Your organization may have enough talent already. The real problem is what happens to that talent after you hire it.
The Rockstar in the Ruins
The executive team thought they had solved their problem. They hired a star with an exceptional record and glowing references. She had rescued difficult projects elsewhere. Leadership expected her to restart their stalled business unit.
Six months later, the project was still stuck. Launch dates passed, and two lead engineers resigned. Their star hire spent much of her time chasing approvals. She was solving internal problems instead of doing the work she was hired to do.
The postmortem blamed cultural fit and communication. But look at what happened to her work. A simple copy change required five approvals across three departments. People carried responsibility without enough authority to act.
The company had bought exceptional capability. Its own system prevented that capability from becoming contribution. Then it blamed the employee.
Maybe You Do Not Have a Talent Problem
When performance falls, managers naturally look at people. Who failed, who needs training, and who needs replacing. Sometimes those are exactly the right questions. People differ in skill, effort, judgment, and responsibility.
But there is another possibility. The organization may already have enough talent. It simply cannot use what it has. The problem may not be missing capability, but trapped capability.
Think about how much talent disappears inside ordinary workplace friction. An engineer waits three days for information. A manager spends hours getting permission for a simple decision. A salesperson protects a lead because the reward system discourages sharing.
Nobody has suddenly become less capable. Their ability is still there. The system simply makes that ability harder to use. That changes how we should understand poor performance.
Capability Can Exist Without Becoming Contribution
Capability is what someone can do. Contribution is what happens when that ability becomes useful. Organizations often assume the first naturally produces the second. It does not.
Between capability and contribution sits an entire workplace. Information must move, decisions must happen, and tools must work. People need enough authority to handle their responsibilities. Different parts of the organization must also cooperate.
Break enough of those connections and talented people remain talented. They simply become less able to contribute. What looks like a people problem may actually be a system problem. That is a very different diagnosis.
We Measure Individuals but Produce Results Together
Modern management contains a strange contradiction. We often measure performance individually even when results are produced together. A project misses its deadline, so the project manager gets blamed. Yet the delay may have started somewhere else.
Perhaps engineering waited for procurement. Procurement waited for finance, and finance waited for approval. Meanwhile, every department protected its own targets. The final result came from the whole chain.
This does not mean individuals escape responsibility. It means responsibility should match reality. Before blaming the visible person, examine the less visible relationships around them. The system may be producing the result we later assign to one person.
Ubuntu Gives Us Another Way to See Performance
The Southern African idea of Ubuntu is often expressed as, “I am because we are.” It can sound like a simple celebration of community. Its deeper lesson is more practical. People develop and express their abilities through relationships.
A brilliant engineer still needs useful information. A skilled nurse depends on functioning clinical systems. A salesperson needs pricing, logistics, inventory, and customer support. Nobody produces meaningful results entirely alone.
Ubuntu does not erase individual responsibility. People remain responsible for judgment, effort, boundaries, and behavior. But individual ability still needs a working environment around it.
Knowledge needs information. Initiative needs authority. Cooperation needs trust. The seed determines what might grow, while the soil shapes how much becomes real.
Broken Systems Waste What They Already Have
This gives us another way to think about waste. We easily notice wasted money, unused equipment, empty buildings, and excess inventory. Wasted human capability is much harder to see. It often hides inside normal work.
It appears as waiting, meetings, duplicated effort, and unnecessary approvals. It appears when information stays trapped inside departments. It appears when everyone sees a problem, but nobody has authority to solve it.
The employee still looks busy. The capability is still present. Yet much of that capability never becomes useful contribution. The waste looks like work, which makes it easy to miss.
Find Where Capability Gets Trapped
This suggests a better leadership question. Instead of asking only how to get more from people, ask where their capability stops becoming useful. Look for repeated waiting, blocked information, and unclear authority. Look for incentives that reward one department while hurting the whole organization.
Then make a small change. Remove an unnecessary approval or clarify who can decide. Share important information earlier. Change an incentive that rewards people for keeping useful resources to themselves.
Then watch what happens. If work begins moving more easily, you have learned something about the system. If nothing changes, your diagnosis was incomplete. Learn from that result and try again.
Beware the Hero
Heroic employees can hide broken systems. They stay late, chase missing information, and repair damaged relationships. They remember procedures nobody bothered to document. Somehow, they keep everything moving.
Management sees the result and assumes the system works. But the system may work only because someone carries its weaknesses every day. When that person leaves, the hidden problems suddenly become visible.
Exceptional people are valuable. Depending on exceptional effort for ordinary work is not. If routine performance requires constant heroics, examine the system. Your best employee may be hiding your biggest weakness.
The Soil Is Not an Excuse
Systems thinking can also go too far. Once we notice structural problems, we may start blaming everything on the organization. That simply reverses the original mistake. People shape systems, and systems shape people.
Some failures come from weak structures. Others come from poor judgment or insufficient skill. Many come from both working together. Good leadership must learn to tell the difference.
The point of examining the soil is not to excuse the seed. It is to understand the harvest correctly. Sometimes the person needs to change. Sometimes the environment does.
Leadership Is the Conversion of Capability
Organizations spend enormous effort acquiring talent. They recruit people, interview them, test them, negotiate with them, and train them. Then many pay surprisingly little attention to what happens next.
That may be backwards.
Hiring gives an organization capability. The surrounding system determines how much becomes contribution. Leadership therefore involves more than finding better people. It means creating conditions where good people can do good work together.
Information must move, authority must be clear, and feedback must arrive quickly enough to matter. Incentives should support the whole organization instead of rewarding isolated success. Relationships matter because contribution travels through relationships.
That is where Ubuntu becomes practical. “I am because we are” does not make individual excellence smaller. It helps explain how individual excellence becomes useful. Our abilities become more powerful when surrounding relationships allow them to serve.
When talented people repeatedly struggle, examine their performance. But do not stop there. Follow their capability through the organization. See where it slows, waits, or disappears.
You may already have many of the seeds you need.
What you really need may be better soil.
Credits
This essay draws on Ubuntu, the Southern African philosophy often expressed through the idea, “I am because we are.” Its relational view helped shape the essay's distinction between individual capability and useful contribution.
The systems perspective draws on Systems Thinking, especially the idea that repeated outcomes often emerge from relationships, rules, incentives, information flows, authority, and constraints.
The ideas of capability and contribution were developed through the ONES Thinking framework. Capability describes what people become able to do. Contribution describes capability placed in service of people and worthwhile purposes.
Tags
#Leadership #Systems_Thinking #Ubuntu #Organizational_Culture #Human_Potential
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