How to Identify High-Potential Employees -- And Why You Must Take Time to Do So

Imagine you’re a high-performer; you’re motivated, engaged and delivering business results, but soon you realize you don’t have a clear, defined path to advancement within your organization. Would you start to get frustrated?Now, imagine you’re in an executive role at an organization that, due to turnover, doesn’t have employees who have been around long enough to understand the mission, values and goals. Would you think it was time to invest in a people strategy?

The Dynamic Talent Market

These are common scenarios and important ones to consider because the talent market today is dynamic and full of opportunities for smart, talented people. If your organization isn’t investing in its people strategy and working with its employees to help carve out career paths for them, it’s going to run into problems with talent management and retention down the road.With large numbers of baby boomers gearing up to exit the workforce and a young talent pool that is untethered from the idea of long term employment, more and more employees are comfortable moving and changing employers at a rapid pace if it meets their career objectives. The challenge for organizations is to always have people in place that know their business. If people are moving in and out too quickly -- or even if they’re being promoted up through the ranks too rapidly -- organizations can lose the opportunity to have someone in a role long enough to make a difference and learn what they need to know to be successful.How can you begin to invest in your people strategy and carve out career paths for your high-potential employees so you don’t lose them to another employer?

Start with Senior-Level Support

If you’re going to target high-potential employees and bring them into a system of leadership development and succession planning, you need to start with a supportive senior team. No high-potential or leadership program can be successful unless the senior team is championing it. If senior leaders don’t value it, no one else will and it won’t get the attention, resources and commitment necessary to achieve success.

Develop a Competency-Based Process

To start identifying high-potential employees you need a competency-based process. You need to consider which competencies your organization requires to thrive and grow.The methodology for identifying high-potentials is a combination of performance and potential. Look at your talent pool and ask “are they performing?" And then, “what’s their capacity to perform at the next level?”If, at first, employees will get noticed for their performance and results, it becomes important to start observing and testing their potential for leadership. These competencies are generally the ones related to learning agility, people leadership and strategic agility.

Identify Learning Agility

A key indicator of whether an employee will be ready for a promotion in the foreseeable future is learning agility -- the ability for someone to take something they’ve never done before and figure out how to do it successfully. Individuals with high learning agility will take on new challenges, learn about them and establish the resources they need to make it successful.Korn Ferry describes these individuals as “relentless and versatile learners who are open to change, analyze both success and failures for clues on how to improve, experiment and try anything to find solutions, enjoy the challenge of unfamiliar tasks, [and] quickly grasp the essences and underlying structure of anything." These individuals are naturally high-potentials because they’re always working to improve and find solutions.Contact us for more help learning how to identify high-potential employees.Success Labs is a full-service, strategic organizational and leadership development company located in Baton Rouge, La. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.