Issues & Observations — How to put your finger on the high potentials
✍ Scribed by David Berke
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2003
- Weight
- 56 KB
- Volume
- 23
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1093-6092
- DOI
- 10.1002/lia.1016
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
n any organization there are individuals who are considered to be the likely future leaders of the organization-in other words, to have high potential for leadership. Developing and retaining these high-potential individuals is crucial to an organization's long-term success. But before high potentials can be developed and retained they must be identified.
The process of identifying high potentials might appear to be obvious and simple-you merely determine which individuals are most intelligent and perform best, right? But identifying high potentials-and just as important, the people who should no longer be considered high potentials-involves looking at more than just performance and IQ. And an organization's ability to conduct this identification process successfully has an enormous impact on the effectiveness of its succession planning.
Typically, people identified as high potentials are viewed as being capable of advancing two or more levels up from their current positions. In some cases the definition is even narrower, focusing only on those who are believed to have the potential to make it to the very top level of the organization.
Such definitions are both too general and too limiting-too general because