Organizations should strive to create the conditions for people to meet their full potential. For one, it is the right thing to do – it is the respectful way to treat people. And for any work that requires creativity, which is a significant percentage of the work being done, you get better performance from people if you are enabling them to strive for their full potential (Pink 2009).

Enabling people to strive for their full potential is easy to say and very hard to do. Too often, having a pre-existing “great culture” or “leader(s) who get it” are necessary conditions to get the results you expect when using lean. While this has led to recognition of the importance of engaging and developing people, many are still struggling or not seriously attempting the daily intention to put it into practice. If you are deliberate in how you use lean you can create the conditions to build a “great culture” and develop “leaders who get it.”

We need frameworks to structure our thinking to enable people to strive for their full potential. Frameworks from psychology, which is the study of human behavior, can be useful to give us the structure we need to deliberately enable people. This starts with understanding individual needs. To strive for their full potential, people require their needs for Purpose, Autonomy, and Mastery to be addressed (Pink 2009). Being able to focus on these needs is predicated on basic and psychological needs having been met (Maslow 1943). The first step is to understand where people are in having their needs met. Then, if their basic and psychological needs aren’t met, we should focus on enabling them to meet those needs starting with their basic needs. If their basic and psychological needs are met, we can focus on enabling them to achieve self-actualization. Self-actualization builds on itself leading to better and better performance, enabling people to strive for their full potential. The needs that enable self-actualization are Purpose, Autonomy, and Mastery.

At the simplest level, Purpose is about understanding the value in your work – what is the meaning of it. The more you can connect to something bigger than yourself the more you are fulfilling this need. Autonomy is about having control over your work. This doesn’t mean let people do whatever they want whenever they want, but how can we create the conditions for people to have control over their work. For example, enabling people to improve their work and update standards gives them control over their work. Some companies go as far as to give x% of time to let people pursue the projects they want to. The need for Mastery at its essence is about learning / skill development. This is most powerful when it is something that you are striving to be your best at. Though, you can also get some of the essence of the need for learning when learning or improving in any skill. During my covid-19 shut-in lifestyle, I found it rewarding to fix my dryer and do basic electrical and plumbing work. I will never be a master in these areas, though it contributed towards fulfilling my need for skill development. This work also contributed to fulfilling my needs for Autonomy and Purpose. It was my choice to do these projects and I wanted to be able to dry my clothes, bring my outlets up to code, and to not have leaky faucets. 

We are most effectively fulfilling our needs for Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose when they build on each other propelling us towards our full potential. I experience this when writing. I don’t love writing and I do it because it is an important and necessary part of my Purpose to share knowledge to make it easier to enable people to reach their full potential. It is also a phenomenal way to refine thinking, which is important to me and part of my pursuit of Mastery. My skill at writing keeps getting better and better through writing, editing, and collaborating with others. And Autonomy is really important for motivation to write and to write well. If there is a topic I want to write about, I will get up early and spend hours putting words to paper – I might even go so far as to say that I love writing under these conditions. If there is something I need to write about that I don’t want to write, it is the most painful thing I can do and the end product isn’t very good – these are the conditions under which I hate writing.

Creating the conditions for people to strive for their full potential is a respectful way to lead. And to get the best performance from people and the results you expect, you have to be deliberate about how people’s needs are being addressed. When you are setting up an experiment or using or reflecting on using lean methodology, you need to be explicit on how you are enabling people to fulfill their needs for Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. When you are deliberate in how you are enabling people, you can create the conditions for building a “great culture” and developing “leader(s) who get it.”

How will you create the conditions to enable people to strive for their full potential?

For more on related concepts including the connection of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose to other frameworks and how they all connect to lean can be found in this post about leading with respect to enable people to reach their full potential.