Potential is a promise nobody’s cashed yet. Good leaders help people cash it.

Hearing that you have potential is not quite praise. It describes a gap between what somebody could do and what has happened so far, and on its own it just sits there. What closes the gap is someone handing over a real task, slightly early, with help attached. Potential nobody uses turns quietly into a thing people used to say about you.

Pick the person near you who keeps getting described that way and give them something real. Not a rehearsal, an actual job with a deadline on it. Stay close enough to catch problems and far enough that the result is genuinely theirs.