Can you spot high potential?

In many organisations, the HR team is able to identify those with high potential – and knows how to
develop this. But for some organisations, spotting high potential can be a tricky business – and
especially so for line managers as traditional career paths no longer, if they ever, necessarily
enable the leaders of the future to rise to the top.

At Head Light, we see that two of the main challenges which impact the identification of potential are:

• Projection
• Detection

Let us explain.

To find the future stars of the organisation, line managers need to identify and understand what the
early markers of High Potential (HiPo) are. That is, what are the behavioural precursors of superior
performance in more complex or more senior roles? This involves a bit of projection and
extrapolation. Often these precursors or indicators are identified by carrying out biographical career
interviews with current high performers and looking back at what set them apart at an early stage in
their career. A crystal ball would be helpful though...

Once you know what you’re looking for, then you have to assess for it and find ways to detect it.
Traditionally this has been done by gut feel (“I know it when I see it!”), line manager evaluation or
performance appraisal. The main difficulty of these approaches is that they all rely on the view of
one individual (and it is usually the line manager) and they are typically based on an assessment of
performance in the current role, and that may not afford the individual the opportunity to
demonstrate broader capability or potential.

Evaluations that are reliant on one perspective are, of course, also subject to a number of cognitive
biases, which are naturally very hard to manage or mitigate against:  The Horns Effect; The ‘Face Fits’ bias. .
In addition to these biases, if the manager-subordinate relationship is not a happy one, this may
well affect judgement regarding current performance and future potential.

So what's to be done?


Psychology and technology have offered us a wide range of means by which we can more robustly
and reliably assess potential – although access to these is not always at a line manager level.  Assessment centres are often used to test for future potential - as are some psychometric tests. More recently, we see the emergence of 360 degree feedback as a means for picking up those HiPo markers but if course this can only be used with those already within the organisation.

But it does make sense to embed the means to ‘assess’ the potential for bigger and more complex roles into current talent management and HR practices so if you and your line managers are already using 360 review as one of one of the processes which help you to manage talent within the business, with only a slight adaptation, it could used to look for ‘high potential’ thereby providing more information and keeping costs to a minimum.


So how can we at Head Light help?

Some organisations are very clear on what ‘potential’ looks like and in our experience, there are a number of attributes which tend to predict success in higher-level roles. Common ‘HiPo’ indicators are:

• Capacity for learning – being able to learn from own mistakes, actively seeking feedback
and using it constructively to inform future performance, reflecting on own behaviour
to learn lessons for the future, being a quick learner and able to learn in a number of
different ways

• Resilience – being able to recover quickly from setbacks, coping with high pressure and
demands, finding ways around obstacles; perseverance in the face of adversity.

• Strategic thinking – longer-term thinking, looking outside the organisation for
opportunities, seeing patterns, trends, themes and relationships, being able to manage
ambiguity and deal with increasingly complex issues, problems, timescales and
information, systems thinking, seeing things from an organisational perspective.

• Flexibility – being able to adapt communication, influencing, leadership and interpersonal
style to suit the demands of the situation and the other people involved, managing change,
shifting one’s approach in response to new priorities.

• Emotional intelligence – being able to accurately recognise and manage one’s own
emotional states, recognising and understanding emotional responses in others, using this
understanding to increase interpersonal effectiveness.

• Drive and motivation – being a ‘self-starter’, actively seeking out opportunities to learn
and stretch oneself, showing a drive to make a difference, actively managing and planning
a career, setting stretching personal goals.

Building on this, we have developed the functionality within our award-winning Talent 360® tool to ‘flag’ some of the indicators within a 360 questionnaire as ‘high potential markers’, thereby supporting the line
manager in his or her need to identify these.

These ‘markers’ are not shown when people complete the questionnaire, and they may be existing
indicators across as number of different competencies. But when a report is generated, however,
the software looks at the ratings given to these indicators and produces a composite HiPo score,
providing a useful visual summary on a separate page.

If you want to see how this looks in practice, then please do get in touch.

Making Talent Reviews more effective

As an HR Business Partner, you need to know where the pipeline of future talent is going to come from within your area of the company. Do you have sufficient internal talent to drive the future growth of the business, as set out in your strategy? What are the gaps between the resources you have and what the company will need in the next 2-5 years? What are managers doing to grow and develop the people in their teams? Are there any critical roles or posts which do not have suitable successors and where your organisation is at risk? What do you need to do or put in place to mitigate against these risks, and ensure the sustained growth and success of your part of the business?

The forthcoming round of talent reviews should help you to answer these questions.

Talent Review Scenario 1

You are an ambitious, motivated person and you want to advance your career as far as you possibly can. You work hard and are keen to show that you’re a valuable asset to the company. Your skills and experience befit a role which is far beyond the requirements of the post you currently hold; you took an entry level job with the company because of the wider opportunities the business can offer. Whilst you consistently exceed your objectives, you get the feeling that your line manager doesn’t always recognise your worth, and you don’t always see eye to eye. But you know that the organisation has a talent review process through which high potential can be spotted and promoted to positions where they can really add value so you’re willing to stick with your current job for now...

Talent Review Scenario 2

You manage a large team in a growing area of the business. You know your team pretty well and they’re all good people; some have clearly reached their ceiling but are happy to remain the solid bedrock of the Division, but others show potential far beyond their current role and you recognise that you can’t keep all of them in the long-term. It is likely that the company will get the most value from them - and that they are more likely to resist the amorous advances of your competitors - if they are given opportunities to grow, develop and ascend the ranks: this is likely to mean that they will not remain in your part of the business, but that’s what good management is all about. It can be as difficult to manage these ‘stars’ as it is to deal with the underperformers, but the organisation has the talent review process in place so this will give you the opportunity to ensure that there are growth opportunities either within your own area , or across the organisation for them. You are looking forward to seeing their careers accelerate...

Talent reviews are an essential element of talent management, since they are the organisation's opportunity to identify and make best use of rising stars, but they are also often poorly managed or misused. In theory, talent reviews should form an integral part of the people strategy and should enable the company to make best use of its assets. In reality, the process is fraught with difficulties and rarely fulfils the needs and expectations of the key stakeholders, as described above.

In this article we will consider why this might be, and share some practical steps that organisations can take to improve the utility of their talent reviews.

Read the full article here