TPC Leadership develops leaders with a heart for leaders AND their organisations. They are engaged and passionate in what they do. They focus on the individual, but will always keep the vision and objectives of the organisation into account.
Janna Kramer, Learning & Talent Development Leader
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At TPC Leadership we work extensively with Professional Services companies, supporting them to develop talent. In this second blog of the series TPC Leadership UK’s Associate Partner Catherine Bardwelland AssociatePeter Walldiscuss how to define and measure high potential amongst your teams.
How do you define and measure high potential (and avoid elitism)
It is difficult to predict how people will develop as their careers unfold. Some high potential employees are obvious, others are harder to draw out. While there are tools to help managers identify and measure high potential, the process will always rely partly on human judgement.
Catherine Bardwell, TPC Leadership Associate Partner, and Peter Wall, TPC Leadership Associate, explore how clear roles, shared responsibility and an inclusive approach are key to successfully identifying and nurturing all high potential employees.
What are the key success criteria that define high potential?
High potential is usually defined by an employee’s ability, drive and social skills. Catherine stresses, “It’s a balance. You can’t just measure the results leaders deliver or their IQ. How they develop trust and motivate others is an important indicator of their emotional intelligence too.”
When C-suite members are looking to define high potential, they should take a holistic approach – consider a candidate’s emotional intelligence, their ability to work collaboratively across boundaries and how they influence teams. They will need to draw on all of these elements to achieve sustained high performance in today’s increasingly complex and diverse organisations.
Developing emotional intelligence starts with increasing self-awareness. This shouldn’t be underestimated. The more a leader understands how their personal feelings may impact reactions and decisions, the less likely they are to demonstrate subconscious bias or promote elitism.
Make developing people a performance objective
If leaders are to truly embrace and value the process of identifying and developing high potential, they must be measured on it.
Peter explains that best practice is for leaders to have “developing, identifying and nurturing people” as part of their performance review. “If you’re measured on it as part of your job, you’ll do it and you’ll take it seriously” he says.
The difference between good leaders and outstanding leaders, Peter explains, is that good leaders ask, “how do I get this done?” while outstanding leaders ask, “how can I use this to give someone an opportunity to stretch and grow?” They focus on the inputs at least as much as they do the outputs.
Some businesses choose to appoint an employee in HR to manage talent identification and development. The danger of this is that line managers may then abdicate responsibility for developing their people. The focus must be on shared responsibility – an HR professional may oversee development, ask challenging questions and act as a conscience, but managers are best positioned to spot, measure and nurture talent in their teams.
Share responsibility and adopt a coaching culture
The idea of shared responsibility in measuring high potential can be encouraged through creating a coaching culture. Catherine explains that a successful coach will provide three key building blocks:
Create awareness within the coachee by asking probing questions that help guide them through a process.
Offer choices – it’s not about one career path, but about exploring what’s important for them.
Make the coachee responsible for their journey so they feel empowered to drive forward.
Peter explains that traditionally, when senior leaders try to manage and measure someone else’s career, they take a problem-solving approach. “They’ve learned to help people by offering advice telling them what they should do to fulfill their career aspirations – after all, that’s how they’ve got to where they are.”
“They’re trying to be helpful,” says Peter, ‘but a shift in mindset is needed. Now the best leaders are realising that they can help people make progress by supporting them, stimulating them, asking questions and challenging assumptions.” Their responsibility is to guide and oversee – it is the individual who takes responsibility for their own career journey.
Avoiding elitism
There is a danger that measuring high potential can lead to bias, elitism and ‘cloning’ – where leaders subconsciously choose to develop people who are like them.
We have a human tendency to gravitate, particularly when under pressure, towards people whose personality fits with our own. Peter refers to when he worked as a coach with a team on an engineering project. The project was struggling, and the pressure was on.
Peter recalls the manager saying, “if everyone was just like me this would be so much easier” and immediately laughing in disbelief that he’d said it. Regardless of our values and best intentions, we can still revert back to a self-preserving mindset when the pressure’s on.
The best leaders then, will meet the needs of the business rather than their personal need for security or superiority. They will practice continual self-awareness and development and strive to make conscious, objective, fair decisions when defining and measuring high potential.
Looking for insight on how to develop high potential in your organisation? TPC Leadership ‘s tailor made approach works specifically with Professional Services to reveal and develop high potential talent. Contact us for more information about our leadership solutions.
At TPC Leadership we work extensively with Professional Services companies, supporting them to attract and develop new talent. In the first of a new series, Associate Partner Catherine Bardwelland Associate Peter Wall,share some of their insight and experience on how to ensure an organisation’s talent ID process is fit for purpose and inclusive.
Successful organisations rely on emerging talent to sustain, develop and future-proof their business. Few would argue that a talent ID process that is inclusive and fit for purpose is anything less than essential.
YetGartner reports that only one quarter of HR leaders see their high-potential employee strategy as successful. Catherine Bardwell, TPCL Associate Partner, and Peter Wall, TPCL Associate, say it’s time to challenge old-fashioned mindsets and think outside the 9-box grid.
The need to be cautious with the 9-box grid
The 9-box grid is a popular talent management tool used to map employees into nine groups based on their performance and potential. It’s designed to help managers consider and articulate how well employees are performing in the present as well as predicting their growth potential.
While the 9-box grid has its advantages – some believe it makes talent investment decisions easier – it must be used with caution. Ultimately it is a process that is susceptible to bias.
It is human nature to root judgements about others in our own narrow sense of what good performance looks like. When we rate employees in the 9-box grid, it is too easy to put people in boxes based on our own personal preferences. The danger is that diverse talent is missed and we simply create clones of ourselves.
How do we nurture and develop talent within the Professional Services?
Providing opportunity for new experiences is one of the most successful ways to identify and develop unique talent. Catherine describes how one organisation used a process of rotation, where “talent was rotated every couple of years” exposing employees to different scenarios and new challenges, allowing managers to see how individuals coped and evolved.
The rotation system flourished because the organisation’s culture focused on revealing strengths. It is this, Catherine explains, that is key. Research fromGallup shows that when employees know and use their strengths, they are six times more engaged – and strength-based development has helped companies realise up to72% lower attrition and nearly 20% sales increase.
A strength-focussed culture, combined with the opportunity to shine in different situations, keeps leaders in a state of discovering what they’re good at. As those strengths are revealed, organisations can find ways to keep honing them. The leader’s long-term development path becomes a little clearer too.
Challenging bias
A Harley Davidson enthusiast and expert, Catherine recalls a trip to a Harley Davidson dealer. As she and her husband approached, the dealer immediately addressed Catherine’s husband, completely bypassing Catherine and assuming that she would not be interested.
When Catherine challenged him on this, he explained it was because she is female and that in his experience, very few women choose Harleys because they are such big bikes. “Women are typically more risk-averse and don’t jump on a bike unless they’re 100% sure it’s the right size” he told her.
Catherine relates this to leadership scenarios and seeking talent: subconscious bias must not blind an organisation in their quest to recognise and nurture potential. For a talent ID process to be fit for purpose and inclusive, companies need to challenge prejudice and create a “blank canvas” that eliminates bias and encourages reasonable risk-taking.
Go looking for potential
Talent will not always leap out at you and jump on the biggest bike. “In my experience there are people who naturally push themselves forward – who want to get on – and are quite good at getting noticed” Peter explains. These are the obvious high potential employees and while they are valuable, it’s too easy to allow them to dominate the talent ID process.
Peter recalls working with a firm who talked about the need to enhance their ‘bench strength’ – the term they used to describe how many employees were suitable to replace senior leaders in the coming years. They had identified three or four noticeable candidates but were concerned they couldn’t see more talent emerging.
Peter helped them see that in marking a small, obvious cohort of employees as high potential, the firm had set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy: those few who were profiled as high potential were given the challenging tasks, so it was those few who had the opportunity to visibly rise to the challenge and who were able to demonstrate high performance.
The better talent strategies don’t just focus on the obvious candidates, but “go looking for and mining for people with potential” says Peter. A talent ID process that is fit for purpose and inclusive is free of bias and provides opportunities for all employees to reveal their talent.
If you are looking for help to support your organisations talent ID process, TPC Leadership’s tailor made approach works specifically with Professional Services firms to reveal and develop talent. Contact us for more information.
In this blog TPC Leadership UK’s Associate Partner Catherine Bardwell and Associate Peter Wall discuss how to define and measure high potential amongst your teams.
How do you define and measure high potential (and avoid elitism)
It is difficult to predict how people will develop as their careers unfold. Some high potential employees are obvious, others are harder to draw out. While there are tools to help managers identify and measure high potential, the process will always rely partly on human judgement.
Catherine Bardwell, TPC Leadership Associate Partner, and Peter Wall, TPC Leadership Associate, explore how clear roles, shared responsibility and an inclusive approach are key to successfully identifying and nurturing all high potential employees.
What are the key success criteria that define high potential?
High potential is usually defined by an employee’s ability, drive and social skills. Catherine stresses, “It’s a balance. You can’t just measure the results leaders deliver or their IQ. How they develop trust and motivate others is an important indicator of their emotional intelligence too.”
When C-suite members are looking to define high potential, they should take a holistic approach – consider a candidate’s emotional intelligence, their ability to work collaboratively across boundaries and how they influence teams. They will need to draw on all of these elements to achieve sustained high performance in today’s increasingly complex and diverse organisations.
Developing emotional intelligence starts with increasing self-awareness. This shouldn’t be underestimated. The more a leader understands how their personal feelings may impact reactions and decisions, the less likely they are to demonstrate subconscious bias or promote elitism.
Make developing people a performance objective
If leaders are to truly embrace and value the process of identifying and developing high potential, they must be measured on it.
Peter explains that best practice is for leaders to have “developing, identifying and nurturing people” as part of their performance review. “If you’re measured on it as part of your job, you’ll do it and you’ll take it seriously” he says.
The difference between good leaders and outstanding leaders, Peter explains, is that good leaders ask, “how do I get this done?” while outstanding leaders ask, “how can I use this to give someone an opportunity to stretch and grow?” They focus on the inputs at least as much as they do the outputs.
Some businesses choose to appoint an employee in HR to manage talent identification and development. The danger of this is that line managers may then abdicate responsibility for developing their people. The focus must be on shared responsibility – an HR professional may oversee development, ask challenging questions and act as a conscience, but managers are best positioned to spot, measure and nurture talent in their teams.
Share responsibility and adopt a coaching culture
The idea of shared responsibility in measuring high potential can be encouraged through creating a coaching culture. Catherine explains that a successful coach will provide three key building blocks:
Create awareness within the coachee by asking probing questions that help guide them through a process.
Offer choices – it’s not about one career path, but about exploring what’s important for them.
Make the coachee responsible for their journey so they feel empowered to drive forward.
Peter explains that traditionally, when senior leaders try to manage and measure someone else’s career, they take a problem-solving approach. “They’ve learned to help people by offering advice telling them what they should do to fulfill their career aspirations – after all, that’s how they’ve got to where they are.”
“They’re trying to be helpful,” says Peter, ‘but a shift in mindset is needed. Now the best leaders are realising that they can help people make progress by supporting them, stimulating them, asking questions and challenging assumptions.” Their responsibility is to guide and oversee – it is the individual who takes responsibility for their own career journey.
Avoiding elitism
There is a danger that measuring high potential can lead to bias, elitism and ‘cloning’ – where leaders subconsciously choose to develop people who are like them.
We have a human tendency to gravitate, particularly when under pressure, towards people whose personality fits with our own. Peter refers to when he worked as a coach with a team on an engineering project. The project was struggling, and the pressure was on.
Peter recalls the manager saying, “if everyone was just like me this would be so much easier” and immediately laughing in disbelief that he’d said it. Regardless of our values and best intentions, we can still revert back to a self-preserving mindset when the pressure’s on.
The best leaders then, will meet the needs of the business rather than their personal need for security or superiority. They will practice continual self-awareness and development and strive to make conscious, objective, fair decisions when defining and measuring high potential.
Looking for insight on how to develop high potential in your organisation?Get in touch with us to find out how we can help.
In this blog we hear from TPC Leadership UK’s Associate Partner Catherine Bardwell and Associate Peter Wall on how to ensure your organisation’s talent ID process is fit for purpose and inclusive.
Successful organisations rely on emerging talent to sustain, develop and future-proof their business. Few would argue that a talent ID process that is inclusive and fit for purpose is anything less than essential.
YetGartner reports that only one quarter of HR leaders see their high-potential employee strategy as successful. Catherine Bardwell, TPC Associate Partner, and Peter Wall, TPC Associate, say it’s time to challenge old-fashioned mindsets and think outside the 9-box grid.
The need to be cautious with the 9-box grid
The 9-box grid is a popular talent management tool used to map employees into nine groups based on their performance and potential. It’s designed to help managers consider and articulate how well employees are performing in the present as well as predicting their growth potential.
While the 9-box grid has its advantages – some believe it makes talent investment decisions easier – it must be used with caution. Ultimately it is a process that is susceptible to bias.
It is human nature to root judgements about others in our own narrow sense of what good performance looks like. When we rate employees in the 9-box grid, it is too easy to put people in boxes based on our own personal preferences. The danger is that diverse talent is missed and we simply create clones of ourselves.
How do we nurture and develop talent?
Providing opportunity for new experiences is one of the most successful ways to identify and develop unique talent. Catherine describes how one organisation used a process of rotation, where “talent was rotated every couple of years” exposing employees to different scenarios and new challenges, allowing managers to see how individuals coped and evolved.
The rotation system flourished because the organisation’s culture focused on revealing strengths. It is this, Catherine explains, that is key. Research fromGallup shows that when employees know and use their strengths, they are six times more engaged – and strength-based development has helped companies realise up to72% lower attrition and nearly 20% sales increase.
A strength-focussed culture, combined with the opportunity to shine in different situations, keeps leaders in a state of discovering what they’re good at. As those strengths are revealed, organisations can find ways to keep honing them. The leader’s long-term development path becomes a little clearer too.
Challenging bias
A Harley Davidson enthusiast and expert, Catherine recalls a trip to a Harley Davidson dealer. As she and her husband approached, the dealer immediately addressed Catherine’s husband, completely bypassing Catherine and assuming that she would not be interested.
When Catherine challenged him on this, he explained it was because she is female and that in his experience, very few women choose Harleys because they are such big bikes. “Women are typically more risk-averse and don’t jump on a bike unless they’re 100% sure it’s the right size” he told her.
Catherine relates this to leadership scenarios and seeking talent: subconscious bias must not blind an organisation in their quest to recognise and nurture potential. For a talent ID process to be fit for purpose and inclusive, companies need to challenge prejudice and create a “blank canvas” that eliminates bias and encourages reasonable risk-taking.
Go looking for potential
Talent will not always leap out at you and jump on the biggest bike. “In my experience there are people who naturally push themselves forward – who want to get on – and are quite good at getting noticed” Peter explains. These are the obvious high potential employees and while they are valuable, it’s too easy to allow them to dominate the talent ID process.
Peter recalls working with a firm who talked about the need to enhance their ‘bench strength’ – the term they used to describe how many employees were suitable to replace senior leaders in the coming years. They had identified three or four noticeable candidates but were concerned they couldn’t see more talent emerging.
Peter helped them see that in marking a small, obvious cohort of employees as high potential, the firm had set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy: those few who were profiled as high potential were given the challenging tasks, so it was those few who had the opportunity to visibly rise to the challenge and who were able to demonstrate high performance.
The better talent strategies don’t just focus on the obvious candidates, but “go looking for and mining for people with potential” says Peter. A talent ID process that is fit for purpose and inclusive is free of bias and provides opportunities for all employees to reveal their talent.
How to attract and retain millennials is a pressing concern facing all businesses, but the challenge it presents small businesses is even more acute. In this blog, TPC Leadership Associate Partner, Vicky Ferrier explores the issues relating to attracting and retaining talent.
The latest SMB Trends Report from Salesforce showed ‘hiring the right talent’ to be the no.1 factor constraining business activities in the US and the second largest constraint in the UK.
Large companies have the luxury of attracting talent through their prestige, clear promotional opportunities and potentially larger benefits packages. They also have the power to look the part for younger talent – with striking office spaces, 3rd wave coffee bars on site, and possibly even a slide connecting the first and second floors.
What do small companies have to offer emerging leaders in such a talent market? How can they keep up with managing millennials when the other side doesn’t only seem to have greener grass, but have also installed a playground on the lawn?
Make opportunities for leadership development
“Instead of aiming for unique accomplishments, the intense desire to succeed leads us to strive for guaranteed success.”– Adam Grant, Originals
The advantage of small businesses is that they can create opportunity everywhere instead of funnelling new hires into a specialism. Recruiting talent can be a process of inviting potential candidates to make an impact on the whole of the company – and to grow in leadership as they do so. Even if the primary role of a position is sales, marketing or PR, the opportunity for creative input, communication and ideation can extend far beyond.
Leaders of small businesses should actively ask for input from everyone regardless of their position in the company. While large companies can often be tangled up by unwieldy processes and hierarchical management, small businesses have a natural agility to run with ideas from below. As Craig Pearce of MEF University says, “knowledge trumps position when it comes to leadership if we are going to make breakthroughs.”
Demonstrating that you value your emerging leaders as leaders – and not just task-completers – doesn’t just mean you’re more likely to retain talent. The respect and opportunity you give will almost certainly motivate your team to give significantly more of themselves to the company. Offering in-depth opportunities for leadership development, whether through training courses or coaching, will strengthen this desire to stick around even more.
Foster real friendships with your emerging leaders
“We have a critical mass of thought leaders who are thinking that we need to move away from the concept of leadership being just a hierarchical role to it being a social process.” – Craig Pearce, MEF University
What small businesses might lack in their coffee game is made irrelevant by what they can offer on a relational level. In larger companies, it is easy to let the sliding doors between departments and levels of management become significant barriers. In smaller companies, there are far fewer obstacles to developing real relationships. There’s even the chance for the business to feel like a family, regardless of whether it is actually a family business or not.
The desire to belong affects anyone of any age, but for millenials it can be a deal-breaker in choosing who to work for. If your company creates space for real friendships to develop – whether in or outside of work hours, people will be able to sense the connection and will want to be a part of it. Practically, it can help to introduce interviewees to the rest of the team, so that they can begin to visualise themselves among them.
Radiate realistic optimism
“Great leaders must honestly accept the gravity of challenging situations… doing so provides them with credibility to also share an optimistic, authentic vision that is both reassuring and realistic.” – Russell Reynold Associates, Leadership Through Uncertainty
Being small isn’t a default path to developing a sense of belonging in a team. Intentionality is still required if genuine friendships are to develop – the kind emerging leaders want to stick around to enjoy for years. And it requires more than being nice. It requires leaders to be open about their limitations, honest about the real state of affairs and to be encouraging even when a project fails. They must radiate realistic optimism. This is what inspires people to show their true selves and enables true camaraderie to form.
Look to those you already have
“A workforce of great people not only does great work, it attracts more great people.”
– Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works
Leadership development of the people already a part of your team will go a long way in attracting talent further down the road.
What people are looking for – more than any peripherals or benefits package – is a great team to be a part of. They know that in order to grow, they need more than a clear promotional path. They need to be around other people who are growing fast.
