Are you “operating” on the right level…and realising your potential?

It’s a New Year again, and early January is always a good time to reflect.

Last year (around this time) I wrote about “Setting yourself up to win…in 2018”, with 7 examples of preconceptions that in my experience lead to failure – and what you should do instead.

The last preconception was thinking that your potential is fixed, which I believe is a good subject to dive deeper into – especially in the context of whether you are realising your potential, and “operating” on the right level professionally, so to speak.

Throughout my career and various leadership assignments I’ve seen many people underestimating their potential, with a blind spot for what they could truly achieve. And I’ve seen just as many people with a pretty good idea about their potential, but not really doing something about it, or not knowing how – which often turns into a huge (and recurring) regret, especially as you get older.

So, I’ve always seen it as a leadership task to open people’s eyes to what their true potential is – and then help them achieving it.

Many people hold the belief that “operating on the next level” requires working longer hours, which, however, is not true for the typical (and already hardworking) knowledge worker. If you are already working long hours, the best performance lever is not putting in more hours – with vastly diminishing returns – but getting more value out of the efforts you already put in; that is, increasing your impact and value creation.

Steve Jobs believed that the range between what the average person and the best person could achieve, was 50 or 100 to 1. I share that belief and it is a massive multiplier. While everyone cannot (and doesn’t have to) operate on that performance level, most people can improve their performance, and in my experience, and as evident in our training classes, we see average potential improvement factors around 2.5x. That is a lot of additional value creation, which can empower you and change your professional and private life.

Imagine the impact of the additional value creation. Assuming you increase your value creation by a factor of 25% (1.25x) from Monday to Thursday, you can have Friday off – for the rest of your life…

Read the full article here