Identifying employee strengths means letting them try things

A reader writes:

Curious — what's the biggest surprise you’ve had working with such a large crew?

People are capable of so much more than we assume as leaders

I hear this all the time from leaders: "Editorial cant possibly go on video, they're all introverts"

In other contexts, it sounds like "I don’t trust [person or function] to be able to do [skill]"

Trust your people because it’s up to them to find their strengths, and they may go through a few iterations to discover what those are. Tolerate this discomfort of people doing things differently than you would, and letting folks try things, so you can “unlock” an entirely new level of performance.

It’s the difference between a passionate organization innovating, and people just coming in to push buttons and do the work. 

So I put the introverts on video

"Let's just do it ourselves," I said, and so we put anyone on video that wanted to be. Some people really despised it, and were grateful for the chance to validate that.

Some really took to it. One of those introverts got hired as a Senior Spokesperson at our top competitor. A risk she took resulted in a career inflection point.

Leadership assumed she couldn’t do it, and she could, and loved it, and springboarded right off that experience into the stratosphere. 

If we didn't set her up to try a few, we wouldn't have discovered this.

(Turns out introverts are very talkative yet measured, and doing it on camera is more comfortable for them than doing it in front of people. Who knew!)

Oh yeah? Watch me