In a recent visit to Australia, organisational psychologist Adam Grant shared his research-backed advice for uncovering greater potential, growth and performance in your teams.

When we think about high performance, our minds often wander to superstar athletes or the intellectual geniuses. But we all have the potential to be high performers in our fields, we just sometimes miss the crucial support needed to raise our own bar.

“I think about hidden potential as the capacity for growth,” says Grant, a US-based organisational psychologist, author, podcast host and Professor of Management and Psychology at the Wharton Business School in Philadelphia.

In a recent visit to Australia, as part of an event hosted by Growth Faculty, Grant shared

some research-backed practices to help employers uncover hidden potential in themselves and their teams. Below, HRM shares a summary of some of his advice.

1. Identify your givers

All workplaces have givers and takers, says Grant.

“The givers are people who are constantly asking, ‘What can I do for you?‘ Takers are the opposite. They want to know, ‘What are you doing to do for me?'”

Givers are worth their weight in gold, as they’re often helping people uncover their own capabilities.

“[Givers] share their knowledge. They teach their skills, they mentor junior people, they volunteer for unpopular [tasks],” he says.

This could lead one to believe that you should exclusively hire and build teams of givers. But keeping toxic ‘takers’ out of an organisation has proven to be much more effective, says Grant.

“If you bring one giver into your team… more often people are like, ‘Great, that person will do all my work’. So effective hiring and selection is less about bringing in the givers and is more about weeding out the takers who destroy the collective potential of the group.”

Action point: Create reciprocity rings

Grant cites the work of Australian researcher Sharon Parker, ARC Laureate Fellow at Curtin University and Director at the Centre for Transformative Work Design, who has helped shape his research over the past 25 years.

Proactive generosity in a work context is relatively rare, Parker’s research found.

“It turns out that 75 to 90 per cent of helping behaviour starts with a request,” says Grant. “Somebody saying, ‘I’m stuck on this. Could I get your advice? Can you help me solve this problem?’ 

“But a lot of us don’t ask. We don’t want to be too vulnerable. We want to look competent and self-reliant. If you’re a giver, there’s an extra barrier which is that you like to be on the giving end of every interaction. You don’t want to be a burden to others.”

Cheryl Baker, co-founder of Give and Take Inc, and her husband Wayne Baker, professor at the University of Michigan, came up with a solution for this called the ‘reciprocity ring’. 

Essentially, you gather a group of people who don’t know each other too well and invite them to make a request for something they need but feel they can’t get/do on their own. The whole group is then tasked to use their collective knowledge and networks to fulfil each other’s requests.

For example, employees might seek exposure to a mentor, expertise to build something new, or support getting a pitch over the line with the executive team.

Grant refers to an example of a pharmaceutical company that conducted a reciprocity ring. One researcher was trying to synthesise a strain of PSC alkaloid, but they didn’t have the budget to continue the work.

“Someone from a different unit said, ‘I have some slack in my lab at the moment and this sounds like it would be a great learning opportunity for my team. We can do it for free.’ And that saved the company 50 grand.

“I think this is a great exercise… because when everyone is asked to make a request, the givers start asking [for help], and when everyone is expected to help, the takers start giving. In one study, we found that takers tripled their contributions during this activity.”

2. Challenge assumptions

Learning how to find a diamond in the rough is a critically underrated skill, says Grant. In one of his former roles, Grant was in charge of hiring a team of salespeople for a travel company.

“I remember one [candidate] stood out to me as being a horrible fit for the job. This guy who applied was a maths major and built robots for fun… it was probably the worst interview I’ve ever witnessed. Afterwards, I made the decision to reject him.”

When he was debriefing with the company’s president and going through the list of candidates, she queried him on this decision.

“[She asked me], “Why did you reject him?” I said, “To be perfectly honest, he didn’t make eye contact for the first 45 minutes of the interview. There’s no way he’s going to have the social and emotional intelligence to be good at sales.” And our President said, “You realise this is a phone sales job, right?””

This was somewhat of a ‘light-bulb moment’ for Grant. He had an idea of what a ‘successful’ sales representative looked like and didn’t take the time to consider if this candidate might have other valuable skills to add to the mix. Perhaps he was neurodivergent, quiet or introverted, all of which carry their own unique benefits to an organisation.

Action point: Rethink job interviews

Grant decided to give this candidate, and others who’d been unsuccessful, a second chance. He also changed how the interview was conducted. Instead of asking them questions, he gave them a chance to sell something: a rotten apple.

“We figured, if you can sell us a rotten apple, you can sell pretty much anything. My all-time favourite pitch was someone who came in and said, “This might look like a rotten apple, but this is an aged, antique apple. And you know how they say, ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away?’ Well, the nutrients that have formed in this apple during the ageing process mean you only need to eat one per week.’

“I hired him and he was the single best salesperson in our company, he broke multiple company records and he studied maths and built robots in his spare time. That was a great lesson for me.”

“When you ask for advice, people become more specific. They become more actionable. They give you suggestions that you can actually put into practice.” – Adam Grant

This experience has led Grant to believe that all job interviews should come with a do-over.

“There’s an entrepreneur, Guy Winch, who… at the end of the interview, asks, “How do you think it went?” And if you weren’t happy with your own performance, if you feel like the company didn’t give you a chance to shine, they invite you to try again. That is an incredible way to find people who have hidden potential.”

3. Normalise not knowing

Often, we think of imposter syndrome as a debilitating, chronic disease, says Grant. But, in certain circumstances, it could help us.

He refers to the research of Basima Tewfik, Assistant Professor, Work and Organisation Studies at MIT, who studies impostor thoughts, such as: ‘Am I good enough? Should I be here? Am I ready for the next step?’ 

“What the data suggests is that the more often you have those thoughts the better you perform. Basima studied investment professionals, military professionals and medical professionals, and [the results] showed that more frequent impostor thoughts lead to more persistence.

“And [it also leads to] better learning because you feel like there’s a gap between what other people expect of you and where you are right now. Also, you know you don’t know everything, so you become curious and start to let other people coach you.”

Action point: Encourage employees to stop thinking of impostor syndrome as ‘pathology’

While Tewfik’s research isn’t suggesting that Impostor Syndrome is a good thing, it does encourage employees to perhaps “dampen the initial stress and anxiety that comes with impostor thoughts by showing that there’s an interpersonal silver lining,” she said in an article for Harvard Business Review.

4. Consider the ‘second score’

The second score concept was first introduced to Grant by Sheila Heen, Thaddeus R. Beal Professor of Practice and Deputy Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project.

“When somebody gives us a D minus and says, ‘Your performance was terrible,’ we try to argue with that and convince them to change the first score. But we can’t change the first score because it has already been determined by the performance you gave yesterday.”

The second score, which you give to yourself, is about receiving an A+ for how well you took the challenging feedback.

“I think about this pretty much every day. Whenever someone tells me something I’ve done poorly or need to improve at… I’ve got to figure out how to prove myself and the best way to do that is to show that I’m willing to improve myself.”

Action point – turn your critics into coaches

Resist the temptation to tune out negative feedback, says Grant, as you don’t want to create a situation where “people are lining up to tell you comfortable lies instead of the unpleasant truth”.

We need to turn these “unpleasant truths” into important coaching.

To get people who’ve given you ‘negative’ feedback to coach you to do better next time, instead of asking for feedback ask for their advice, he says.

“The problem with feedback is people are backward-looking and will tell you what you screwed up yesterday. That doesn’t tell you anything helpful. What you want are coaches who look to the future and tell you what you can change.

“When you ask for advice, people become more specific. They become more actionable. They give you suggestions that you can actually put into practice.”

Need support uncovering your hidden potential as an HR professional? Take AHRI’s capabilities analysis test to learn where you can enhance your skill set and receive a personalised report outlining what your AHRI learning journey could look like. Learn more here.