“How do I grow other people?”
Leaders genuinely want to know how. Unfortunately, I think the question itself gets us into trouble.
Inspire them, share your own success story, give them advice. These are all logically defensible—and occasionally help. But they also keep us busy imagining how we can change someone else.
Sometimes we get sneaky about it. Drop a hint. Tell a carefully selected story about a past struggle. Tidy it up, maybe invent a few details, so the lesson lands.
We aren’t sharing it because it's still bothering us. We are sharing it because we imagine it changing someone else.
But I've observed a more natural way people can evolve together.
My old basketball team organically did this. We rode home together and talked about the matches that day. No one was trying to inspire or motivate anyone else. Each person just shared, if they wanted to, something that happened in the match that bugged them about their own performance.
Not a situation they had already perfectly overcome or intellectually resolved. Something recent, raw, unresolved.
And we didn’t seize the opportunity to advise that person into oblivion. We just listened, and the energy from that one person working on their own puzzle spilled over into someone else, who suddenly recalled something they did that completely failed.
If I had to describe the feeling, it was like the energy my buddy was getting from trying to understand his own problem in front of me triggered memories in me. Then I wanted to puzzle out my own screw-up, and get better.
He wasn’t telling his story to get me to do that. He had something of his own to figure out.
Advice wasn’t banned, but it was not the first go-to, and it sometimes never came.
It felt like we were all in overlapping silos, influencing each other just by working on ourselves. Each person had their own puzzle, but somehow being together helped us grow.
I have seen this exact phenomenon in business as well. Personally, I find it way more energizing than being given advice or hearing someone’s polished account of how they succeeded.
But there is a trap here. If I take this observation and decide, “Right, I’ll share an unresolved failure so other people start working on themselves,” I am back to trying to grow other people. I have just found a subtler way to do it. Even if the story is completely true.
What made those rides home different was that nobody was using their own development as a technique for someone else’s. We were bothered by our own performance, curious about what happened, and wanted to get better.
Teaching, advice, and success stories all have their place. But I think I prefer defaulting to mutually influencing silos first.
I have plenty of things of my own that still need figuring out. Perhaps I don’t need to turn those into lessons for everyone else.
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