Unmasking Potential
Helping Your Team Reveal Their Hidden Talents
One of the trickiest parts of leadership is recognizing when your team has untapped potential—and finding ways to bring it out.
At the beginning of this year, my team and I were worried about a small group of seniors. They’d been given leadership opportunities, but they didn’t yet have the full set of skills to thrive. The easy option would have been to scale back their responsibilities or keep our expectations low. But that’s not leadership.
So instead, we gave them the tools.
For the first nine class meetings, I pulled those seven students into a conference room for a “class within a class” on leadership. We built our sessions around books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, Dare to Lead, and Leaders Eat Last. Together, we explored what it really means to step into leadership—beyond the title, beyond the role, beyond the mask.
We just wrapped up at the end of September (thanks to block scheduling and a few interruptions along the way). Here’s what those students told me they learned:
We are leaders. Many of them didn’t recognize themselves as leaders until they had the language, tools, and confidence to claim it.
Run to trouble. Don’t hide from challenges—face them head-on.
Love languages matter. They discovered not only their own preferences for giving and receiving support, but also how to honor each other’s.
The Platinum Rule. Don’t just treat people the way you want to be treated; treat them the way they want to be treated.
What struck me most was how much was already there, waiting to be unmasked. They had the talent, the energy, the creativity—they just needed guidance, practice, and permission to see themselves differently.
As leaders, our role isn’t to hand people masks and tell them who to be. It’s to help them take off the masks that hide their potential, and to create environments where they can reveal the strengths they already have.
Because when hidden talents come to light, the whole team shines brighter.
Think about your own team—students, colleagues, direct reports, or peers. What potential might be hidden behind a mask of doubt, inexperience, or underconfidence? And how might you create the space for that potential to come forward?
