I was visiting my daughter in San Antonio last week and we ordered Chinese delivery for dinner. After the meal, my 20-month old granddaughter, Elise, grabbed a fortune cookie and started chomping on it. I looked over and saw that she was about to swallow the piece of paper inside the cookie. When I pulled it from her mouth, I glanced at the fortune and it read, “Help people achieve their full potential. Catch them doing something right”. I was stunned as I use a similar statement in my leadership program. Curiously, I cracked open another cookie and the fortune read, “The best way to predict the future is to create it”. Those of you who have attended one of my programs will recognize those words as part of the leadership dogma that I preach. Coincidence? I don’t know. I tend to run into leadership opportunities everywhere, even while eating Chinese food with my family.

Here’s a refresher for attendees and an introduction for other readers.

Creating the Future

Leaders don’t take the future, they make it. A leader’s starting position is that they need people around them to challenge their mental models. Diverse people. People who take in information and make decisions differently than they do. Leaders make proposals versus declarations so that people feel free to express themselves openly. If a leader does not invite challenge, they won’t get it.

Leaders build relationships internally and externally. Why? They know that there is no reality – there’s just what they and others choose to observe. They know that it’s critical to engage people in conversations that form relationships through which potential is evoked. There is no such thing as fate. What we call fate is the manifestation of relationships with people, things, and beliefs. Through relationships, leaders co-create their reality by shaping the environments around them.

Help People Achieve Their Full Potential

If the people in an organization achieve their fullest potential, the organization will achieve its. Leaders know that one of their critical jobs is to nurture the potential in people. Their belief is that everyone has latent potential. What holds people back is their disposition towards growth. Poorly led organizations tend to put people in boxes, limiting awareness of what they could be, or even worse, weakening their confidence to a point that they stop trying. Leaders affect employees’ disposition about growth and learning by altering position. That is, they put employees in positions where they can learn. It’s the act of learning in an organization that shapes an employee’s disposition towards growth. The tip of a leader’s sword is “learning loops”. Everyone in an organization should be in a learning loop. Everyone should be what I call a “usual suspect”. Not everyone will become the next CEO, but everyone can grow. Everyone can be coached to a greater awareness of what they can be. Leaders coach a “self-directed future” in people by engaging them in conversations that meet them on their turf, with attentive eyes, giving them freedom to choose, shaping insights through questions, co-creating motivating possibilities, and acknowledging the person’s effort and inner strengths.