’s also a function of degree of difficulty. How capable you appear to be is often a reflection of how hard your task is.

when we judge potential, we often focus on execution and ignore degree of difficulty. We inadvertently favor candidates who aced easy tasks and dismiss those who passed taxing trials. We don’t see the skills they’ve developed to overcome obstacles—especially the skills that don’t show up on a resume.

One person’s trauma may be another’s setback; one person’s roadblock is another’s hurdle. We can calculate the degree of difficulty in a dive, but there isn’t a formula to quantify the degree of difficulty in a life.

The goal of measuring degree of difficulty at the individual level isn’t to advantage people who face adversity. It’s to make sure we don’t disadvantage people for navigating adversity.

Ultimately, the key indicator of potential isn’t the severity of adversity people encounter—it’s how they react to it. That’s what a better selection system would assess.

Too often, our selection systems fail to weigh achievements in the context of degree of difficulty.

Selection systems need to put performance in context. It’s like having wrestlers compete in their own weight class.

We need a way to assess the distance people have traveled to overcome the unique obstacles on their path.