How do you find your HiPos?

Posted by Anne Hamill

Most Talent Professionals are focused on how to identify, develop and retain the people who have the potential to make a big contribution to the business in future years. However recent research reported by CEB shows that the majority of people who are identified as high potentials have left their organisation 5 years later!

Is this a problem with how organisations identify people to invite to talent programmes? Read on to evaluate your own process.

Talent team resources are limited, and there is a drive to invest the most time and energy where it will deliver the best outcome. But how do you do this?

Most organisations have some kind of Talent Programme – sometimes more than one – and select people onto these. Talent programmes can present a range of opportunities to be picked up by individuals, or experienced by the whole cohort.

Below are 4 key ways in which organisations can approach the issue of choosing the few people who will be given these opportunities. Some approaches to selection are time-honoured, some are radical departures. We’ve identified some pros and cons to each method.

Use ratings of performance and potential to sift out the best
This is the starting point for many organisations, using the time-honoured 9-box grid that focuses attention on who to invest in, and who to manage out. However, these traditional 9-box grids suffer from some major drawbacks.

1. 49% of your managers, by definition, are below the mean in terms of their own performance and potential. How much do you trust their untrained judgement?
2. As most managers aren’t trained to spot potential, ratings are very inconsistent from team to team. Thus the 9-box requires an immense spend of senior time in moderation meetings to try to force consistency.
3. The success in defending a high rating may depend more on the manager’s skills – in being observant, articulate and persuasive – than the calibre of the individual being recommended.
4. Managers and individuals become disengaged if the initial rating is moderated to a lower one. They feel it is arbitrary, unfair, and hard to justify.
5. Few managers actually ask their ‘high potentials’ how much stretch they want, or talk about their ambitions. This can result in up to a quarter of the people on your talent programme only being on it because they were worried that it would be detrimental to say ‘No’.

Use Development Centres to provide a consistent evaluation
Development Centres are often used to back up manager ratings, because multi-faceted assessment has a good track record in predicting performance. However these also have drawbacks.

1. You are taking your most highly rated people and creating winners and losers – where the prize is to be offered a place on the talent programme. Do you really want to demotivate 50% or more of your most highly rated people? It’s likely to cause them to look elsewhere. And remember that the best DCs predict only around 40-50% of the variance in performance.
2. DCs usually favour confident extraverts who like being thrown in at the deep end to think on their feet, and influence and persuade people they don’t know. Does this description fit all the people you want to retain and progress? Or are you also interested in people who like to prepare thoroughly, learn from their mistakes, and drive their own development? Traditional DCs can disadvantage women, ethnic minorities, and introverted professions such as engineers. Do you want fewer of these people in your talent pipeline? See our article on making ACs introvert friendly.

Use self-nomination and hurdles
This approach is more 21st century, as it removes the line manager from the equation and gives a direct line of sight to ambitious individuals. Quality can be assured by making a Good performance rating required to participate, and asking people to leap hurdles that require them to show drive and commitment to learning. If well-designed and run, this approach can make a major positive impact. It is egalitarian, promotes proactivity and self-driven learning, and allows people to show what they can do. Failure to win through is usually due to lack of personal effort or commitment, so it doesn’t make people feel judged – at each stage, if people drop out, they can be given help to do better next time. They will either self-select out, or redouble their efforts – both are a good outcome. You can even design the whole high potential programme on self-directed lines (in 2013, T&P came Runner Up in the CIPD Talent Management Award for a self-directed early talent programme, for example – for details see here). One of the big benefits is that you are likely to get a much more diverse pipeline of talent by selecting high potentials this way – key for any organisations who need to improve diversity statistics.


What are the drawbacks to this approach?

1. It requires skill to set up and maintain a self-directed programme as every piece of communication has to reinforce a very positive message of self-direction and accountability. Even small actions – like sending reminders – can undermine the self-directed ethos. In our experience, we need to support HR and management through the first few years of these programmes for them to succeed – but once the ethos is embedded great things can be achieved! So expect to invest in expert help in the early stages.
2. You need a committed sponsor who is prepared to think differently to run the pilot.
3. You need career and learning workshops to instil a strong self-directed ethos in participants, and you need systems like Talent Boards to match and support the self-directed effort.

Select high contributors rather than high potentials
This approach challenges the idea that high potentials are diamonds in the rough, waiting to be found and nurtured into high contributors. Instead, the idea is that most people who will deliver outstanding value to their organisation in the future are ALREADY delivering outstanding value in their current roles. There is also a fundamental shift in the thought process about what type of talent you want to identify. Some of your high contributors may be in stages of their lives where they don’t want to be stretched – they may have young families, ageing parents, sick partners – or be approaching retirement and driven to leave a legacy. Others will be high contributors seeking big jumps into stretching roles with more responsibility. For both groups however the focus is often more on contribution and recognition than reward. Our research suggests that reward is important for those who are ambitious, but primarily as being hard evidence that they are valued for their contribution, and not paid according to their age or experience.

What are the drawbacks with this approach?

1. How do you assess high contribution? You need a clear definition, and to set a challenge. Not unlike an Awards ceremony – but with multiple winners – people are challenged to prove the value of what they are doing. You can even provide kudos to those who have managed a high contributor – providing an incentive to enter your team members. The value of setting up a high contribution challenge is that it creates a high engagement, ‘earn the right’ culture. This will create high contributors not just spot them!
2. Some areas of the business may be more fertile for demonstrating high contribution – e.g. in sales it is easy to find numbers to support your case, and in some areas teams create achievement together. This means that you may need to have workshops that help people to quantify and illustrate the value they have added. Think of the way Award givers often run workshops in how to present your Award submission – but a more personal investment is showing people how to drive their career by adding value and making this visible.
3. You need a range of diverse rewards. Some people want visibility to senior managers and challenging projects or job moves. Others want recognition and to be valued. So a menu of outcomes for your high contributors makes a lot of sense; the traditional ‘HiPo programme’ will only be one of these.

The Takeaway
In the 21st century we have flatter structures and more matrix management. The systems that worked in 1957 (when the 9-box grid was first developed) don’t always work now. We need a more flexible and less hierarchical system to spot our high contributors and high potentials.

And perhaps the most important thing to note is that how we identify talented people for investment sends a huge message to our people.

Is your process sending the message that the organisation is bureaucratic and hierarchical (potential ratings made by managers, and approved 5 months later)? Or only interested in people who can rise to a challenge in a day (DCs)? Or is it clear that you will invest in everyone who is prepared to up their game and take control of their destiny?