What does Growth Potential mean?

My daughter ran across the term "Growth Potential" the other day and asked me what it meant.

She's long ago come to learn that asking daddy a question usually results in a much longer conversation often with colorful analogies, and the occasional Venn diagram.

Whether you call it Growth Potential, a Growth Mindset, or just "Potential" - even for adults, it can feel ambiguous when you wonder how it can be demonstrated and measured. 

When I think back to the people I'd interviewed, hired, managed, there were 2 common traits that among those with "growth potential". More importantly it wasn't just about potential - they went on to grow.

Those folks managed to find the perfect balance between Confidence and Humility.

Let's start with Confidence: A lack of confidence leads to self-doubt, it delegates decisions, it avoids risk (and really - everything begins to look like a risk.) Too much confidence is a label we often apply retroactively when hindsight is 20/20, but when you're proactively looking for it, too much confidence presents itself as arrogance. It ignores data, risks, it feels threatened by questions, analysis, and it creates additional risks. Confidence (without yet adding Humility into the mix) presents itself as comfort. Being comfortable with others, comfortable elaborating, exploring, and being vulnerable. It's not an absence of self-doubt, or anxiety but it's being comfortable with those feelings. If you think about each of these in the context of job interview, you can start to see how confidence can stand out.

How about humility? Too little humility may look like an over-confidence, but you have a lack of humility without confidence. On its own a lack of humility appears as being jaded, apathetic, cynical, dismissive, pessimistic. Too much humility results in underselling yourself, discrediting your own impact, obliviousness to your own value. If you're talking about the team project you worked on, you use phrases like "They decided" and not "We decided", let alone "I decided." Over-humility can be annoying. The right amount of humility (without yet adding Confidence into the mix) recognizes that importance of luck, the value of others, acknowledges the myth of perfection, learns from mistakes and also learns from successes. Humility understands the power of being iterative, collaborative, consultative, and skepticism.

The overlap of confidence and humility? That's where you see the potential for growth. Confidence + Humility is knowing we don't know everything, won't be perfect, will face risks but and yet, with the right kind of approach that gives space and time to learn as we go, to refine, to iterate, that we'll get closer and closer to success. That's growth.

Lastly, there's another term that I love to use: Excellence. Excellence knows that we can't deliver perfect in an imperfect world, and we can't account for everything. Excellence doesn't pursue perfection; it strategizes for the imperfect. Be excellent.

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