High Potential Leaders

As discussed recently (Oct 28), using performance to assess leadership potential is a Catch 22 situation: the person can’t be seen to be a leader without having been given the opportunity, but how does the person get the opportunity to lead without having already been seen as a leader? There evidently needs to be an assessment of leadership potential in order to make sure that leaders actually get the opportunity to perform. Current thinking on leadership tends to favour identifying and developing “high potentials”. But how do you assess and identify a high potential leader?

October’s Harvard Business Review has an article entitled “How to Hang on to Your High Potentials” by Fernandez-Araoz, Groysberg and Nohria (Reprint R111OD www.hbr.org). Their key answers to the headline question are to 1. Align the leaders with the organisation’s strategy (so the leaders are adding the value as needed); 2. “Thoughtfully” develop and reward (targeted, balanced and specific); and 3. Communicate honestly (since “companies are often reluctant to acknowledge who has made the “list”, [because] their process is overly subjective or unfair.”) Their fourth and final answer is “select with care”, and accordingly half the article is dedicated to “what is potential”?

Here’s a summary followed by my culturally biased critique (“et alors”).

High Potential Leaders

Potential is a person’s “ability to grow and to handle responsibilities of greater scale and scope”. Scale can be measured in terms of budget or staff; scope can be defined with reference to breadth and complexity. To identify this potential in a leadership context, the authors make reference to the Egon Zehnder International model for assessing potential for which the main parts are as follows:

1. Individual’s Motives

·    This “inner core” predicts consistent patterns of behaviour over time, and relates to the “social motivators” – need for achievement, affiliation or influence.

·    One key social motivator related to leadership is “socialised influence (or having a positive impact on others for the good of the larger organisation).”

2. Leadership Assets

·    These “assets” predict how far and how fast a leader can grow.

·    The four key assets are “deriving insight”, “engaging others”, “demonstrating resolve” and “seeking understanding”.

3. Sense of Identity

·    “Identity” is how the high potential sees themself on the “stage”.

·    Engaging with the future, the high potential should envision a senior role to achieve one of the motivations (and not just for prestige or status).

4. Skills and Knowledge

·    Unlike the three “innermost” items which are hard to learn or change, skills and knowledge can be “easily” acquired.

·    To assess potential, the ability to learn and acquire new knowledge and skills should be considered.

Et alors?

In a culture with high power distance, it is likely that the motives of the individual are quite often overlooked. It can be the equivalent of the "head of the family", or the hierarchy who decides who has potential without involving the individual. If from experience, those with the authority to decide do assume to understand the individual's motives then special care needs to be taken to understand the motives of individuals in a multicultural environment! The chances are that the “second guessing” of what motivates an individual will be done in a mono- (rather than multi-) cultural context; however motivations can be one of the key areas of intercultural misunderstandings. In a culture with low power distance, the individual is more likely to be consulted directly which can reduce the risk of “miscasting” someone as a high potential leader, especially in a multicultural environment.

Some cultures are implicit, others are explicit. Reviewing potential with the individual concerned, communicating status and being transparent are all “success” factors of the above potential review and identification system. This process can work well in an explicit (sometimes known as “direct”) culture whereas it is more of a challenge in an implicit (sometimes known as “indirect”) culture. Similarly some cultures place more emphasis on the past rather than the present or the future. Accordingly it can become more of a challenge to review potential when the reference point is automatically past performance. In this context, there is also the perennial debate about “born” or “made”. Implicit, past-orientated cultures might conjecture that leaders are “born” whereas explicit future-orientated cultures might postulate that leaders are “made”. As the authors say, “select with care” and in a multicultural environment extra care has to be taken to communicate transparently and objectively across all cultures whether implicit, explicit, high or low power distance and past, present or future orientated!