I’ve heard it said that to find opportunity, you have to either be lucky or smart – and it’s best to be both. The problem with this thinking is that coming across an opportunity doesn’t mean you will gain any benefit from it. What you do after you uncover an opportunity is what matters most.

Opportunities represent potential that still must be developed after you have seized it. Whether or not you cultivate, harness, tame or exploit an opportunity takes more than being smart and lucky: you must be competent. Having the opportunity to accomplish something worthwhile and being unable to do so amounts to it being wasted. The world suffers from wasted opportunities. There is never a shortage of opportunities; they are just easier to miss than to realize.

There are many things that make an organization competent. You need people to do what must be done. They must have the resources required to do whatever that is. There must be systems in place to enable, enhance and harness people’s optimal performance. All of these things are a function of management; getting things done.

Having the right managers doing the right things takes leadership.  So does develop the potential of people so that the organization’s efforts are aligned to a clear and common sense of purpose, and people are driven to perform conscientiously to accomplish what matters most.

High-performance organizations are not a collection of the most talented people or in possession of the most or best resources. They are living organisms that demonstrate the value of intelligent design and provide the means to continuously learn and adapt; regenerate the energy required to set and achieve aspirational objectives;  expel waste and toxins and attract, develop and retain the competent people needed to faithfully serve the purpose for which it exists.

High-performance organizations are not a collection of the most talented people or in possession of the most or best resources.

A competent organization is the product of competent leadership.

The role of leadership in any organization is to ensure that its people and systems are competent. The measure of competence is purely a measure of performance. Is the organization performing to a standard that it sustainably accomplishes what it must? If the answer is “yes,” you can determine that the leadership is competent.

The success of any organization isn’t a function of what the leader does or doesn’t do but what the leader accomplishes as a result. As a leader, your job is to make it both necessary and possible for people to perform in ways that consistently accomplish the organization’s most worthy aims. Ultimately, it is the organization’s performance that makes its leader successful or not. The measure of a leader’s performance is a measure of the performance of the organization. Your competence as a leader depends on what your organization accomplishes under your guidance and support.

Without a competent organization, you cannot be a competent leader.

 Leaders are often credited for finding and developing the opportunities that make their organization successful. So-called, visionary business leaders —the modern-era likes of which include Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg, Steve Jobs, Esther Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates —would not have achieved their success without the organizations they built around them. The opportunities they observed or created would be worthless without their organizations to turn opportunistic ideas into powerful and extremely valuable realities.

Building a world-class organization requires competent leadership by a team of leaders who understand that a crucial component of their role is to develop other competent leaders. It is like the flywheel that the author Jim Collins speaks about. Leaders create other leaders who create still more leaders until the organization’s capacity to perform is defined by capable leadership up and down the ranks and across the span of the organization’s efforts.

You can build systems, structures, and plans, but people must be developed, and competence must be cultivated. You cannot build a durable, competitively sustainable business without cultivating a culture that embraces, fuels, and drives high-performance at every turn. You can build things, but you cannot build people.

You can’t shape people like you can a tree or bush, but you can nourish their growth, support them when they are most vulnerable, help them to strengthen their limbs – and give them room to grow. The key difference with molding people is that growth occurs foremost in the mind. What they then do with their bodies and actions follow. You cannot make a person think as you wish they would. At best, you might influence their thinking, and perhaps they will choose to think as you would like them to.

A person’s performance is never the sum of their capability. They might have all the right competencies: the skill, knowledge, talent, and experience needed to accomplish what they are tasked with. But how they are able or choose to think about those tasks will determine how they perform. Your level of performance is a function of how you use what you have available. How you use what you’ve got is a function of how you think. And how you think is driven by your personal beliefs and values.

A person’s performance is never the sum of their capability.

Top performance is a consequence of conscientiousness.

What you feel is right or wrong and what you believe to be necessary together influences your drive and determination.  Whether you are willing to get comfortable being uncomfortable, pushing yourself, and finding your grit – is a function of how you think – not how developed or rehearsed you are. Conscientious amounts to “who” you are in those moments that call for all of you to show up – or at least more of you than you might normally offer up.

Leaders cultivate conscientiousness through influence. You shape people’s beliefs by offering meaning to things. And you make that meaning relevant by being an exemplar of that meaning through your actions.

How you behave is a window into what you believe.

 People tend to see what they believe is in front of them. We imagine things that are not there and delete things that are right in front of our faces – but we don’t want to see. You must believe something is an opportunity for it to be one. You can only seize the opportunities you can recognize. And then you must convince those that need to act upon the potential that the opportunity is real and worth the risks that are always inherent in the uncertainties of undertaking something new or unfamiliar.

A leader becomes competent by causing people to see the value they might contribute to as serving something more significant than their own needs and interests. Leaders show others that service to a greater good brings the joy of enormous satisfaction – and leaves a legacy of things being left better than how they found them.

The world is replete with vast opportunities ready to be harvested but hiding in plain sight. The keys to making a more vibrant world are in the hands of those who can lead the great worthy causes that define the potential of the human spirit.

Humanity moves forward on the vision of those who challenge the status quo, defy mediocrity and believe it is their duty to make possible what was once impossible, make believable what was once unbelievable, and imagine what was once unimaginable. Are you willing to be that kind leader?  If you are, the world is ready and waiting for you.