On the way back from my teaching duties (riding my Flyer), I listened to Bill Strickland's IT conversations interview, and it's IMHO a must hear for the above categories of people. More about him at http://www.bill-strickland.org/.

Very briefly summarized, his message about enabling people to grow is

• Set the bar high.
• Consider people as assets instead of liabilities.
• Provide a world-class environment (as in efficient and cool, not necessarily expensive).

All this rings lots of bells here, for several of my roles in life this sounds similar to how I'm trying to act, and I can tell that when I do it works. So go get the podcast!

Jazz comes up several times during the talk, paralleled with the state of mind that's needed to make things happen - seems like a jazzy state of mind helps.

I've written about this before, so I cannot agree more: the jazzy way of playing music, where you set the bar high and improvise with people that you trust, with all your feedback channels fully active, applies to much more than playing music.

I really like improvisation...

Update: good synchronicity between this and my good friend Sylvain's post!