You don’t know what your people are capable of

One of the most dangerous assumptions a leader can make is that they know what someone is capable of.

The irrational yet highly desirable certainty of ‘knowing’.

You are constantly, consciously and subconsciously, assessing performance. Noticing patterns. Experiencing both pride and frustration in people. You can’t help but attach to how your people are going today.

The truth is their performance today has no bearing on their actual potential.

How do you know what’s truly possible?

The truth is, you don’t.

You don’t even know what’s possible for you – so how can you know what’s possible for someone else?

In every client I’ve ever worked with, one story has played out consistently: leaders arrive with objectives, yet leave with an experience of themselves beyond what they even dared to imagine was possible. In hindsight, their ‘objectives’ were laughable in comparison to what became reality.

What changes in them is far more significant than what they first knew to ask for. Their confidence changes. Their self-understanding changes. Their leadership changes. Their relationships change. Their ability to have hard conversations, ask for more, expect more and become more changes.

They did not know that was available at the beginning. They couldn’t.

They were setting goals from inside the very identity, patterns and limitations they were about to outgrow.

Perfectly normal.

When you have someone alongside you, invested in your growth and development, skilled in developing people through their leadership and courageous enough to be ambitious about what’s possible for you, the landscape changes completely.

This is true people leadership and, because it is rare, few understand what becomes possible when a leader partners with someone for their growth. People don’t grow in isolation. They grow in relationship with someone who can open space beyond what is seen today, challenge the status quo, set bigger ambitions and welcome the ‘new’ versions of people that emerge once their understanding of themselves changes and the risk of trying things differently is welcomed.

That is Unmanaged leadership.

And it's available to every leader brave enough to go beyond what they thought was possible.

It's not leadership that simply assesses performance from a distance, but the kind that creates the conversations where a person becomes more visible to themselves.

I learned this the hard way.

Years ago, I had someone in my team who I did not see as ready for a bigger role. I had decided, with frankly a level of arrogant determination, that he could not operate at the next level. I could see his strengths, but I could also see the gaps, and the gaps were the part I fixated upon (not coincidentally as I did the same with myself).

I never considered him for promotion.

While I was on maternity leave, he was promoted into a much bigger, higher-value role. And not only did he step into it, he began excelling. He brought a bigger vision than I had imagined. Over the next few years, he became one of my top performers and, over and over again, surprised me with what he grew into.

He demonstrated capability I had assumed was not there.

I had mistaken the edge of my imagination for the edge of his capability.

A humbling leadership experience indeed.

What changed was not simply that someone else believed in him. It was that he received different leadership and a freedom to express a vision only he could see: different ambitions, different conversations, different space, different opportunities, and a different invitation to discover what he could actually do.

Once you see that, you cannot keep pretending your belief is passive. Your belief shapes who you notice, who you stretch, who you challenge, who you advocate for, who you overlook and who you quietly stop expecting more from.

This is where management and leadership separate.

Management operates from what is already known. It looks at current performance, builds a view, categorises the person and manages within that conclusion.

Leadership takes evidence seriously, but refuses to make evidence final. It uses evidence to invoke curiosity rather than limitation. It holds the possibility that the person in front of you may not yet be the full expression of what is available in them, then creates the conversations, standards and conditions that allow that possibility to be tested.

Management works with the person it already knows; leadership helps reveal the person not yet fully expressed.

That does not mean every person is ready for every opportunity. It does not mean you promote recklessly, ignore gaps or pretend performance does not matter. Belief without discernment is not leadership.

But certainty without humility is not leadership either.

If you are going to lead people well, you have to leave room for your people to become someone you did not expect. More than that, you have to become the kind of leader who helps them discover that person before they can see it clearly for themselves.

This is foundational to Unmanaged leadership.

Management relies on recognition of the known; leadership creates discovery of the unknown.

If your ambition is to lead so your people no longer need to be managed, you will not lead from a fixed view of who they are. You will be leading from openness towards the possibility of who they could become, while creating the conversations that help them see themselves, understand themselves and move through the world differently.

So before you decide someone lacks significant potential, ask yourself a bigger question:

Do I know that?

Or have I simply reached the limit of what I can currently imagine for them?

Because those are not the same thing.

And the difference may be the future you either close down or help create.