Rise and Shine

Harnessing high potential, driven talent—part 2

Last week, as a dedication to an outstanding young professional engineer Washington Chimuzu, who has excelled in his career, we looked at how you can harness high potential and driven talent as you develop your own professional development.

Today, we continue to look at some specific tactics that you can employ to maximise the value you get from the highly driven members of your team who have great potential.

Below are five of the key tactics that you can use to maximise the benefit of having high potential and driven talent on your team:

Allow them space: As a minimum, people who are highly driven only need you to give them the space to operate in—a good conducive environment where they can be their best to deliver the best they know for the benefit of the wider team. Make sure they are not complaining and no one places stumbling blocks before them. Such people usually want traction and speed in what they do. Your obligation is to allow them the necessary speed they desire, but without breaking (not bending!) any rules or norms.

Encourage and support them: Remember that the highly driven people are human beings and not machines —they too have feelings and they too enjoy support and encouragement from others. Give them! Let them know that you are behind them and you support them. Tell them that you are with them in spirit and be with them physically too whenever it matters and is possible.

Inspire them: If you really want to maximise what you get from the highly driven people, inspire them into maximised success and achievement. Make them feel nice about what they have achieved. When they face challenges, remind them how they have conquered bigger ones before and remind them how they hate failure and how they enjoy success and achievement. Appeal to what matters to them—usually it is success, delivery and achievement.  Remember also to reward them accordingly. Do not use them like slaves but work with them as partners who are human beings with feelings.

Challenge them further: Of course if they do one metre, ask them to push it further by another half metre. When they dig three holes and they want to pack and go, ask them to dig just one more hole and when they dig that one, ask them to dig the final one ‘for the road’! Keep pushing their limits until your team or organisation has gotten the best of best from such driven people.

Spread to others: When you multiply any positive number by a number greater than one, you get a much bigger number. Similarly, if you can multiply this positive energy you get from the highly driven person, by spreading that energy to other team members, the result will be much greater than when you let the others maintain their laid back approach and low rate of production. Share the lessons and spread the energy, propagate the good attitude and infect the rest of the members with the same kind of enthusiasm that is the bedrock for the success of the highly driven team member. Today, we have looked at some of the key tactics that you can use to maximise the value that you get from high potential and driven people. If you employ these techniques when working with driven people, you will be amazed by how much you will achieve together. Change the world by encouraging driven people to do what they know best and by spreading those best practices to other team members. All the best as you let others rise and shine and as you too shine along the way

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