Can you spot high potential?- Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog we explored the difficulties of identifying those with potential.

So how can we at Head Light help?

Some organisations are very clear on what ‘potential’ looks like and in our experience, there are a number of attributes which tend to predict success in higher-level roles. Common ‘HiPo’ indicators are:

• Capacity for learning – being able to learn from own mistakes, actively seeking feedback and using it constructively to inform future performance, reflecting on own behaviour to learn lessons for the future, being a quick learner and able to learn in a number of different ways
• Resilience – being able to recover quickly from setbacks, coping with high pressure and demands, finding ways around obstacles; perseverance in the face of adversity.
• Strategic thinking – longer-term thinking, looking outside the organisation for opportunities, seeing patterns, trends, themes and relationships, being able to manage ambiguity and deal with increasingly complex issues, problems, timescales and information, systems thinking, seeing things from an organisational perspective.
• Flexibility – being able to adapt communication, influencing, leadership and interpersonal style to suit the demands of the situation and the other people involved, managing change, shifting one’s approach in response to new priorities.
• Emotional intelligence – being able to accurately recognise and manage one’s own emotional states, recognising and understanding emotional responses in others, using this understanding to increase interpersonal effectiveness.
• Drive and motivation – being a ‘self-starter’, actively seeking out opportunities to learn and stretch oneself, showing a drive to make a difference, actively managing and planning a career, setting stretching personal goals.

Building on this, we have developed the functionality within our award-winning Talent 360 tool to ‘flag’ some of the indicators within a 360 questionnaire as ‘high potential markers’, thereby supporting the line manager in his or her need to identify these.

These ‘markers’ are not shown when people complete the questionnaire, and they may be existing indicators across as number of different competencies. But when a report is generated, however, the software looks at the ratings given to these indicators and produces a composite HiPo score, providing a useful visual summary on a separate page.

If you want to see how this looks in practice, then please do get in touch and we can schedule a Talent 360 demo.

You may also like to read our first blog on this subject or read our article on spotting talent.