If you don’t believe in people, they won’t grow

This is an interesting and true thought of Monique Valcour in the HBR . If you don’t believe in people, they won’t grow, they won’t evolve.

Personally it reminds me on two lessons I’ve learned. #1 was in school. I didn’t perform as expected in Chemistry and after some 6 months I had a serious discussion with my teacher explaining my the implications of my low performance. But one thing that made the difference: Somehow he believed in me. He told me: “I know that you can perform much better..” He believed in me. A year later he highly recommended me to study Chemistry due to my excellent performance an natural skills for the subject.

#2 was 15-20 years later, now being a leader myself, one of my team members wasn’t perceived as a high-performer by the rest of the organization. Literally his days were counted before I stepped in to reorganize. It was time to give back. I told him that I trust him and believe that he will be good in leading his own team and gave him a chance and promised to support whenever needed. He took this challenge – and given the unsupportive rest of the organization it was a challenge. The stunning rest of the story is that he became an excellence leader with high focus on people development.

There are two more articles which – at least from my perspective – have the same idea:

“People stopped trusting leadership when leadership stopped trusting people” from Dean Brenner http://switchandshift.com/11-trademarks-of-rebellious-leadership

and

“Vertrauen führt” from Carsten K. Rath http://www.carsten-k-rath.com/2016/04/06/vertrauen-fuhrt/