Actualizing Potential
Actualizing potential is a path to a better world: as individuals, parents, leaders, friends, and citizens. My path towards this belief started in formative years and continued through my time at West Point, as an officer and Apache pilot in combat, and as an executive at Bridgewater Associates. Ultimately, it led me to become an executive coach who supports leaders in their individual and organizational pursuit of growth. Today, it brings me to launch LionPoint Coaching, a venture that unites my own path towards reaching potential with that of the clients I serve.
Realizing the value of helping individuals and teams build towards their potential:
Entering West Point, I couldn’t tell a colonel from a captain. Sure enough that distinction, along with strict uniform standards and the New York Times articles upperclassmen forced us to memorize, would become drilled in my head during my plebe year. These tasks were boxes to be checked and chores to be done in the spirit of cultural immersion and lessons in “followership.” In my second year, though, I found day-to-day purpose as I mentored a first-semester plebe, Andrew. Being a successful “team leader” to a plebe can be challenging. The mentorship must account for the unique culture that is West Point while identifying an approach that resonates with the mentee. In that relationship, Andrew and I succeeded together, and I would begin to experience the basic elements of what would become my professional (and maybe life) calling.
Upon graduating, I knew serving as a team leader was the pinnacle of my West Point experience. I was fortunate to serve as the person who helped Andrew see his potential, process the environment, and connect his unique approach to the West Point journey. We worked together in a one-on-one setting, diagnosing daily problems; I provided an objective outsider perspective, coaching him, never to fundamentally change, but to see where his fit existed. Because of Andrew, I learned that my measure of success is a product of the success of those I serve.
Recognizing the importance of pushing towards potential in the high-risk circumstances:
As a young Army officer I graduated flight school and flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, serving as platoon leader for soldiers and pilots alike. In the fast-changing, high-risk context of combat operations, I had to play to my strengths, and sure enough that meant forming personal, coaching relationships to those with whom I was serving. While serving as air-mission commander, I needed to balance this on-the-ground leadership while also flying in nearly forty combat missions of my own.
In an ambiguous, uncertain environment, authority can be comforting, but to accomplish goals it was critical to be my best by being authentic, using a coaching-first leadership style. Reaching potential was a multi-level process for the team, and would be realized only when I used my strengths and applied my natural compulsions. Just as in a start-up or high-growth organization, our contexts shifted daily. Actualizing potential depended on being self aware as individuals and as a team, knowing and taking personal responsibility for our failures. Standing on airfields in Iraq and Afghanistan, the crew chiefs would eventually start calling me “Coach,” forgoing the rigid military social distinctions in a manner I took to be a sincere compliment.
Learning first-hand about the cost to achieving potential when you are not aligned with the context:
When the context does not match who we are, we decrease effectiveness, lose productivity, and physiologically feel it. After leaving the Army and Columbia Business school, I found my way to Bridgewater Associates. For three years, I worked in a client advisory role, overseeing institutional clients totaling ten billion dollars of assets. Although I loved many aspects of my experience, I never clicked with all aspects of the culture or did work that fully aligned with my sense of purpose. Having always set high standards for myself, I took a while to comprehend that my failures were not direct judgements on my capabilities but instead a misalignment with the context.
My Bridgewater experience was essential to my own evolution and belief in the model I apply as an executive coach: failing allows us to harness the concept of “actualizing potential.” Through failures, we learn where we did not find context or created the wrong goals. Ultimately, actualizing our potential comes from stumbling and falling. We take responsibility, get back up, make corrections, design better, fail better. And when we reach a goal, we set a new one, with new potential, pushing a new frontier.
Understanding that improving the human condition is dependent on our collective ability to achieve potential:
Thirteen years after business school and following a breadth of professional experience, LionPoint is my new frontier designed around, what I believe to be, my best context. I had the opportunity to discover this over the past four years while coaching and serving dozens of C-level executives and founders. Today, LionPoint serves these same leaders, who are driving high-growth, high-rate of change organizations on which employees, investors, and communities depend. And we do it using high-impact, high-touch coaching.
Though I have plenty of grey hair, I am not some grey-haired guru who has managed three successful exits. I do not tell clients how to manage their organizations; that is not my job. Instead, I am committed to helping leaders build the context and gain the awareness that gives them the highest impact possible. We work as a team, diagnosing problems and making sense of failures. We take on this task together, partnering to actualize the full scope of our potential.
