Potential needs support

On enablement, scaffolding, and giving your team the first day nobody gave them.

2009, the middle of the financial crisis. My first job out of university was not the one I had planned. I had studied economics with a focus on finance and banking, and I had taken it for granted that my first job would be in a bank. The financial crisis had other plans. I ended up in politics instead: policy advisor for labour market policy and economics at a large industry association. A permanent contract, a big fancy office of my own, an association with a big name. What could possibly go wrong?

I came straight from university, and I could run analyses and work with data. I knew nothing about lobbying. I didn’t know how to write a good speech, how to build networks, how to represent an association’s position in committees. I knew nothing about power dynamics. I didn’t even know exactly what my job was, or which skills I would need to do it well. And nobody explained it to me. The onboarding: sparse.

One of those moments, out of many: a big international event, on a topic that wasn’t even mine. I was there to observe — that was the entire brief. Then the organizer asked me to represent the German position. On the panel. Panic, last-minute preparation, and then an appearance that could only go wrong: long, nested sentences, delivered in a monotone. I doubt anyone remembered a single thing I said afterwards. Luckily, the union representative from France was just as bad. Experiences like that kept coming, again and again, and I learned from them - the hard and slow and inefficient way.

The words for what was missing came later: empowerment. Enablement. Being set up for success. And much later, I got to experience what they look like in practice. When I joined my last employer as an organizational and leadership coach, the onboarding was thoroughly professional — and beyond the org charts and the systems, my boss made sure I understood the sensitive territory: the tricky topics, the histories, the power dynamics. The things nobody writes down and everyone expects you to know. I could navigate well from the beginning, and I got up to speed fast: within a year, I was asked to lead the organizational development and L&D team. Same me. Different conditions.

Good onboarding has more layers than skills and tricky terrain. L&D expert Dwayne Britton names the one most organizations miss entirely: building a bridge, from day one, between what drives a person and the purpose of the company, so people don’t just learn what to do, but understand why it’s theirs to do.

But onboarding is only the most visible moment of enablement — the one with a name and a checklist. The need itself doesn’t end after week twelve. People take over new areas, inherit teams, get moved into roles nobody prepared them for; teams get new projects, new structures, new goals. Every one of those transitions is a first day without the welcome. Enablement is ongoing work — leadership work — and it matters most exactly when things change.

The research is clearer on this than most companies want to admit. Enablement is good for the business: organizations with strong onboarding retain 82 percent more of their new hires and see over 70 percent higher productivity. Gallup’s meta-analysis across more than 100,000 teams finds the top quartile of engagement delivering 23 percent higher profitability and 81 percent lower absenteeism than the bottom. BCG found that companies that are good at onboarding grow revenue 2.5 times faster than those that aren’t. And Korn Ferry’s research shows that people who are both engaged and enabled perform up to 50 percent better than those who are neither. Talent is evenly distributed across those groups. Conditions are not.

Right now I’m working with a leader who was handed an entirely new area of responsibility — new field, new tasks, no enablement whatsoever. She was drowning, for months, until she brought in support from outside: someone who has walked the path before and who maps, reflects, and builds alongside her. Now she can breathe, and she has a clear way forward.

I’m convinced that people and teams need the right support to do their best work, and that without it, an enormous amount gets lost. Potential. Effectiveness. Joy. A training catalogue on the intranet is not support. A bridge between what you can do and what is needed — built by someone who walks it with you — is.

So if you carry responsibility for others — for leaders stepping into bigger roles, for teams absorbing the next change — here is what you can actually do:

Find the invisible first days. Who on your team is in a transition right now — new role, new scope, new project, inherited team? Each of them is having a first day without a welcome. That list is your enablement backlog, and it’s usually longer than you think.

Start with one real conversation this week. Not the status update. Name what you see, without verdict — and then ask what’s missing around them before you ask what’s wrong with them. Then do what Brené Brown calls painting done: describe together, in detail, what good looks like in this role, this project, this quarter. It sounds trivial. It isn’t — it unearths the stealth expectations people are quietly failing against.

Rebuild the missing first day — all three layers. Skills: name the two or three capabilities this role actually demands, and agree where they’ll come from. Terrain: spend one hour walking them through what’s not written down — the histories, the tricky topics, who really decides what. Purpose: ask them which part of this work is theirs, and why them. If they can’t answer, that’s your next conversation.

Build scaffolding, not programs. Adam Grant calls the support that unlocks potential scaffolding, and the construction metaphor is precise. A scaffold goes up so that something can be built that couldn’t be built without it — and it’s designed, from the start, to come down again. It doesn’t carry the building; it lets people reach places they couldn’t reach alone. That’s what separates it from a crutch, and from the standing programs organizations love: scaffolding is temporary, it’s tailored to the next stretch rather than to everything at once, and its success is measured by its own removal. According to Grant, “Most of us aren’t missing talent, we’re missing scaffolding.” In practice, for your struggling leader: one person who has walked this path — a seasoned peer, a mentor, an external guide, coach or consultant — with a real mandate to map, reflect and build alongside her, for a season. When she can navigate on her own, the scaffold comes down. What remains is her own capability.

Subtract friction. Sometimes people aren’t missing support — they’re carrying obstacles. Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao call leaders who take this seriously friction fixers: audit one ordinary week and find what makes the right work needlessly hard — approvals, unclear decision rights, meetings that could be a message. Remove one thing. Making the right things easier is enablement, too.

Say the progress out loud. Teresa Amabile’s research is unambiguous: nothing motivates like visible progress in meaningful work. People in transitions can’t yet see their own progress — so mark it for them, weekly and specifically. Small wins aren’t small.

Environments can be built. Start with one conversation this week.

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I coach leaders and build environments in which teams do their best work — and stay whole doing it. Based in Berlin. Working in DE & EN.