Assessing Potential Leadership Talent

Identifying and assessing leadership potential can be a complex challenge.

An employee's current high performance does not predict future leadership potential. On average only about 29% of an organisation’s current high performers will have the potential to rise to more senior, critical leadership positions.

To have the best chance of success in identifying leadership potential the following three critical areas should be assessed. Once determined, these areas should be regularly reviewed as they can fluctuate due to changes in their personal and work environment.

Ability

An employee’s ability consists of innate characteristics such as capacity to process complex ideas, to think broadly and quickly, to perceive and understand theirs and others' emotions and learned skills such as technical, functional and interpersonal skills. The ability component of potential highlights the core set of skills than an employees will need to excel in a more senior role.

Using the Smiths Leadership Competency Model through Performance Review, 360 feedback, the Discovering Your Potential Development Centre and Kaisen profiling are all sound ways of assessing innate ability and learned skills. Without the right level of ability the probability of their success at the next level is 0%.

Engagement

Engagement is the extent to which an employee commits to something or someone in the organisation, how hard they work or how they stay as a result of that commitment. Employees emotionally commit to an organisations when they derive pride, enjoyment, inspiration or meaning from something or someone in the organisation. Rational engagement is when an employee feels that something or someone in the organisation provides financial, developmental or personal rewards that are in their best interests. These forms of commitment drive the discretionary effort that employees invest in their work and the extent to which they intend to remain with the organisation. If they are not engaged with the business research suggests they are likely to have only a 13% probability of success at the next level.

Ambition

Whilst this can slow down and speed up depending on the stage in a person’s life, there should be a clear pattern and demonstration of the desire, drive and passion that it takes to progress through a leadership career. Research suggests that if they lack ambition to progress to the next level their probability of success is 44%.

When all three factors of ability, engagement and ambition are present you are likely to have identified the employees who could pursue a leadership career and assist Smiths in achieving its Full Potential.