Posts Tagged ‘Employee Leadership Potential’

One of the challenges companies face today is managing their employee turnover, specifically for key positions in the organization. A key position is defined as a critical role that would adversely affect a company’s operations if it were vacated. These positions are typically leadership or managerial and make up between eight and twelve percent of all positions (Berger, 2004). When an employee vacates a key position, via unexpected leave, retirement or promotion, an organization ideally backfills the position with a cadre of highly-qualified candidates ready to replace that person. Human Resource (HR) departments plan for succession to hedge against the risk of departure. Hence, companies cannot afford turnover of high-potential employees in line for key positions.

Like leadership, potential has as many definitions but is even more ambiguous. These definitions range from “inherent capacity for coming into being” to a “latent excellence or ability that may or may not be developed.” Leaders need to start somewhere; their entrance into the realm of leadership usually begins in a front-line management position. One of the key criterion in selecting a leader is the anticipation of their success to lead their team. In essence, what is their leadership potential? Most organizations measure potential by intuition or “gut feel.” The problem with this informal measurement is that it is often wrong. Society is littered with poor managers hired by people who thought the person had leadership potential. The fallacy in their selection is based on past performance, not on their potential to be a good leader. These are generally the data points that create the ubiquitous “9-box” companies use to slot future stars. Performance is regularly measured, albeit inexactly. Potential is not something that is actively measured and companies do not utilize the proper research instruments to measure it.

A Manager Provides the Right Antecedents for Employee Success

Having the proper antecedents for leadership development will likely produce better leaders. Malcolm Gladwell (2008) extensively analyzes the conditions that make people successful in his book “Outliers.” Date of birth for junior hockey players, affinity relationships for certain professions like law, and native languages assisting math skills for Asian children are all foundations that provide better success. These antecedents are harbingers of success and set the stage to bring out the best in their subjects. Silzer and Church (2009) discovered that an employee’s potential can be stifled by his or her immediate manager by not providing the right antecedents for high performance. Hence, a good manager provides the right conditions for an employee to realize his or her potential.

In part 2 of this post we will look at ways of identifying high-potential outside of past performance based on two predictive attributes: self-efficacy and mindset.