Do You Realize Your Potential?

"Role playing" is the third -- and potentially most rancorous -- step of the Potentia System. Meant to assess one's "habits of action," it puts people in conflict situations. Savage assigned me the part of a manager at a factory that may have been responsible for contaminating community water. Meanwhile, Savage himself acted as, variously, an environmental activist, a mayoral aide, and a local newspaper reporter. His questioning tested drive (Did I actively try to deal with the problem?), resilience (As new information emerged, did I incorporate that information into my decisions?), and empathy (How skillfully did I work with people whose views differed from my own?). As it turned out, I didn't deal so skillfully at all with Savage's alter egos. I told one of them that I found him naive -- meaning that I earned an "F" in empathy, or, in Potentia parlance, that empathy was a "stress zone" that was "extremely demanding."

The final step of profiling is "development and succession planning." After the Potentia rep and the client look over the test results, says Savage, the client is moved "from the artificial environment of spending a day with me to the real environment of the client's work." Clients answer questions like, "What challenges does my work put forward?" and "How do those challenges relate to what I've been experiencing in this process?" Adds Savage: "If you're seeing that you have areas of talent that are at the moment untapped and underutilized, and you're going to develop them, you have to start from somewhere. And the only somewhere you can start from is where you are now. So what opportunities -- which you may not have previously recognized -- will allow you to develop in the areas that you want to develop in?"

Who Am I and Why Am I Here?

Clients are rarely shocked by the outcome of their profiling. "If something is surprising, then I normally think it's wrong," Savage says. "No one knows you better than you do." Profiling often tells clients what they already know, or at least suspect, but that doesn't mean it's not useful. "Over time, we all tend to become habituated to certain ways of seeing the world," Savage says. "Certain values have worked for us. But life goes on, and every so often we need to be able to revisit and reawaken the full range of options that are available to us -- and then we get to choose again."

Among the options that Nortel's Hershberger realized were available to her was a more significant role in leadership. "I see the world in terms of patterns and systems and discontinuities," she says. "The profiling determined that I have huge potential to expand those abilities -- not to do today's job, not to do tomorrow's job, but to become the type of leader who is needed a year out. I've used that information to evolve my role and my team's focus."

Hershberger has also been able to apply some of the lessons that she learned about herself to her colleagues. "Another coworker who had been profiled and I realized that when we're at a meeting, we often use the Potentia framework," she says. "When people are talking past one another, we see how they're thinking at different levels and missing each other. And we help them make connections more quickly."

Hershberger is not the only one who has benefited from her experience with Potentia. "People say to me, 'You have changed my life,' " says Savage. "I have not changed their lives at all. They have changed their lives -- because they have come to a clear understanding of something that was probably always there, but that they couldn't see clearly and thus couldn't act upon. I provide them with a mirror so that they can see themselves."

But enough about Potentia: What about me? Well, according to my values profiling, I place the highest value on "acceptance/inclusion," defined by Potentia as "feeling liked or valued by others you hold in high regard." And I place the lowest value on "personal growth," defined as "feeling that you are developing as a unique individual." When I told Savage that I thought the phrase "unique individual" reeked of New Age navel gazing, he issued a warning: "Some things that we don't value, we view with disdain. It's fine if this doesn't resonate for you. But if you were running a 5,000-person division of a company, it would resonate strongly for some of those people. Your disdain could make it difficult to communicate with them."

I'm not, at present, running a 5,000-person division. But it's still something to keep in mind -- because part of the reason why Potentia even exists is that these days, the pace of change in the workplace is so fast. "Your whole environment can change in the space of 12 to 18 months," Savage says. "It has become much, much more important for individuals to be aware of and in charge of their own careers."

Read the Sidebar: Take-Home Test

Curtis Sittenfeld (curtis-sittenfeld@uiowa.edu), a former Fast Company staff writer, is a graduate student in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Learn more about Potentia International on the Web (www.potentiasystem.com).