Potemkin Village: Why Looking Good Isn’t the Same as Being Good

A lot of individuals and organizations put a lot of effort into how things look, but far less into how things actually work. In this episode, we explore the concept of a Potemkin village and how it shows up in organizations that look strong on the surface, but lack alignment underneath. Whether you’re evaluating a job opportunity or building a team, you’ll learn how to spot the difference between environments that are built to perform and those that are built to present.

Learn More About Zach:

• Get 1:1 coaching with Zach -- Schedule a free call here
• Subscribe to my free newsletter here

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

There's a lot of individuals and a lot of organizations that spend a lot more time managing how things look and appear than improving how things actually work. We like to polish our words so they sound just right with every post. We make sure that each photo or image we're taking presents our team or ourselves in the best possible light. And in other words, we go to great lengths to ensure that our perception looks and appears strong. Now underneath all of this is an important question. Is it real or is this just well presented? Because there's a big difference between something that will actually perform and something that simply appears like it does. And if you're not careful, it's easy to start to confuse the two. So if you've ever found yourself wondering, is what I'm actually seeing real, or is this just a really well-built version of what they want me to see? Then there's actually a term for this. It's called Potemkin Village, and today on the podcast, we're going to explore what it means and how it applies to all of us when leading or stepping into an organization. Hey coaches and leaders, I got a quick question for you. You spend a lot of time building game plans for those you lead, but when was the last time you built one for yourself? If you're looking to sharpen your leadership skills, strengthen your team culture, or find better ways to support and challenge your athletes in the mental game, I'd love to help. I'm offering a free coaching call where we can talk through your current challenges and create a simple game plan for what might move the needle most for you, your players, and your program. Most coaches I know obsess over developing their team, but they neglect the person in the mirror. This call is a chance to invest in you because a better you is going to produce a better them. And if that sounds helpful, you can grab a time at Callendly.com slash Zach Brandon. That's Callinly.com slash Zach Brandon, or just check the link in the show notes. I'd love to connect and explore how I can best support you. So this term Potemkin Village comes from a story tied to Gregory Potemkin, who was a political leader and close advisor to Catherine the Great in the late 1700s. And Catherine the Great decided to go tour the region after Russia had annexed Crimea to see the progress that had been made. Now, according to the story, as she traveled through these areas, Potemkin had villages set up along the route, structures that looked like they were these beautiful depictions of these like thriving communities. There were buildings, people, activities, uh everything that you'd expect in a really successful developing region. But the claim is that many of these weren't actually real functioning villages. They were essentially facades built or staged to create the illusion that the region was far more developed and far more prosperous than it actually was. In some versions of the story, even the same groups of people were moved from place to place to just make each stop feel kind of active and alive. Now, to this day, historians debate how much of that story um has truth to it. Some believe it's a bit exaggerated, or even some believe that it was political propaganda used by Potemkin's critics to discredit him. But regardless of how literal it was, the idea and the concept has stuck. Now, I was reminded of it recently because a friend of mine uh reached out and she's going through the interview process for a director role with a professional sports organization. And we were talking about um not only the interview process in a way where she could, how could she best present herself, you know, how to communicate her value, how to communicate her vision for this department. But we also discussed how this is a really valuable space and time for her to interview the organization as well. Because interviews aren't just about being evaluated, they're also an opportunity for you as the applicant to gauge what this organization is really about. This is in essence part of the introduction to the organization's culture. And one of the most important questions that you're gonna find or that you're gonna need to consider as you're going through this process is okay, what here is real and what here is being presented to me? Because organizations, just like individuals, they're really good at putting their best foot forward. We'll have values on the wall, we'll have language that sounds really good, and uh again, all of these like philosophy statements. But the the question that you have to ask yourself is like, does the appearance match the reality inside those walls? Uh and this is important because it's incredibly easy to confuse perception with performance, especially in environments like sport or business and even leadership where optics do have weight, but as we know, sometimes it doesn't share or depict the full story. In reality, though, some environments they're actually built to perform and sustainably do so. And others simply just give this illusion that they are performing or at least trending in a good direction. A Potemkin environment is optimized for how things look. It's ensuring that the message is clear, the brand is strong, the stories are compelling. But again, when you actually peel back the curtain more and you ask more questions and you really pay attention and observe, you're gonna notice things like people actually being disconnected. You're gonna notice standards that are maybe a little more inconsistent, um, or you're gonna hear things like development pathways for people that aren't really clear. Like there's there's vague generalities given around them. But a performance environment, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily mean that it's always polished, but it does ensure that it's aligned and it's gonna be a culture where it's honest and uh the there's consistency between what is valued and what is reinforced in behaviors. But if we're not careful, we can start investing a lot more energy into maintaining the appearance of something working instead of actually doing the harder work of making sure that it actually does work in the first place. Uh in essence, there's this gap, a gap between what we say we are and what we actually experience in our lived reality. So as you think about this, here's I think a few things to consider as to how this might apply to any of us listening. So whether you're stepping into a new opportunity or maybe you're trying to build up an organization or a department for yourself, here's a few things to consider. In the interview process, this isn't just your opportunity to cast yourself in a positive light. This is also your opportunity to listen and to observe. Pay attention to the energy in the room, pay attention to the consistency across different conversations, pay attention to how people talk to one another or about one another. Um, pay attention to, you know, are you getting those kind of cookie cutter uh polished rehearsed answers that sound good, but again, they're kind of vague, they don't really have specifics behind them, and you're just getting a lot of information versus actually a lot of like quote unquote value. And then once you've started to pay attention to some of those patterns and those signals, then it becomes ask questions that reveal the re reality of the environment and not just their well-articulated philosophies. Instead of just being asking, like, okay, what are some of your guys' values? Ask things like, How is feedback handled when something isn't going well? What's something that's not working right now that you're trying to improve? These are actually going to depict the realities of the situation. Again, it's one thing to clearly describe hey, these are the values, these are things that we care about. But I want to know what it looks like when they're tested. I want to know what it looks like when they're being challenged. Like that's when our values become essential, not only at an individual level, but also as an organizational level. And again, a philosophy that's really easy to articulate, but the reality can be much harder to hide when you start to pay attention and you start to ask the right questions. And then if you're leading one, an organization of sorts, ask yourself, are we building something that's just performing? Or is this something that just presents and appears well? Where's your energy going? Is it going into optics or is it going into systems that will actually improve your organization? Um, because sometimes the environments that trip us up the most or that actually don't reach success, they're not necessarily the ones that obviously appear broken. They're the ones that can look like they're working, and people start to sweep things under the rug, people start to pay attention or only present kind of the best or most polished versions, um, best moments of an organization when in reality uh there can be a lot underneath of that. So at the end of the day, every organization it tells a story. The question though is whether that story is actually being lived or is it just being told? And the more you can train yourself to see the difference, the better decisions you'll make, the better environments you're gonna build, and the more likely you are to be part of something that's not just impressive, but that's actually effective.