Your Best People - How to find, measure and manage your top talent

Every organisation is looking for people with potential but the problem is that they often don’t ask the question “potential for what?” Talking about potential in general is not very helpful; everyone has potential of one kind or another. One of the outstanding characteristics of human beings is their ability to adjust to changing circumstances. It’s what has allowed the species to survive and become dominant. But some people are less flexible than others, and different people are interested in doing different things. Defining potential has two sides: what the organisation wants done and what the individual wants to do.

There are a variety of ways to identify potential, but all start with answering the “for what?” question, and in organisational terms that can generally be thought of as a job or series of jobs. Starting at the “what” end – what tasks, jobs, roles, functions, levels, responsibilities, etc. – opens up the opportunity to use a very simple but very powerful technique: self nomination. If you want to find out who has potential for something, one of the first things you need to do is find out who thinks they have that potential. That means that you have to ask them.

We can see flags coming up immediately. Are we saying that people know more about their potential to do something than their managers do? Most of the time, yes. Are we saying that people understand themselves – their strengths, weaknesses and abilities – better than their managers do? Most of the time, yes. And are we saying that people know better than their managers do whether they want to do something? Yes, all of the time.

The more structured an organisation – processes, systems, rules, regulations – the more “comfortable” it is for its people, and the less room/need there is for independent action and decision making. The more the structure makes decisions for people, the less involved and committed they become. The lesser the structure the more challenging it is and the more it demands, supports and develops independent action and risk taking.

One of the best ways to identify who have potential for something is to set up a process of self-nomination. People who volunteer to do something are demonstrating their commitment. It’s a matter of commitment and motivation.

The great majority of programmes and systems for identifying potential are based on judgements and decisions by third parties. In most cases the individuals who have been identified as “having potential” remain unaware of the fact. Lists of fast track people, potential leaders, and “talent pool” people are created by various processes and are often based on performance appraisals. But we know that the appraisal system has a number of shortcomings, one of which is that managers sometimes hold back people they don’t want to lose, and sometimes inflate their assessments of people they want to get rid of. Nor is it uncommon to see managers who have favourites whom they support and sponsor over people who have greater talent or potential.

Sometimes people who are put on high potential lists don’t want to be there. Sometimes they’re quite happy doing what they are doing, and if they’re doing it well, what’s wrong with that? If you want to find out who is up for change, for career advancement, for challenge and for performance improvement – i.e. who has a decent probability of having potential – the best way is to ask them to identify and nominate themselves. Once they’ve done that they’ve passed the first test; they’ve shown interest and some level of commitment.

A large organisation with approximately 120,000 employees uses, as part of its training and development for supervisory and non-supervisory employees, an on-line learning system which offers a variety of training/learning “modules”. Participation in any and all of the elements of the system is purely voluntary and the entire menu of training and development modules is available to all employees. The training modules are structured around core skill and knowledge areas which build on one another. Upon completion of a module, the successful employee receives a certificate and the organisation is informed of the accomplishment. Rewards are linked to successful completion of the various modules, but more importantly the system flags for the organisation the people in its workforce who demonstrate energy, desire for improvement, motivation, commitment, and ability – i.e. potential.

By and large people have a much wider range of capability than we, and they, believe. It’s not so much that people hide their light under a bushel, it’s more that organisations provide bushel baskets for everyone and keep them covered, lifting the baskets in a semi-random fashion to see if there is light beneath. The unfortunate result of this process is that a lot of people finally get tired of waiting for their basket to be lifted and extinguish their lights themselves.