Caroline Slee-Poulos and Ron talk about Potential

same. And Merry Christmas to everybody. This obviously is coming shortly after Christmas for you. Today, we're going to talk about that wonderful subject of potential. And I think those of you that follow Learning Without Scars and our resources through blogs and podcasts and newsletters and audio learning and everything that we're doing out there, we have three different missions. The first one is helping everybody understand and identify the potential that they represent as people. And then what we at Learning Without Scars do with assessments and subject-specific classes is help people realize that potential. But potential is a pretty nasty term. I'm famous for saying if somebody tells you at 16 you have a lot of potential, that's a heck of a compliment. You puff your cheeks up and your chest out and here you go. But if they tell you the same thing at 66, you have to wonder what you've been doing the last 50 years.

So with that as the opening shot, how do we help people identify their potential, Caroline, in your view as a teacher? How do you help a student understand and identify their potential?

It's interesting that, you know, the age group that you're dealing with at school,13-year-olds, it's understandable that it's cloudy. It's mysterious. I don't really know. what that means? How do I translate that into my life? And your comment about I graduated from high school, that's it, I'm done. Or university or technical school or whatever the education is. And you get to work. And a lot of people that I've dealt with over my life have said to me, oh my God, what a relief, that's over. And I flip it on them. In fact, learning starts. After you finished with all your formal schooling, you're learning in school, no question about it. The reading, writing, arithmetic type of thing, and then the expansion of that into more specialties and then narrowing it down, whether it's vocational school or university, a graduate degree or whatever. But now you get out into the business world and you get a job. And that job, you kind of have a breath of...

sigh of relief. I still remember the year that I came, that finished school and had to go find a job and could not find one. And we've got the world in the last two years anyways, that's had a case where people, kids graduated from university, didn't have a normal graduation. They had to apply online, couldn't find a job. 50% of the mechanical engineers a couple of years ago were unemployed right after graduating. So getting a job at a company, having the beginning of a career was a start. There's an Amazon commercial now that we treat all employees the same, whether you're here as a summer job or as an intern or as a starting or you're making it a career. Most people, when they start on their job, don't know what making it a career really means. That's the same thing as potential, isn't it?

And that potential, if you look at recent statistics, and they're very much more stark today because of the pandemic and what's going on, but people become disengaged with their business because they don't feel involved. The boss tells them what to do. It's kind of the old school approach to life. I'm going to show you how to do the job and I'm going to have you do the job while I watch and I'll make corrections to you. Then I'm going to watch you do it. Then I'm going to say, congratulations, now work at it so you can do more faster and it'll cost me less money and you're going to get good at it. And that's the last I talked to that employee. And that's nuts. It's absolutely nuts. How do we excite the new worker? And then we've got the older worker, the 30,40,50 year old who's been doing the same job for 10 or 15 or 20 years. How do we re-excite, re-ignite their interest, their joy of work?

Potential to me was interesting because as you know, Caroline and many people do, I was a swimmer. And in swimming, you learn something I think that's fundamentally critical in life. You don't compete with other people. You compete with yourself. How good do you want to be? And that's looking down the throat of potential. It's something I'll never forget. If I'm on the blocks at a race and I finish last, but I beat my best time, I won.

Because making yourself better. Trying to striving towards achieving that potential was the real deal.

Yeah, and that's hard work. It's hard work. The interesting thing, what we have at Learning Without Scars on the website is a tab called resources. And with resources, within resources, we've got our blogs, we've got our podcasts, we've got our newsletters. We now have audio learning, which is out there in multiple languages. And we have a suggested reading list up there now. And we're moving forward to having a... you know, a book of the month type of club with a panel that will discuss the book, which people will be able to sit and listen on. But as an example, pick a book, Patrick Lencioni, Three Signs of a Miserable Job. Having somebody read that and then listen to a panel talking about what we should be getting out of it, I think helps people to break out of that. quicksand of the job has got me trapped. I need the job to make a living. I need a job to feed my family. That's what becomes the pressure point, isn't it?

And then the leader comes in and criticizes us or one of our peers insults us or something in the workplace gets there that's what I call a demotivator. As you know, you've heard me say this over and over, I can't motivate anybody. I think you have to motivate yourself, but I can demotivate everybody, anybody by how I communicate with them. And the world that we live within has not really got to the point of sophistication and openness where the boss-employee relationship is one of equality as opposed to structure. And that hurts potential, I think.

Yeah, which is where the planet has kind of evolved from, isn't it? The last 5,000 years, we've gone from royalty to, you know, tyrants to whatever, to now we've got what we call bosses. And, you know, it's interesting that in the 80s, you had the arrival of total quality management, continuous quality improvement, the Edward Deming approach to life in America. And it was done in Japan first, and that's Kaizen is the Japanese term. And what the Japanese look at in their jobs is that every day they strive to make their job a little bit better. In America, that's a completely different culture. We go into the job, you want to learn how to do the job, and I liken it to the assembly line. I'm going to put tires on a car on an assembly line, and I've got an impact wrench in my hand, and I've got a conveyor belt that's bringing the vehicle down the line, and I'm putting the tires on on one side of the car. And the front tire hits there.

I mount it, I use the jackhammer. Then it comes to the next tire. I mount it, I use the jackhammer. And that goes on eight hours of the day. And now I want to go to the employee who knows how to do the job better than anybody else. And I want to make a change. And rather than the boss instituting the change, the change should come from, you know the job better than anybody else, George. What do you think we should do to make this better for you? And wouldn't that be a refreshing change?

Yeah, I had a case in point where I'm working with a dealership in Russia and I'm in Moscow talking to employees. And there's a man with a master's in business administration, a smart man. And I asked him one of my standard questions. What do you think we should change here to make your life easier at work? And the response I got back was, don't ask me questions like that. Just tell me what you want me to do. The potential had been completely torn out of him. I've got here. You tell me what to do. I'm okay. I don't get into trouble. If I get into trouble, I'm in deep trouble. This is not good.

Potential, I still will never forget going to register for university with my father and I'm 16. And the other night we have dinner and Declan, my grandson, your son is 16. And we were talking about what he wanted to do. And I had to make choices as to what classes I was going to take. And he's got another five years before he gets to that place. That's when he's out of university. If he goes to an undergraduate degree or vocational school, it's another three years or whatever it might be. It's really difficult today, much more so than ever before. And I think the challenge is, like you said, leadership has changed. It's not telling people, it's asking people. Our class, the art of the possible, identifies the leader as the orchestra conductor who's the only person. as his back to the customer. And he's the only person that isn't playing an instrument.

The leaders of the strings, of the horns, of the percussion, they're the ones that actually have to get the musicians to play to their potential. And the conductor has to organize all of those leaders in a manner such that the music that comes out of that orchestra is beautiful. And it is if everybody does their job. companies fail or succeed based on the leadership being able to tap into the potential of each of the employees. That's a pretty powerful statement, don't you think?

I think we should stop there on talking about potential. Have you got anything you want to add as a closing piece?

Yeah, let me translate that. We can all do more than what we think we can do. And getting us to do that is the challenge of potential. Thank you, Caroline. And thank everybody who's been listening to this podcast. I look forward to having you join us again at another lesson learned. Mahalo.