Building a Team Capability (7/12)

What is the team you're building actually capable of?

The team built as organism, with each part operating in its zone of specialty, the whole becoming more resilient and capable because of that diversity, doesn’t assemble itself. (see my post from last week)

Someone has to understand, or at least have a hunch, what each team member is genuinely capable of. Not just what the role requires, and the skills they were hired for: but what that person at their best, in the right conditions, is capable of - or could be. What is their potential?

Strengths don't always show up in interviews or volunteer themselves in meetings. They may be hiding, untapped, in roles where skills (the stuff you can learn) are being directed toward what was needed rather than what could be possible.

The leader's job is to find the strengths: Those things that are innate to the individual. Recognize them and build the conditions in which they flourish. That requires knowing your people at a level few leadership cultures make time for.

What happens to an organism when every part is operating in its zone of specialty — when strengths are the architecture rather than the accident?
Output rises. Energy increases. Creativity, innovation and resilience — the capacity to absorb pressure, adapt, and continue — increases in ways that can't be coerced through process or mandated through expectation.
You can't optimize your way to that through processes or tools. You can't hire your way to it either.

You build it. Deliberately. From the inside out.

What do you actually know about what each person on your team is genuinely capable of?