Truth 64. Your team has untapped talent

You don’t need to be a psychologist to know this principle about the way the brain works: You tend to notice most those things that are important to you. If you’re looking for your door keys, you’re not necessarily noticing that your cherished copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the fourth LP from the left on the shelf over the stereo. You might notice the dust bunny under the couch, but usually only if the keys happen to be embedded in it. You can sleep right through the siren on the street below your open window, but your child’s sniffles will keep you awake all night. And if, after years of dreaming, you’ve finally resolved to buy that red Corvette, you’re going to suddenly see a lot of red Corvettes on the road.

We notice what’s important to us, a habit that can be traced back to the times we lived cheek-to-jowl with mastodons. We needed to pay attention to what was going on around us just to stay alive. And to help us out with this essential task, our brains learned to filter out the trivial details. We couldn’t be so deeply distracted by watching the flitting of a moth that we didn’t discern the faint shift of air on the back of our necks as a cheetah closed in to strike. We wouldn’t have survived long enough as a species to invent that Corvette.

We may be forfeiting a more empowered, inspiring future.

Today, thanks to the invention of such things as doors and fast cars, we can afford to relax and look around at more details that our brain would have earlier dismissed as unnecessary to survival. We have the luxury of seeing beyond what we need to notice what we actually have and how we might be able to use those attributes to make our lives even better.

We practice this same survival-level focus at work—especially when we consider who our employees are and what they can do for us. We may hire people specifically to help us with our core business survival needs. But, with that job-specific focus, we tend to overlook the other talents they bring to the team. Consequently, without meaning to, we may be forfeiting a more empowered, inspiring future for the sake of tackling the basic survival needs of today.

Even if you’re still barely staggering along in survival mode, invest at least a couple of hours every week in exploring what else your team can bring to the organization. For starters, take a fresh look at their resumés. Remember that they were probably tweaked to respond specifically to the published requirements of the job your employees ultimately landed. A variety of talents and skills might have been edited out or thrown into the background to highlight those abilities and skills you had originally asked for.

Search the resumés and applications to discover what other talents and passions might be buried there. You may discover, for instance, that you have a cadre of multilingual employees who can use that untapped skill to open new markets in previously neglected communities or countries. Or perhaps one of your employees has special expertise, understanding, or personal contacts in a relatively unique market, but a market, all the same, that represents customers who could uniquely benefit from your product.

All that passion, knowledge, and talent represent a resource that will open all sorts of doors of opportunity.

Likewise, make sure you keep up with your employees’ ongoing development and education efforts, especially the classes they take independently, for the sheer love of learning. All that passion, knowledge, and talent that your employees voluntarily acquire after they have met their own survival needs represent a resource that will open all sorts of doors of opportunity—for your company, for your employees, and for you. All you have to do is just look up from your survival-level tasks and notice.