High Potential

“It isn’t where you come from; it’s where you’re going that counts.” – Ella Fitzgerald

What could be more motivating than a conversation about where you are going and what you want to do? Instead, the typical focus in hiring, performance management and talent review discussions is “what have you done” to prove your worth and potential to the organization.

Having facilitated Interviewing Skills workshops for years, I have also held the belief that the value of behavior-based interview questions is that past performance is a reliable predictor of future behavior. While past performance is clearly an important piece of the puzzle around selecting and growing talent, I believe we are missing an important piece if we do not also engage a job candidate or team member in a conversation about where they want to go, and what they want to do next. During a time when leadership is looking for ways to be more inclusive and encourage belonging, what a wonderful yet simple tool for motivating and nurturing talent!

Most job descriptions list a litany of qualifications and experience that a hiring team wants a candidate to have, with words like “demonstrated” and “proven”. Often there is an exhausting, bulleted list of forty or more items (who has really done all that?), and then you look at the level or salary range and think, “Who is this (cheap) unicorn?” This is intimidating to job seekers, and very well may discouraged some fine applicants due to overwhelm. From a diversity and inclusion perspective, this can leave several high-quality (yet humble) candidates out of the pool, and only bring forth the overly confident or “been-there-done-that” types. The job descriptions that stand out are those that include the impact the role will have on the organization and what success will look like, allowing candidates to present their potential and not just their past accomplishments.

Once you have a diverse slate of candidates ready to interview, questions should include some open-ended inquiry around candidates’ next career move and what types of projects they find motivating and challenging. Behavior-based questions that assess past performance can be serious and fact-based. Make the next part of the interview more fun and allow people to demonstrate you their creative thinking and potential.  “If you could design the next role in your career, what would it be?” “Which parts of the job description are new to you and how do they fit with your strengths career aspirations?” “If you were a leader in our organization, what is one initiative you would enact in order to improve employee engagement?”. As with behavior-based questions, all interviewers should take notes and give some thought to the potential of the candidate, and not just what they have done in the past.

Performance Management and Coaching discussions are terrific opportunities for these types of inquiries as well. While feedback is certainly important to help staff members improve and refine their skills, why not also assess their views of their own potential? “If you could design that project from the beginning, what would you do?”  “If you could pick your next challenge at the company, what would it be?” “I know you love working on this team! What other teams could benefit from your talent, skills, and career goals?”. This gives managers a different level of information on an employee’s skills, moves the dialog forward (particularly if difficult feedback has been a part of the conversation), and can be motivating to an employee who would like to tell you about where she is going rather than where she has been.

This type of information gives those managers more to discuss when they go to the table for Talent Reviews. Many organizations use a 9-Box Grid or similar tool for assessing past performance and future potential. I admit that I have been skeptical of the potential piece in particular, as that assessment seems rife with opportunity for bias. How do we truly assess another person’s potential? Do we look through the lens of what is familiar to us? (“He reminds me of myself as a young person”) Do we only see potential in the staff members who agree with us and do not rock the boat? Are we assessing a person’s potential based on the current role when he perhaps has high potential in another, untapped area?

Talent leaders would do well to encourage leaders to have forward-looking dialog, career development conversations, and “stay interviews” throughout the performance management cycle so that they come to the Talent Review and Succession Management tables with a broader, more inclusive picture of the potential of each individual on the team. Instead of viewing “High Potentials” as a club of certain team members, challenge managers to discover the high potential that each person possesses. Rather than lose people to other companies, keep talented folks in your organization by tapping in to where they have potential, rather than whether they do.