High-potential employees contribute far more to their organization than the average worker. It follows, then, that supporting their growth plays a major role in a company’s success. In this article, we’ll discuss how to identify high potentials (or HiPos) and encourage their continued development. We’ll also explore how to improve retention of your top performers.
Table of Contents
- The Importance of Identifying High-Potential Employees
- How to Identify High-Potential Employees
- Strategies for Developing High-Potential Employees
- Retaining High-Potential Employees
The Importance of Identifying High-Potential Employees
Nurturing the growth of high-potential employees will shape your organization’s long-term success. “When you nurture your team’s potential, you’re creating a pipeline of skilled leaders who deeply understand your company’s culture and operations,” writes Stacy Greiner in Fast Company. “The high-potential employee you develop today could become a transformative leader tomorrow.”
But that’s easier said than done. While 98% of company leaders view identifying HiPos as vital to success, just 14% feel confident in their ability to do this. By making development of HiPos a core priority, HR can help their organization increase its competitiveness.
As you lead the effort to identify high-potentials, develop their abilities, and keep them satisfied, you’ll boost retention of your top employees. This will also let you engage in thoughtful succession planning, allowing you to prime your HiPos for particular roles. Along the way, you’ll also keep your talented employees equipped with cutting-edge skills and knowledge.
How to Identify High-Potential Employees
Too often, supervisors and organizations use “instinct” or a “gut feeling” to identify high-potential employees. But that can often lead to biased decisions—and may fail to recognize the potential of some extremely talented people. Instead, companies should take a more strategic approach to targeting HiPos for development and advancement. Let’s look at some criteria to consider when identifying your high-potential employees.
Distinction Between Performance and Potential
An employee’s performance in their current role doesn’t always equate to high potential for future advancement. Some people have mastered their current role but lack interest or aptitude for an advanced position. “High-potentials tend to also be high-performers, but high-performers aren’t necessarily high-potentials,” asserts the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), citing a Korn Ferry report.
Further, some employees could be high performers with stronger mentoring and development. In some cases, truly gifted individuals simply haven’t received the right training and encouragement.
Key Indicators of High Potential
Certain skills and qualities tend to signal high potential in employees. Here are some key ones to look for:
- Strong leadership aptitude.
- Drive and ambition, providing a solid work ethic and high productivity.
- Ability to adapt and thrive in challenging environments.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
- Capacity for innovation, merging a future-focused perspective with ingenuity.
- Emotional intelligence, lending self-awareness and strong interpersonal abilities.
- Ability to prioritize tasks and projects effectively.
- Learning agility, facilitating flexible adoption of new skills and knowledge.
- Strategic thinking capacity, fostering strong problem-solving and big-picture thinking.
- A high level of integrity and clear principles.
- Resilience, or the ability to grow from setbacks, mistakes, and challenges.
High potentials may already be demonstrating leadership in certain situations. They may excel in leading projects, for instance. Further, with their ability to prioritize, they laser in on meaningful work. Their emotional intelligence gives them strong interpersonal skills, which benefits their collaborative abilities and leadership aptitude. And their strong work ethic fuels their efforts to grow, while allowing them to be self-directed. Additionally, high-potential employees demonstrate a high level of productivity and excellent quality of work.
Tools and Methods for Identifying HiPos
Use a mix of tools in your efforts to spot high-potential employees. We’ll discuss some especially useful ones here.
9-Box Talent Review
Managers can use the 9-box talent review to assess direct reports’ current performance and future potential. By using this fairly simple grid along with a clear rubric, managers can consider which employees have the greatest potential for advancement.
Psychometric Assessments
You can use psychometric assessments, and even AI-driven predictions, to evaluate potential. Psychometric tests measure a combination of skills and personality characteristics to assess aptitude for particular types of roles. Some research has found that when testing incorporates AI analytics, accuracy can improve by 15%.
Observation
Particularly during stretch assignments or other critical projects, managers can directly observe employees’ performance. Managers can record these observations in performance logs. Then, they can reflect on who has displayed the most impressive growth or tackled the most ambitious challenges.
Moreover, look for people who seek out higher-level training and responsibilities, which shows drive and ambition to succeed.
360 Feedback
Use 360 reviews to gauge how employees view one another. Coworkers will have important insights on one another’s potential. They may notice emerging leadership abilities in a colleague, for instance. These interpersonal insights will help reveal qualities such as emotional intelligence and communication skills.
Performance Management Software
Performance management tools can illuminate employees’ progress, promoting objectivity by leveraging hard data. Supervisors and HR can look at percentage of goals achieved, quality of work, and other criteria using such solutions.
Potential-Focused Interviews
You can also conduct interviews with current employees to gain additional perspective. Potential-focused interviews focus on key indicators of high potential, assessing how employees have worked to develop and utilize such qualities. They can also examine employees’ interest in advancement and level of ambition.
Things to Avoid
Let’s examine how to steer clear of bias in the identification process.
First, avoid simply giving advanced opportunities to the people who have always received them. Often this upholds societal stereotypes about who make the best leaders.
Rather, when identifying high-potential employees, consider how structural barriers may have affected some individuals. Keep in mind that not all HiPos have had the same access to mentoring, development, and other opportunities. Do examine past performance, but don’t rely on it exclusively.
Remember that not all HiPos are highly vocal, too. Quiet contributors may have a great deal to offer—especially once you begin cultivating their potential. Some of them may simply need more confidence, more encouragement to tackle bigger projects, or strategies for proactively utilizing their abilities.
Strategies for Developing High-Potential Employees
Nurture the growth of all your high-potential employees in the following ways. Talk with managers and leaders about how to implement these strategies, so all HiPos have the support they need.
Creating Tailored Development Plans
Managers should sit down individually with each high potential employee to craft a development plan. Ask HiPos about their 5-year goals, and then break these down into one- or two-year goals. Discuss how their goals align with both present and anticipated organizational needs. Then, explore learning opportunities that support their goals while filling crucial needs gaps.
Providing Challenging Opportunities
Encourage high-potential employees to stretch their skill set by taking on more challenging projects. Find projects that align with their special interests—an area they’d like to learn more about, or a cross-functional area that merges different interests, for instance. These intellectually stimulating endeavors will engage and motivate HiPos.
Coaching and Mentorship
Each HiPo should receive regular coaching from their immediate supervisor to expand their leadership skills. Pair them with a mentor as well, who can enrich their perspective. The mentor could be a couple of levels above them in the organizational hierarchy, positioning them to act as a sponsor who advocates for the HiPo’s advancement.
Through coaching and mentoring, support HiPos in developing emotional intelligence and cultivating relationships, along with other key qualities. First, help them cultivate greater self-awareness by tuning into how their behaviours affect others. Then, help them enhance their empathy by learning to put themselves in their direct reports’ shoes and notice how they’re feeling. Coach them on sharing positive reinforcement with direct reports, building rapports, and talking through challenges with them.
Fostering Connections
Encourage meaningful connections between high-potentials across the organization. As they share ideas and collaborate on projects, they’ll stretch their skills and realize more impressive results. Having this network of relationships will also prepare HiPos to lead more effectively at higher levels.
Continuous Learning and Skill Development
Offer ongoing learning and enrichment tailored to high-potential employees’ needs. Combine training opportunities with stretch assignments and mentoring, as Donnebra McClendon says on Forbes. This three-pronged approach will help employees internalize the lessons they learn in trainings and apply them to their daily work.
Build Strategic Thinking Skills
Invite high-potential employees to meetings with senior leaders, to build their strategic muscles. They’ll gain a sense of how decisions are made and a stronger concept of the organization’s priorities. “Managers can also give employees assignments that require them to engage with other parts of the organization—through these experiences, they can discover how to connect dots across units or functions,” add researchers in Harvard Business Review. You can also assign emerging leaders bigger teams to manage, they note.
Building a Feedback Culture
Foster a culture of psychological safety to enhance HiPos’ potential, as Anthony J. Mayo says in Harvard Business Review. This will encourage them to flex their innovative abilities and tackle greater challenges. Within this culture, encourage regular sharing of feedback in all directions. As high-potential employees gain constructive and positive feedback, they’ll feel empowered to handle more ambitious responsibilities.
Retaining High-Potential Employees
Now that you’ve identified your HiPos, work to keep them through the following strategies.
Recognizing and Rewarding Talent
Make sure each high-performing employee feels appreciated by sharing ample praise. If they don’t feel their abilities are recognized, they’ll look for opportunities elsewhere.
Creating a Clear Career Path
Talk in-depth with each employee about their goals and dreams. Then, work with them to outline a career path toward these big-picture goals. Discuss opportunities within the company that will advance their progress along this path.
Fostering an Inclusive and Engaging Work Culture
High-performers will thrive in an inclusive, engaging culture. They tend to expect their company to follow an equitable approach to pay, advancement, and development—meaning they’ll look elsewhere if their organization doesn’t. And they want to be part of an engaged, driven team that will allow them to do their best work. So, strive to motivate all your employees to succeed, instilling enthusiasm by offering praise and coaching, fostering camaraderie, and providing enriching opportunities for growth.
By supporting the development of all your high-potential employees, you’ll further your organization’s success. During each review period, reconsider which employees have the highest potential for growth. That way, you’ll be using up-to-date information to make these determinations. As a result, you’ll be more likely to spot every HiPo and fully nurture their development.
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