What Do Leaders Do with Untapped Potential?
By Sophie Makonnen
A recent Harvard Business Review article on leadership development caught my attention. The authors suggest a simple but helpful tool: four questions to help leaders decide where to focus their growth efforts. As I read them the pieces I wrote a few months ago: Efforts and What it Build and When Strengths Become Default came to mind right away. Three of the four questions sounded familiar: What do your strengths help you do well? What skills do you have right now? What can you delegate or manage differently? We have already looked at what it means to build on your strengths rather than just fix weaknesses, and what happens when those same strengths are overused and start causing problems.
But the fourth question stood out to me: Where is your untapped potential?
How do you even know something is there? Is it an interest you have never had time to pursue? A pull toward something you cannot quite name? Or is it something someone else sees in you before you see it in yourself, a capability that exists but has never had the right conditions to surface? In leadership, this question carries particular weight. Your own range shapes more than your personal growth. It shapes what you can see in others, what you can create for your team, and how well you can read and respond to what your organisation or field actually needs. A leader whose development has stayed in one lane for too long may find it harder to recognise what the moment is asking for, in the people around them and in the work itself. And yet, the organisation itself is not always the place where that potential gets unlocked. Sometimes the context is too narrow, too set in what it already knows, to make room for what you have not yet had the chance to become.
Untapped potential is often hidden and not easily measured by formal reviews or skill lists. It typically reveals itself through slight hints, like when someone supports you without clear evidence, when you take on novel challenges, act on curiosity or creativity, or seize unanticipated opportunities you initially considered passing up.
You might already know what that moment was for you. The real question is whether you have given it enough attention since then.
What Gets Left Behind
Untapped potential is rarely something you chose to set aside. It is more something to discover, or to be discovered by someone else who is generous enough to pay attention, observe, and provide the right circumstances for that potential to emerge and consolidate.
Organisations tend to reward what they can measure and recognise what already fits their expectations. Over time, professionals learn, often without realising it, to invest in what gets noticed. The rest quietly recedes.
This matters in any role. But in leadership, the stakes are different. When you are leading people, the range you operate within shapes more than your own development. It shapes what you notice in others, what opportunities you create for your team, and what potential you are even capable of seeing. A leader who has spent years being recognised for one thing, and one thing only, may find it genuinely difficult to recognise something less familiar in someone else. Not out of indifference, but because the range of what they have learned to value has quietly narrowed. And the same narrowing often applies inward. A leader who has not had the conditions to explore their own untapped potential will find it harder to create those conditions for others.
That exploration often does not happen by choice. It tends to be triggered when business as usual stops being enough. A role transition is one version of this. So is a crisis, a restructuring, or a moment when the context shifts in ways that your existing strengths were not built for. In any of these situations, the capabilities that built your reputation, the precision, the technical excellence, the ability to deliver, are still there. But the situation now requires something more, and sometimes something different. That gap is uncomfortable. And it is also, if you can stay with it long enough, the opening through which untapped potential can tend to appear.
The question worth sitting with is not whether untapped potential exists. It does. In you and in the people you lead. The more honest question is what has been standing in the way, for you and for them, and what it will take for it to come to light.
When the Conditions Are Right
it can and in the ideal world it should. Sometimes a supervisor is overwhelmed and asks you to step in. Sometimes a role shifts and suddenly requires something you have never been asked to do before. Sometimes the organisation itself, or a context outside of work, creates room for capabilities that your day job never called on. What these moments share is that they were not planned. They happened because something was needed and the conditions, however imperfect, made it possible to try.
I think of a staff member I worked with when I was leading a unit. When I arrived, there was pressure from several directions to let her go. People had complaints. The picture painted was not flattering. I had conversations with her and saw something different: a capable, introverted professional whose strengths had simply never probably been given the right context. And she seemed resigned. I decided to follow what I had seen in our meetings.
Sometime later, a project landed on my desk. It had been approved but had no team leader. I needed to act. I looked at who was available. She fit the profile. "Well, let's see," I told myself. I was not certain it would work, but I made the bet and put her in as project leader. The project was small enough to allow course correction if needed. Maybe, I thought, it was exactly the opportunity she needed.
There was immediate pushback. Those who had been critical of her from the start objected loudly. I did not argue. No time to try and convince them. Instead, I put myself as co-leader of the project, not to manage her but to absorb some of the exposure if things went wrong. I moved forward. That was the safe space, not a formal arrangement or a development programme, but a structure that made the risk survivable for both of us. She had room to lead without the full weight of failure falling on her alone if she stumbled.
She delivered with flying colors. Two years later, after being exposed to different environments, stakeholders, and levels of responsibility she had never encountered before, she received an offer for a director level role outside the organisation. When circumstances later shifted and that position became unstable, she had already become someone different. And no one could take that away from her. She rebuilt slowly and is now in a strong position that suits who she is.
None of that was in a development plan. It started with a problem that needed to be addressed quickly. My own performance as a new director was also on the line. The idea was unconventional. The information was incomplete. And I was a new leader, still finding my footing. What made it possible was not just the opportunity but the space to try without the certainty of success. What I did was decide to tap into what I suspected was there. In taking that risk, I discovered something I had not fully anticipated: that how I chose to lead directly impacted what the people around me could become. So, to come back to the question the HBR article was asking: “Where is my untapped potential?” it is not only about one kind of potential. It was about yours and your team’s. And as a leader, you have the power to unlock that potential in others, or to quietly extinguish it.
The conditions you can create
Is it possible to create those conditions as a leader? In my experience and opinion: Yes. But it carries some risk. The potential you think you see may not surface the way you hoped. The person may not be ready, or the context may not hold. Whether to take that risk, and how much of it to absorb, is a concrete choice a leader has to make. Some organisations have learned to build those conditions deliberately and systematically. Some organisations have learned to build those conditions deliberately and systematically. Many have not. Others pretend to, without the commitment to follow through. If you are working in such an environment, the gap between what is said and what is actually supported will be felt by the people you are trying to develop. Ultimately, it comes down to what is within your reach, given where you are and what you can influence.
And sometimes, beyond what any leader or organisation can plan for, it is circumstances themselves that create the opening. I explored that idea in When Circumstances Take Shape, and it is worth a read alongside this one.
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