The Myth of Extraordinary: The Grandparent Standard

Part Two in a Series

Ask any grandparent — any parent, any aunt or uncle who has ever leaned over a car seat or crouched down to eye level on a living room floor — and they will tell you, without hesitation, that the child in front of them is remarkable.

Not will be remarkable. Not has potential to be remarkable. Is. Right now. In this moment. Remarkable.

The Evidence of Everyday Wonder

The evidence they will offer you is specific and deeply felt. She counted to three before any of the others did. He recognized a horse in a picture book at thirteen months — a horse, not just a dog or a cat, but a horse — and pointed to it with one small certain finger as if he had always known. She held her fork correctly last Tuesday, the whole meal, without being reminded once. He said the word umbrella in the right context on a rainy afternoon, and the room went quiet for a moment the way rooms do when something unexpected and wonderful has just happened.

None of these things are extraordinary by any measurable standard. Developmental charts would call them ordinary. On-time. Expected. And yet the people who love these children are not consulting developmental charts. They are watching with the particular quality of attention that only comes from caring deeply — the kind of attention that does not look for what is missing, but cannot stop finding what is there.

This is not delusion. This is not the soft bias of people who cannot be objective. This is something far more important than objectivity.

This is awe.

Why Awe Matters More Than We Think

And awe, it turns out, is not a feeling that clouds judgment. Research tells us that awe is the very state that opens the mind to possibility — that it fuels imagination, expands what we believe is within reach, and fundamentally shifts how we see what stands before us.

When a grandparent watches a toddler navigate a staircase for the first time, they are not measuring the child against a standard. They are witnessing a human being do something that child has never done before. They are present for a first. And they understand, instinctively, that firsts matter — not because of what they prove, but because of what they point toward.

The grandparent is not celebrating the staircase. They are celebrating what the staircase means about the child who just climbed it.

What Happens in Our Organizations

Now consider how rarely that quality of attention appears in our organizations.

We have built elaborate systems for evaluating performance. We measure output, efficiency, delivery, and impact. We hold reviews. We set objectives. We track progress against goals that were written in a conference room by people who had not yet met the person they were writing them for.

And in the middle of all of this careful, well-intentioned measurement, something quietly disappears. The systems that were designed to develop people begin, almost imperceptibly, to define them instead. The employee stops being a person in motion — someone mid-climb, reaching for something they have never done before — and becomes a profile. A rating. A number on a nine-box grid.

We stop watching with awe and start watching for outcomes.

And here is where the grandparent has something urgent to teach us.

Every Wobble Is Data

The grandparent does not wait for the child to complete the staircase before deciding the child is worth watching. The grandparent is riveted from the first hesitant step. The grandparent sees the effort and the uncertainty and the small recalibrations along the way — the pause on the third stair, the hand that reaches for the wall — and does not read those as signs of inadequacy.

They read them as signs of becoming.

Every wobble is data that says: this child is figuring something out. And the certainty that surrounds the watching — that warm, unwavering conviction — is not contingent on the outcome. It is the condition that makes the outcome possible.

That certainty is contagious. Children who are watched with that quality of belief do not just feel better. They reach further. They try the next stair. And the one after that.

The Question That Should Keep Every Leader Up at Night

So, the question that should keep every leader up at night is not whether they are recognizing excellence often enough. It is whether they have ever looked at the people they lead with the specific quality of attention a grandparent brings to a child in an ordinary moment on an ordinary Tuesday — and felt, not evaluation, but awe.

Because the people you lead are mid-climb. Right now. Every one of them.

They are counting to three before they thought they could. They are pointing at the horse. They are holding the fork correctly and hoping, more than they will ever say out loud, that someone in the room noticed.

The grandparent always notices.

That is the standard. Not the performance review. Not the end-of-year ranking. The grandparent who cannot take their eyes off a child who is simply, remarkably, becoming — and who would never dream of looking away.