‘High potential’ talent, HiPos for short, has been an area of interest in business talent management for quite a while. HiPos are valuable people to have in your organization, but how do you leverage them to best improve the performance of your business? Here’s what I’ve learned working with some of the best Fortune 500 organizations on improving their talent management approaches.
The most important aspect is to think about, or define, potential from a business model perspective – how the company serves their clients and generates profit – rather than from an organizational chart perspective. This is a far more valuable view of High Potentials. (Those of you that have worked with me will notice right away I begin again with how we think about the topic. Why? Because our thinking drives our behavior which determines our results – the conditions, circumstances and outcomes in our lives. Notice how that applies in this situation.) How do we approach this from a business model perspective?
Well, I’ve found that most organizations will talk about ‘high potentials’, but don’t really define what they mean. When you force them to explain, or complete the description, they will say something like the individual ‘has the potential to move up a level or two within the organization and take on additional responsibility.’ That is the ‘organizational chart view’ of potential. What they are saying is that they can use this person to fill some other ‘higher’ position (that’s currently held by someone else) in the org chart. No additional customer or business value is created. A box on a chart simply gets a new name in it.
A much more valuable and immediately actionable definition of high potential is that the individual ‘has the potential to add significantly more value to the business by being positioned, equipped, and developed differently in the future than they are now.’
Why is definition so much more powerful?
- It completely covers the organizational view of potential, but it also includes the possibility of having that person add more value for the company right away, without all the delay inherent in the org chart view. You don’t have to wait for a position to open up above them in the org chart.
- It also dramatically expands the potential impact this individual could have on business performance (immediately). The person doesn’t have to move up the organization at all. The additional value this person can provide isn’t dependent on other things happening (such as someone leaving the company, being promoted, or moving to another area of the company).
- Potential isn’t dependent solely on leadership or management skills. This definition recognizes that there is a tremendous variety in the ways people can add value to the organization. And this approach allows you to reap the benefit immediately. (Am I making the point strongly enough that you can immediately increase the value to the company if you choose to think and behave differently about potential?)
- The additional ways of people adding value is completely aligned with other components of a high performance talent management system, specifically positioning people to their strengths, equipping them for their success, and treating them uniquely.
A good example of how this plays out can be found within a technical environment where the company has an amazingly talent technical individual (an engineer, a programmer, or a marketing expert, etc.) that is extremely good at their ‘craft’, but not interested – or even gifted in – managing other people. More simply stated, they are ‘idea’ people, not ‘business’ or ‘people’ people. In this example, you’ll want to position them where they can utilize their gifts (coming up with great ideas) to benefit the organization, rather than putting them in some ‘high potential management training program’.
Extending this concept, you’ll find that you have a lot more ‘types’ of people than just ‘idea’ people, or ‘management’ people or ‘business’ people. You’ll find that you have people that are great at bringing other people’s ideas to fruition, people who are great at leading, others who are great at developing others, people great at organizing and communicating market information, people who can improve processes, etc.
Effective talent management is all about understanding the talents (and potential) of your people and positioning them to leverage those talents for the benefit of the organization.
In a [near] future article I will write about how to create ‘highly valuable employee profiles’ to capture the talents, strengths and potential of your people so that this information can be used to optimally position your talent. For now, you can find out more about how to position your people in this post: Performance Management 101.
Question: Does your organization define potential from an org chart or a business model perspective? Do you believe it would be more valuable to think about the potential of your people from a business model (or customer) perspective?
