This How People Truly Grow and Thrive at Work: With Support and Challenge

Thrive:

... "to grow vigorously"

... "to progress toward or realize a goal despite or because of circumstances"

How do we define true leadership?

If we look at the books about leadership you will find hundreds, if not thousands of definitions of what it is (and what it is not). But, when it comes to leaders in the workplace, one of the most transcendental definitions of true and great leadership is when leaders help their people unleash their talents, potential and creative capacities.

The best leaders are the ones who have the ability to bring the best from their people and help them thrive and grow. Isn't that, ultimately, what a people leader is about?

How can leaders help people grow at work? You will also find thousands of responses to this question.

Based on his experience in education, Nevitt Sanford, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, formulated the interesting theory of?Support and Challenge.

Support and Challenge states that to help people grow it is necessary to have a healthy balance between supporting and challenging them.

Supporting people means providing the tools, resources, coaching and everything necessary for them to not only perform well, but to thrive with the projects and tasks at hand.

On the other hand, challenging people means encouraging them to continually step up to more complex and demanding tasks. This new level of complexity would require them to not only rely on their current level of capabilities and skills but, more importantly, to learn.

Think about running coaches. They help their athletes excel with a perfect balance of supporting them through the art of coaching, but also challenging them to constantly run a bit more and a bit faster. That’s how the athletes get better. They rely on this powerful combination.

But, just like everything else in life, too much support or too much challenge can have negative effects in individual’s performance and their ability to unleash their full talents.?

The Support and Challenge Grid developed by Sanford established four quadrants. I adapted the quadrants to what they mean for employees at work:

Each quadrant of the Support and Challenge theory has an important meaning:

1. Disengaging environments, in which?Support and Challenge?are low. In that quadrant of low support and challenge, people have very low morale and a lack of energy for personal and professional growth.
2. Stagnating environments,?in which?Support?is high, but?Challenge?is low. This might be one of the most interesting cases to analyze. In stagnating environments some people might tend to become conformist. It is sort of a comfort zone. They might be bored, yet safe and relaxed. The work they have to do is repetitive. They don’t have to stretch their capacities and skills, because once they learn how to do something, it is only by repetition (and not improvement) that they can perform that job well.
3. Retreat environments,?in which Support?is low and?Challenge?is high. This is another ineffective quadrant. Leaders can’t really expect that people perform at their best if all they do is push them without giving them the proper support (resources, tools, coaching, etc.).
4. Maximum Growth environments,?with high?Support and Challenge. This is the place where leaders become true coaches. They support their people, but also challenge them to be better.

The Place Where People Thrive

According to Sanford, the best leaders provide a great equilibrium of support and challenge. They want their people and teams to do and perform as best as possible in the projects and tasks at hand, but they don’t want them to stay there forever. Great organizational leadership is about making sure that employees can excel in their current projects, but also are challenged to slowly but relentlessly increase or improve their skills to tackle more complex ones.

One of the biggest challenges in job and organizational design is that most organizations are used to designing tasks and activities as if their nature would never change or as if the skills needed to perform them would take forever to learn.

But when we scrutinize reality we find that, generally, leaders spend a great deal of time supporting their people in the steepest sections of the learning curve. But, once those employees reach a level of mastery and a plateau in the learning curve which can be measured by their performance, productivity and easiness to perform their projects, they must be challenged to hop onto the next learning curve. Not doing so will result in employees who become bore, but also that don’t feel that their contribution is meaningful to work, their employee experience is mediocre and they become disengaged.

The best leaders I’ve met know that people need their support to optimize their performance. But that’s not enough. They need to be challenged as well to continually grow and develop. That’s why the greatest leaders work on the quadrant of high Support and Challenge. They create a positive, self-reinforcing cycle of personal and professional growth by supporting their people, but also challenging to step up to the next level. ?

People don't thrive in comfort, neither in unproductive stress. They thrive when the work they do is aligned with the talents and strengths they bring to the table. Whether those talents and strengths are fully developed will depend on the leaders' capacities to support and challenge them on an ongoing basis. It is the daily building of a masterpiece. Today they are better than they were yesterday because they are supported, and tomorrow they will be better than they are today because they are challenged.

To thrive at work is to have the opportunity to "grow vigorously". And, most people I know, look for opportunities to be fairly rewarded for their work and, sometimes even more importantly, to be able to unleash their full potential. That's when real growth happens.

-----

By Enrique Rubio, Founder at Hacking HR