Written by Coach JoyGenea with assistance from Norton AI
Leaders aren’t born polished. They’re made in the awkward middle, where experiments feel clumsy, feedback stings, and progress is hard to see up close. Inspired by Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential, this article blends key ideas from the book with my field notes coaching Different Thinkers, people who think and work differently, including folks with ADHD, dyslexia, and autism. Part of my mission: build cultures that reveal Strengths you can’t see on a résumé and that many hiring funnels unintentionally filter out.
Grant argues that excellence is less about innate talent and more about the systems, habits, and social scaffolding that turn messy starts into meaningful progress. That insight is rocket fuel for Unconventional leadership. The more you create environments where it’s safe to try, miss, and iterate, the more hidden potential you’ll surface and the faster your team will compound learning.
Defying gravity: progress without permission
In Hidden Potential, Grant describes the art of “defying gravity,” lifting off before you have perfect credentials, polish, or certainty. In my practice, this shows up as leaders who:
- Ship, then sharpen
- Invite standards and support in the same breath
- Treat continuous improvement as a leadership behavior
This isn’t chaos. It’s structured risk-taking with feedback loops and humane guardrails. Different Thinkers often thrive here because the rules of engagement are explicit and the game rewards insight over optics.
Why it matters now:
- Markets move faster than planning cycles. If your culture punishes visible drafts, you will under-learn your competitors.
- Teams that normalize small bets accumulate “surface area of luck,” more attempts, more feedback, more lift.
- Learning in public creates teachable artifacts (demos, postmortems, v1→v2 diffs) that raise the whole team’s ceiling.
The most underestimated accelerator of growth is the willingness to look awkward while learning. Normalize that, and you’re already leading.
Diamonds in the rough: a hiring story from manufacturing
A few years ago, I coached the CEO of a U.S. manufacturing company. Headcount was ~350 at the time; two years later they’re 500+ and growing. The leader was convinced, “We can’t find any good candidates.” I asked about their hiring process, then made an unconventional request: apply for a role in your own company, one you’re fully qualified and not too overqualified for, and see what happens.
She heard nothing back. Crickets.
Now we had a mirror. HR, overwhelmed by volume, had tightened filters so much that qualified people weren’t even reaching a human. When you dial a system down too far, you don’t just remove noise, you eliminate originality. The next year, she rebuilt the funnel to attract and cultivate real talent and to ensure Different Thinkers weren’t silently filtered out.
What changed and what it yielded:
- Time to first response: immediate automated acknowledgment upon receiving applications (no more silent inboxes)
- Interview rate: increased by prioritizing skill signals over brittle keyword gates
- Quality of hires: meaningfully stronger fit and ramp-up
- Turn rate: ~2% yearly. People don’t leave unless they must (moving, physical needs, major life changes)
- Involuntary exits: none. Hiring the right fit the first time removed costly churn
Hidden Potential calls this “diamonds in the rough”: individuals whose value is revealed in the right context, not by the shiniest surface. Your job as a leader is to change the context so more of those diamonds can be seen, and then polished in public, not hidden until perfect.
Practical signals to add to your hiring funnel:
- Replace resume keyword gates with a 20 minute task preview tied to real work.
- Score for strengths you can train upward (systems thinking, pattern detection) rather than proxies you can’t verify.
- Invite Different Thinkers to choose written, video, or live formats for the preview task to reduce signal loss.
Unconventional leadership behaviors that unlock growth
These behaviors consistently work across startups and scaling teams and align with Hidden Potential:
- Make the awkward middle a public norm
-Reward learning milestones, not just outcomes
-Show “version history” of projects so people see evolution, not just the final
-Run short “what changed and why” debriefs to normalize iteration - Replace talent hunting with environment designing
-Stop trying to hire finished products
-Design onboarding and early projects that surface strengths quickly and visibly
-Pair new hires with a “progress partner” for weekly calibration - Coach like the chess teacher in Chapter One
-High expectations plus real coaching changes trajectories
-Leaders who coach (not gatekeep) pull potential forward
-Give one behavior to repeat and one constraint to respect each loop - Treat iteration as addition
-Clear READMEs, short feedback cycles, and predictable communication rhythms reduce ambiguity
-Different Thinkers bring pattern recognition, systems thinking, rapid ideation (iteration gives those strengths a stage)
-Publish “how to work with me” one-pagers to align on focus, communication, and sensory needs
Different Thinkers and leadership: why the future runs through them
After finishing Hidden Potential, my thought was simple: every one of my clients should read this. Innovation is accelerating, and Unconventional Leaders and persons with ADHD, dyslexia or autism often aren’t just able to keep up, they often build what the rest of us later call “the future.” Here is a concise strengths-in-action snapshot for leaders:
- ADHD: rapid ideation, energetic problem framing, hyperfocus sprints when goals and constraints are clear
- Dyslexia: big picture synthesis, spatial reasoning, second order effects thinking
- Autism: deep pattern sensitivity, precision, principled decision making, systems level clarity
One or two sentences belong in every modern leadership playbook: People with ADHD, dyslexia, and autism are not edge cases to work around. They are core contributors to how breakthrough work gets done when teams are set up to let them thrive.
Composite vignette: Different Thinkers in motion
A product lead with ADHD runs a 90-minute hyperfocus sprint to map three launch risks and proposes two experiments by end of day. A dyslexic systems designer reframes the roadmap in a spatial flow that exposes a hidden dependency chain. An autistic QA specialist notices a repeating failure pattern across environments and writes a principled checklist that cuts defect leakage in half. Same team, three strengths, one outcome: faster, clearer progress.
What leaders can do to amplify these Strengths:
- Clarify the game: write the win condition, constraints, and timebox in plain language.
- Offer choice of medium: async doc, diagram, or quick loom- optimize for signal, not sameness.
- Protect deep work blocks. Publish teamwide “do not disturb” windows.
The Chess Teacher Framework: Set the Standard. Make the Path. Coach the Progress.
A compact leadership pattern you can apply immediately:
- Set the Standard
-Name what “great” looks like with examples
-Define constraints and the bar for quality
-Choose one measurable improvement per iteration - Make the Path
-Provide a short brief template and one strong sample
-Schedule a 15-minute midpoint check-in to adjust early
-Remove one unnecessary approval gate per project - Coach the Progress
-Give specific, behavior-level feedback
-Celebrate visible improvement, not just the finish line
-Capture wins in a lightweight changelog so progress is seen and remembered
Use this as a mini checklist for project kickoffs and weekly one-on-ones.
Monday moves: start now
Here are practical leadership moves that begin revealing hidden potential this week:
- Lead like the chess teacher
-Name high standards out loud
-Offer specific scaffolds: a brief template, a sample, a mid-iteration check-in
-Celebrate the improvement curve, not just the final - Build a hidden potential map
-Ask, “What Strengths do we keep overlooking here?”
-Run a one-hour strengths discovery: three teammates nominate one strength they rely on from each person, with examples
-Convert insights into “how to work with me” one-pagers and use them in planning - Audit your hiring funnel for invisible filters
-Test your own application like my client did. If a qualified insider can’t get through, neither can your best candidates
-Remove brittle keyword gates. Add a portfolio or task-based preview so Different Thinkers can demonstrate value quickly
-Track time to first response, interview rate, and 90-day ramp to keep the system honest
From book insight to business value
Hidden Potential isn’t motivational wallpaper. It’s an operating system that says excellence is built, not found. For founders, entrepreneurs, professionals who game for fun, and anyone who doesn’t feel like they “fit” traditional molds, this mindset is liberating. You don’t need permission to begin. You need a practice.
- Normalize learning in public
- Design environments where strength signals show up fast
- Make better gates, not tighter ones
Here is a little note to demonstrate action. Add this sentence to your culture handbook: A person with ADHD, dyslexia, or autism deserves a fair path to demonstrate real strengths, not a permission slip to be themselves quietly in the corner.
If you want help building a team where hidden potential is visible, developed, and compounding, schedule a free coaching call. We’ll map the practices that fit your context and set up the rhythms that let Different Thinkers do their best work to help grow your company.
Schedule a Free Coaching Call with JoyGenea
Video Transcription:
I have another great recommendation for my neurodiverse, different-thinking, unconventional leader brains: Hidden Potential, Adam Grant. Fabulous book. Written content is great; even better in audio. He mixes in some different audio clips and so forth, which really makes it intriguing and fun. So there you go—20 seconds—I’ve given you the best tip already. Now I’m gonna deep dive a little bit more on how this book, I felt, also connected to the neurodiverse community, the unconventional thinkers that I am working with all the time. So one of the ways that I—and I wrote a whole article; I want you to read it, it’s down below as a link to it—one of the ways this really did do that is obviously the, you know, hidden potential. It’s that portion of people that we are maybe missing, that they are not walking around being the loudest person in the room telling us they’re great at something. It requires observation. It requires engagement. It requires us to pay a little more attention. And one of the things I talk about in this article, in tying this to unconventional leaders, is the fact that so often, in particular, I see a merge between my unconventional leaders and my different thinkers with those with ADHD, dyslexia, autism. And where I really see that is in the hiring process, and I share a great story of a client I had that was really, really complaining about the fact they had no good help for their business. They were having a horrible time hiring, and I immediately said, “I think there’s a lot of people trying to find jobs. Let’s look at that a little further,” and I tell the story of how this leader—she actually applied for a job within her company under a little, you know, kind of like the… hmm, what was that show? The Undercover Boss. She kind of applied for this job to see how the hiring process went, and she right away—she was qualified and not overqualified for the position, like we staged it; anyhow, you can read about it in the article. In the end, she came to recognize they had major breakdowns in their system, and in particular there was almost no way for a different thinker to get through their system to actually be hired. And one of the breakdowns was in what she was trying to do, and in her manufacturing company she actually needed—they were in such a growth phase—they needed different thinkers. They needed people that thought outside of the box, and they were barely grabbing the best people that colored inside the box. And so I talk about that in far more detail in the article. Leaders aren’t born polished, right? They’re made in the awkward middle where experiments feel clumsy, feedback stings, and progress is hard to see up close. You know, this article is inspired by Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential, and it really looks at some of that part of my mission: to build cultures that reveal strengths you can’t see on a résumé, and that many hiring funnels unintentionally filter out. So I talk a bit about that. Then I also talk about the role that we play with each other and as leaders in demonstrating a comfort with different thinkers, or people that think outside of what’s conventional for us, and how important it is. It’s good to surround yourself with like-minded people; it’s also important to make sure you have a little bit of diversity in that thinking, or you will get very siloed and you will miss out on opportunities. And right now, with AI coming on the scene so hot and heavy, you don’t have time to miss out on opportunities. You want feedback and ideas fast, hard, and a lot of them. So if you are not—if you are a leader and you are not wrapped around that framework yet, I’m just telling you: you need to get wrapped around that framework very quickly, very, very soon, or you’re gonna have different problems. In particular, also in the article I talk about different thinkers in leadership and being those unconventional and hidden-potential types of things. For a lot of people, working under an unconventional leader turns out to be something that really moves them more into their strengths, and they know that. And it’s not something that’s easy to replace, and it creates a loyalty and a definite engagement which is quite outstanding. He talks in Hidden Potential about a chess teacher—it’s a great, great story; I’m not gonna deprive you of any of it. I’ve actually seen the gentleman interviewed on 60 Minutes—quite profound. I love, and I go in-depth in the article, that teacher. When numerous people asked him, “Well, how did you get these students engaged? These, you know, like, they didn’t seek you out and be like, ‘I wanna be a chess player.’” No, not at all. He immediately explained that, well, he showed them how it could be fun. And I think so often about when people first get hired for jobs, or even when they’re applying—things can get so granular and so down in the nitty-gritty we forget to make, to help things look fun and engaging and demonstrate all the possibility that is there. And I break that down in the article for you to check out. Hidden potential isn’t motive—I love this—hidden potential is not motivational wallpaper. That’s something AI wrote for me, and I went, “Oh, that’s good, we’re keeping that sentence.” A whole bunch of other stuff left the article. It had good ideas, but they were a little dry; I added a lot more story. It’s an operating system that says excellence is built, not found, for founders, entrepreneurs, professionals who game for fun, and anyone who doesn’t feel like they fit traditional molds. This mindset is liberating. You don’t need permission to begin; you need to practice. You need to try things. Normalize learning in public. We need to get a lot more comfortable with learning in public and making sure we praise that and engage in it. Design environments for strengths—signals show up fast. Challenging people more comfortably in environments that embrace that allows us to find strengths a lot sooner, and making sure that we make better gates and not tighter ones, so when people are applying we’re actually seeing their greater strengths. I am JoyGenea, unconventional leadership coach, huge fan of books in all forms, and highly recommending this book for you. And if you want to learn more about adding and finding those hidden-potential people within your environment or in your leadership style, I’m the person to help coach you and bring that out. I would love to have a conversation. You can schedule a free coaching call—don’t miss out on that opportunity; it kind of feels like a no-brainer. Anyways, I’m JoyGenea, unconventional leadership coach, international neurodiversity coach, and champion for those that think outside the box. Bye now.