High Potential Leadership Development Program: Picking the Right People First

Every year, around the same time, the nominations arrive.

Each business head is asked for two or three names for the high potential programme. The names come back quickly. Mostly the top performers. Mostly people senior leaders already know. Mostly people who present well.

The programme launches with real energy. There’s a kick-off with the CEO, a leadership offsite, a good-looking agenda.

Two years later, someone runs the numbers. A third of the group has left. Another third is doing exactly the job they were doing before. The programme gets redesigned.

Here’s a question worth sitting with: what if the programme was never the problem? What if the selection was?

A high potential leadership development program can only develop the people it starts with. And most of its success or failure is decided before the first session even begins.

High Performance Is Not High Potential

This is the most common mistake in high potential programmes, and it’s easy to understand why it happens. Top performers are visible, valued and easy to defend as a choice.

But performance and potential measure different things. Performance tells you how well someone does their current job. Potential tells you how likely they are to succeed in bigger, broader and very different roles.

Research by the Corporate Executive Board, described by Jean Martin and Conrad Schmidt in Harvard Business Review’s “How to Keep Your Top Talent”, found that only around one in seven high performers is actually a high potential. In other words, a list built mainly from performance ratings will be mostly the wrong list.

That doesn’t make high performers less valuable. Many are exactly where they should be, and deserve to be rewarded and kept. It just means they aren’t automatically the right people for an accelerated leadership track.

What Potential Actually Looks Like

Potential is harder to see than performance, but it isn’t invisible. It shows up in specific, observable patterns.

Notice that aspiration matters. Some highly capable people simply don’t want senior leadership roles, and that’s a legitimate choice. A programme full of people who’d rather stay specialists is a programme that will disappoint everyone.

Why Selection So Often Goes Wrong

Most selection processes aren’t careless. They just rely on signals that feel reliable but often mislead.

The last one is subtle and powerful. When senior leaders choose high potentials, they naturally recognise people who remind them of themselves. Over time, that narrows the pipeline in exactly the way most organisations say they want to avoid.

How to Pick the Right People

Widen the nomination net

Ask for nominations from more than one source. Managers, skip-level leaders, HR business partners and even peers notice different things. Make the criteria for potential explicit, so nominators are describing the same thing.

Add objective assessment

Nominations give you a long list. Assessment helps turn it into the right short list. A behavioural assessment shows how people actually behave rather than how they’re perceived. For a smaller, more senior group, a high potential assessment centre goes further, observing candidates in realistic leadership situations with several trained assessors.

Calibrate as a group

Bring the evidence together in a structured talent review. Compare each person with the criteria for potential, not with each other’s reputations. Ask, every time, “What specifically did we see that supports this?”

Be transparent about criteria

People accept selection decisions far more readily when they understand how they were made. Clear criteria also tell everyone else what to work on if they’d like to be considered next time.