Leadership Development News Roundup: High Potential Employees Edition

High potential employees are critical to every organization’s ability to develop leaders now that can drive it into the future. Have you identified any high potential employees within your organization? If so, are you developing them to ascend to higher positions with increased responsibility? If you haven’t identified any yet, do you know how?For this week’s Leadership Development News Roundup, I’ve assembled a collection of articles and blog posts with information and advice on identifying and developing high potential employees.

• Leadership: More than a Buzzword. Business First Magazine: “A high potential leader (HiPO) can be defined as being an employee or manager who could perform successfully in a leadership role, one to two levels above their current role, within the next two to five years. Many business executives mistakenly pinpoint employees that are performing at a high level as high potential leaders. In fact, performance appraisal analysis suggests just 20 to 30 percent of high performing managers are also high potential leaders.”

• 3 Core Leadership Competencies to Teach Your High-Potentials. Inc.: “It's not enough to come up with good ideas and new innovations. Most organizations have hundreds, if not thousands, of good ideas and new innovations. The challenge is to get these ideas through the eye of the needle. That's why high-potentials need to know how to take innovations, ideas, or agendas and turn them into realities.”

• Measuring and Developing Executive Presence in Leaders and High Potentials. ASTD: “Provide reflective learning experiences. Provide leaders and high potentials with opportunities to reflect on past leadership experiences and connect the dots with their strengths and developmental themes. Through the power of recollection, leaders embark on journeys of personal discovery that lead to clarity about what defines them. When they’re able to clarify what defines them, they can demonstrate an ‘executive presence’ that’s authentic, unique and true.”

• Why High Potential Employees Fail to Make the Effort. Success Performance Solutions: “What separates top performers from mediocre ones may not be the raw talent they have but the effort they put into applying their abilities and skills. The formula for unlocking potential and achieving desired outcomes is: Effort + Talent = Success. Therefore understanding the sources of individual motivation that drives effort, and not innate talent, may be the key to peak performance.”

• The 7 Habits of High-Potential Employees. TalentQuest: “Instead of becoming pigeon-holed as subject matter experts in one area or focusing on a specific skill, high-potential employees find ways to demonstrate their value and impact across the organization. Their openness to change, their ability to learn quickly, and their willingness to teach and train others often leads to new leadership roles and opportunities.”

Let us know if you’d like our help identifying and coaching your organization’s high potential employees.Success Labs is a full-service, strategic organizational and leadership development company located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 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.