Talent, Potential and Respect – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

How diversity of thought makes innovative ideas possible

Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash

When I started my working life, I had plenty of skills still to learn. Enthusiasm and energy for changing things, always offering my point of view and doing my job properly defined me then and still set my pace today. Over time I’ve learned to read the signals that tell me when I need to make internal and external changes, especially when working with more people.

Leaders take on big challenges and responsibilities when they open the door and offer opportunities to more people, older or younger than themselves. They need an outlook that lets them see the potential and talents of the people around them. The fast, unpredictable world we live in pushes us to take on ever more complex challenges, and the solutions lie precisely in other people and what they contribute together.

The responsibility of seeing potential in others demands respect in both directions. Feeling valued is an essential human need. Experience plays a fundamental role and can lend maturity to how we see a situation or challenge, and yet the ability to contribute ideas and innovate goes beyond age or experience.

The talents we build and develop over time are part of that potential. Generational diversity, aptitudes and skills are the greatest treasure a person, team or organization can have. The essence of a team, for example, lies in its diversity of thought for facing challenges and finding solutions.

Once talent, potential and respect are in play and upheld as values, the next part belongs to purpose, or purposes. Beyond feeling valued, our other fundamental need is to find, or guide others to find, meaning in what we do. Together, those two elements will very likely let us take steps that fit what today’s world needs.

We all have unique talents that, aligned with our reason for being in this world, give us a great chance to serve in powerful ways. Respecting other people’s talents, potential and reason for being creates a blend of empathy that makes us grow as people and can open viewpoints we may never have considered.

The path starts with the individual responsibility to know our talents, trust our potential, develop it fully and support others as they discover their own path.

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

This post is dedicated to a reader I care about and appreciate very much. Thank you for helping me become a better person every time we talk.

P.S. This week’s VELA:

• What I’ve been Viewing: The terror of virtue. A TEDx talk by Chilean Axel Kaiser. I liked the range of examples he uses to explain the public lynchings we see on social media today.
• What I’ve been Listening to: Marketing is about values. How to build a proposition around values. A powerful video of Steve Jobs explaining how Apple’s values shape every tool they build and produce to help make a better world.
• What I’ve been Reading: Fixing the Global Skills Mismatch. Another article in line with the one I posted last week on "High-Skill, High-Wage and Low-Skill, Low-Wage Workers". I’m particularly interested in picturing what the future will look like given today’s technological changes, and what the possible solutions are. This recent Boston Consulting Group article is worth reading. I’m also still reading The Future Is Faster Than You Think. I’m going slowly because it’s packed with examples and data on technological changes that will soon reshape our future, for good.
• What I’ve been Learning: Quantum computers. I’m amazed by the capacity quantum computers could reach. One fact from a reading that led me to dig deeper: "The number of qubits in a quantum computer doubles every year….a fifty-qubit computer has sixteen petabytes of memory….an eighty-qubit computer would have more information storage capacity than all the atoms in the universe". The Future Is Faster Than You Think.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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