Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

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.

The reform began with overhauling how teachers were recruited and trained. Unlike Norway, Finland started requiring all teachers to complete master’s degrees offered at top universities. That attracted highly motivated, mission-driven candidates. They got advanced training in evidence-based practices, many of which were pioneered in other countries. They also paid teachers well. These values and practices didn’t transform the culture overnight. In the early 1990s, a new leader came in and called for another set of dramatic changes to create “a new culture of education.” Policymakers started engaging teachers and students in a collaborative effort to define their ideal culture. They articulated a new assumption—teachers were trusted professionals—and supported it by introducing practices that gave teachers freedom and flexibility to shape a previously rigid curriculum.

Students who made significant progress didn’t have better teachers. They just happened to have the same teacher for two years in a row.

Benjamin Franklin famously observed that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

This is another practice backed by research: much like they do for adults, short activity breaks are known to improve children’s attention and some aspects of their learning.

Because Finnish educators assume the most important lesson to teach children is that learning is fun. It’s an assumption supported by evidence. Research in the United Kingdom reveals that students who enjoy school at age six go on to earn higher standardized test scores at sixteen—even after controlling for their intelligence and socioeconomic status.

Extensive evidence shows that the wellspring of intrinsic motivation is having the freedom of opportunity to explore our interests.

Cultivating the desire to read nourishes individual interests.

Finnish students don’t take a single standardized test until the end of high school, when they’re ready to apply to college.

The best teams aren’t the ones with the best thinkers. They’re the teams that unearth and use the best thinking from everyone.

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.

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.

When we select leaders, we don’t usually pick the person with the strongest leadership skills. We frequently choose the person who talks the most. It’s called the babble effect. 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.

It’s not just the loudest voices who rise to lead even if they aren’t qualified. The worst babblers are the ball hogs. In many cases, the people with the poorest prosocial skills and the biggest egos end up assuming the mantle—at a great cost to teams and organizations.

Research demonstrates that when organizations have cultures that prize results above relationships, if they have a leader who puts people first, they actually achieve greater performance gains. When everyone is scrambling to make a rapid rescue, you want someone in charge who cares about everyone.

When teams were relatively reactive, waiting for direction from above, extraverts drove the best results. They asserted their visions and motivated teams to follow their lead.

when teams were proactive, bringing many ideas and suggestions to the table, it was introverts who led them to achieve greater things. 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 ...

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: ‘meetings.’ ”

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.

another key to collective intelligence is balanced participation.[*2]

Collective intelligence begins with individual creativity.

In most workplaces, opportunity exists on a ladder. The person immediately above you is in charge of decisions about your growth. Your direct boss sets your job description, vets your suggestions, and determines your readiness for promotion. If you can’t get your boss to hear you out, your proposal is toast. The system is simple. But it’s also stupid—it gives one individual far too much power to shut creativity down and shut people up. A single no is enough to kill an idea—or even stall a career.

In a typical organization, those protests would have been enough to squash the idea. But Gore has a lattice system. Whenever you have an idea, you’re granted the freedom to go to a range of different senior people. To get your project off the ground, all you need is one leader who’s willing to sponsor it.

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.

It’s not clear whether they’re more capable or more motivated to use prosocial skills, but there’s a case to be made that women tend to instill these skills in their teams. Both economists and psychologists find that good team players motivate the rest of the group to contribute more. And when a law professor studied corporate boardroom dynamics, he found that as women joined Norwegian boards, they were more likely to actually read the materials before the meeting. Not wanting to be unprepared and outdone, men picked up the norm and started doing their homework too.

The test of a diamond in the rough is not whether it shines from the start, but how it responds to heat or pressure.

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

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.[*2]

Yet 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.

Social scientists have long found that people can have dramatically different reactions to the same event. One person’s trauma may be another’s setback; one person’s roadblock is another’s hurdle.

Instead of looking at past experience or past performance, we should find out what they’ve learned and how well they can learn.

“There is more than one star in the sky and more than one goal and purpose in life.”

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.

Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly. —Langston Hughes

Then I came across new evidence that people with bigger dreams go on to achieve greater things. When economists tracked thousands of people from birth until age 55, the aspirations they formed as adolescents foreshadowed how their adult lives would unfold. Young people with grander dreams went further in school and climbed higher at work. Even after accounting for a host of other factors—their cognitive skills, character skills, family income, and parents’ education, occupations, and aspirations—their own dreams made a unique contribution to how they progressed and who they became.

John told me it wasn’t the magic that helped me stand out. It was the initiative I’d taken in teaching myself—and the courage I’d shown in doing an impromptu performance for him. It was my first interview—I didn’t know we were just supposed to talk, and it was only after becoming an organizational psychologist that I realized I’d given him a work sample.

Impostor syndrome says, “I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out.” Growth mindset says, “I don’t know what I’m doing yet. It’s only a matter of time until I figure it out.” Scaffolding gives you the support you need to figure it out.

I now believe that impostor syndrome is a sign of hidden potential.

The most meaningful growth is not building our careers—it’s building our character.

Success is more than reaching our goals—it’s living our values. There’s no higher value than aspiring to be better tomorrow than we are today. There’s no greater accomplishment than unleashing our hidden potential.

Great last page with takeaways

The people who grow the most aren’t the smartest people in the room. They’re the ones who strive to make themselves and others smarter. When opportunity doesn’t knock, look for ways to build a door—or climb through a window.

Instead of focusing on the way you like to learn, embrace the discomfort of matching the method to the task. Reading and writing are usually best for critical thinking. Listening is ideal for understanding emotions, and doing is better for remembering information.