Every workplace has untapped talent waiting for the right conditions to emerge. Sometimes it’s the analyst who quietly automates half their workload without telling anyone, or the customer service rep whose knack for pattern recognition could sharpen your entire sales strategy. The challenge isn’t that these people lack ambition—it’s that the systems around them don’t always notice, nurture, or reward their extra capacity. Company leaders and managers who learn to spot these overlooked strengths can dramatically improve team performance without adding headcount. Doing so means moving past assumptions, asking the right questions, and making intentional space for experimentation. When hidden potential meets the right opportunity, the results can reshape careers and strengthen the organization from the inside out.
Leaders who know how to spot the sparks others miss can change the trajectory of their teams. Often, the most capable people in the room are not the ones making the most noise. They might be quietly solving problems, turning in reliable work, and staying off the radar, their real capacity tucked away where it’s easy to overlook. Paying attention to those quiet team members feeling overlooked can reveal skills that aren’t showing up in the current job description. It’s not about pushing them into the spotlight against their will, but rather about creating a space where their talents can be noticed, valued, and given room to grow. The starting point is curiosity—asking what more they might want to do, and meaning it when you listen.
Technology can play a part in unlocking capacity too. A manager looking to reduce friction in documentation and approvals might point their team toward resources that make the work faster without sacrificing quality. For example, if converting, editing, or sharing PDFs is slowing down project flow, this site may help by giving employees an easy, accessible way to handle those tasks. When the right tool meets a clear need, the productivity boost is immediate, and team members have more bandwidth to focus on higher-value contributions.
The simplest way to find out what else someone can do is still to ask. Building trust and inviting team members to talk about what energizes them outside of their formal responsibilities can open the door to new possibilities. When leaders let employees share broader interests in a setting where that curiosity is taken seriously, it often leads to surprising alignments between personal passions and organizational goals. A side interest in data visualization, for example, might be exactly what’s needed to improve internal reporting. The insight doesn’t just benefit the individual—it strengthens the team’s collective range.
Sometimes, realizing someone’s potential means helping them reimagine their career entirely. A team member who has shown a sharp aptitude for systems thinking, data analysis, or digital security might benefit from further education that channels those strengths into a specialized field. If technology and protection of information spark their interest, they might decide to choose an IT degree track that builds the expertise needed for high-demand roles. Supporting these ambitions not only strengthens the individual’s career prospects but also enriches the organization’s long-term capabilities.
When you want to move from suspicion to certainty, structure helps. One of the clearest ways to see underutilization is to use a skills matrix to map capabilities across the team. This isn’t just a list of credentials; it’s a living document that captures strengths, side skills, and even budding interests that haven’t been put to work yet. By visualizing where skills overlap, where gaps exist, and where potential outstrips the current role, leaders can start thinking strategically about reassignments or new projects. The point isn’t to stretch people thin, but to give them opportunities that play to their best work and encourage them to take ownership of new territory.
For some employees, the disconnect isn’t that their skills are invisible—it’s that they’ve never been given specific, actionable feedback that links their actions to outcomes. A manager who can give feedback tied to visible impact helps team members understand why their contributions matter, and where their strengths are most valuable. This kind of feedback works best when it’s timely, tied to actual events, and specific enough to show a clear line between effort and effect. When people see how their work changes results, they’re more likely to step into new challenges with confidence.
In other cases, you don’t uncover hidden abilities until someone gets to work in an unfamiliar environment. One way to make that happen without disrupting the organization is to introduce temporary cross-functional projects that run for just a few weeks or months. This can be done through internal talent marketplaces, short-term collaborations, or shadowing arrangements that expose people to new workflows. The experience often triggers fresh thinking for the employee and the teams they interact with, revealing skills that might never have emerged in a routine schedule.
Unlocking underutilized talent isn’t just a matter of efficiency—it’s about shaping an environment where people feel seen and valued for more than their current job title. Leaders who commit to noticing quiet strengths, structuring opportunities for growth, and creating space for personal passions often find that the payoff extends far beyond individual performance. The organization gains adaptability, depth, and resilience when its people are encouraged to stretch into new skills and perspectives. Even small shifts, like targeted feedback or short-term project rotations, can uncover capabilities that might otherwise remain hidden.
Look Before you Leap
Going outside involves a search, which can take six months to complete, at a cost of $100K. The newly hired candidate generally comes in at a salary that is 20% higher than what is typical of promoting internally. If the newly hired executive is male, and the internal candidate is female, you have a potential gender equity issue on hand.Consider the Time to Impact
It seems to me that the comparison between the unknown executive from the outside and the not-quite-ready internal candidate misses a key component. Yes, your current employee may not be ready now, but how will they do a year from now, when you can expect the outside exec is beginning to make an impact? If you coached your inside option up, where might they be in six, nine or twelve months? If you have reason to believe they can be making a similar contribution, shouldn’t you consider a lower risk option?Here is a graphic look at the options.
When Buying Beats Building
I have stated my bias for home-grown solutions. There are times when an external hire is absolutely the right thing to do. Here are few of those situations, and the actions you might take:A Closing Controversy
If you ask a team member to fill a leadership role for months and you are considering them for the position permanently, give them an interim title.C-Suite Coaching is personalized mentorship designed specifically for senior executives, helping them enhance leadership skills, navigate complex business challenges, and maximize their impact within the organization.
We carefully assess each executive’s role, industry, and development needs, then pair them with a mentor from our network who has relevant experience and insight to provide tailored guidance.
Executives engage in confidential one-on-one sessions, usually bi-monthly, where they explore challenges, set goals, and receive actionable feedback. Mentors remain accessible for urgent support between sessions.
We use regular progress reviews and feedback from both executives and their organizations to track growth, adjust plans, and ensure coaching delivers meaningful leadership and business outcomes.
Eighty-four percent of Fortune 500 companies have formal mentoring programs in place. All companies within the Fortune 50 have formal mentoring programs. And a recent LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report ranked mentoring as the top learning and development tool for career development. Clearly, the value of mentoring has become very well understood.
It’s expected that an organization’s senior managers will mentor their more junior colleagues. If we assume that we are all works in progress, even our senior leadership would benefit from mentoring, but it seldom happens in practice for two reasons: First, there is a few people of higher rank within the company to mentor a leader. Second, it’s difficult for senior people to make themselves vulnerable with a colleague, a necessary condition for professional growth.
Here are five alternatives to traditional internal mentoring for executives:
Contents:
Introduction and history: 0:00
Mentoring’s role in professional growth 9:45
Benefits of mentoring 22:50
How to start a mentoring program 41:55
Phases of mentorship relationships 1:02:50
Mentoring best practices 1:05:15
When mentoring fails 1:16: 37
The Catholic Church has the kind of well-defined process for succession and continuation that you expect from an organization that expects to be around for millennia. A new Pope requires a 2/3 vote by eligible electors in a sequestered conclave. The electors are the members of the College of Cardinals who are under the age of 80. There is no time limit on these deliberations. Once a decision is made, there is no question of a Pope’s legitimacy.
When it comes to corporate succession, a Board of Directors comprises the electors for a CEO. It sets its own rules on what is required for election. Compromise choices that are not straightforward (e.g., co-presidents or interim titles) are possible but often end badly. For other, more junior positions, the decision-making is more informal, and selections are often less definitive.
The choice of a new Pope is not the incumbent’s decision. When Pope Benedict chose to retire, he couldn’t put his finger on the scale in selecting who replaced him. Being over 80 at the time of his resignation, Benedict wasn’t even eligible to vote in the conclave.
Too often, a leader tells their identified succession candidate that they are in line for the leader’s job. Unfortunately, the candidate interprets the message as their boss’s decision instead of their recommendation. When that candidate is just one of several under consideration, they feel that a commitment has been broken. Here’s a recent blog I wrote on how we make promises that are not ours to keep. Take a look at last month’s blog for more on the subject.
While the Pope can be any man of the Catholic faith, the choice always comes down to somebody from the College of Cardinals. The pool is sufficiently broad, and there are many qualified candidates, based on the experience they’ve gained in different roles.
Spencer Stuart noted that only 56% of new CEOs were hired from inside the organization. Modern organizations seldom have large pools of qualified succession candidates. Executives tend to stay in specialized functional paths, guided by their expertise and their assumption that rotations away from their strengths will slow their career progression. Succession decision makers often value the more circuitous path less taken. If they can’t find that inside or if they want a break from the past, they look outside.
Those not elected Pope continue in leadership positions. They have an unbroken, direct line of authority and teaching passed down from Jesus’s apostles (apostolic succession). This process applies to Church doctrine as well. This loyalty to the organization’s consistent mission is a bond not easily broken.
Those who lose out in corporate succession often don’t stick around. They lack the level of devotion to an organization’s mission that a Cardinal feels. With their ambition for a more senior position stoked, with potential resentment that a “promised” role did not come to them, they are motivated to look for that opportunity elsewhere.
A shared set of beliefs, robust leadership development and a legitimization process are keys to one organization’s ability to select its leader and maintain the continuity of its executive team.
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