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Have you been asked to design a high-potential leadership program but don’t know where to start? The key lies in selecting participants who genuinely show a high potential to lead well.
Traditionally, HR managers work on the assumption that past performance is the best predictor of future performance, which is why behavioural interviews and reference checks continue to be popular selection techniques. However, it is likely that your potential candidates will have little if any experience in leadership. While they may be great at their current job, leadership requires a different set of abilities. An effective staff member gets good results by doing good work themselves, while an effective leader gets good results by getting the best from those they lead. The best individual player on a team does not necessarily make the best captain or coach. Past success cannot predict future success when the demands and nature of the role are completely different to those of the past. It is therefore a mistake to select candidates with perceived high potential based on their past performance.
Another strategy that we often see organisations use to select high-potential leaders is through the recommendations made by candidates’ managers. We do not recommend using this method. It is not an effective or reliable way to identify people with a high potential for leading well. Relying on someone else’s word is equivalent to selecting someone based on comparative reference checks and is only a fraction more reliable than flipping a coin 1. This is not surprising, as managers are subconsciously prone to seeing potential in staff with whom they get along and who share similar traits or approaches. This is likely to result in many candidates with a true potential to lead being passed over simply because their style differs from that of their existing boss. Furthermore, some managers actively seek to develop future leaders whilst others do not. As a result, you are likely to again overlook another group with true high potential simply because their managers don’t value developing others.
Sadly, HR’s two favourite selection techniques are ill suited to the task of identifying candidates with high potential for leadership. So how can you go about assessing potential? There is an answer, but an imperfect one. You need to take a small slice of information about a host of people, and use this information to make predictions about how suited each person is to a career in leadership. Like any form of prediction, there are no absolute guarantees. Yet there are reliable and inexpensive ways that maximise your chance of being right most of the time. Using these methods stacks the odds in your favour. It is similar to being the “house” in a casino. While there may be occasions when individuals surprise or disappoint you (against the odds), overall the house always wins. It takes just three simple steps, each of which filters out candidates based on their:
- Desire
- Ability
- Inclination
Desire
Desire is assessed by inviting people to self-nominate for the program. Doing so will determine whether they are truly interested in a career in leadership and are willing to devote the time to balancing the extra demands of learning with the actual work placements that they will undertake. Research shows that a trait shared by most effective leaders is simply the desire to lead others 2. [S. Kirkpatrick & E. Locke (1991), ‘Leadership: Do Traits Matter’, Academy of Management Executive]. Therefore, it is best to initially cast a wide net in your search for prospective candidates and subsequently narrow down your list with two more screening techniques.
Ability
Ability is assessed using intelligence tests. Despite popular opinion to the contrary, there is a clear link between intelligence and effective leadership 2. IQ tests fell out of favour for many reasons. Firstly, IQ alone is not enough to guarantee that someone will be a good leader, but it remains a prerequisite. Even Daniel Goleman, the psychologist who popularized emotional intelligence, admits that IQ is an essential threshold competency for leaders 3. A second reason IQ tests fell out of favour centred on the notion that leaders are made, not born. There is indeed some truth in this statement. Otherwise, all leadership development would be a waste of time. However, people are not equally “developable”. Your job is a bit like the work undertaken by the Australian Institute of Sport. You must first find the raw talent, then actively put in place a range of strategies to develop this talent and keep it within your organisation. Without raw talent, even the best development strategies produce mediocre results. Yet talent that is not supported and encouraged is wasted potential.
Tendency
A key weakness of intelligence tests is that they test ability but fail to measure less tangible aspects of potential such as personal drive and interpersonal savvy. These are not competencies per se, but rather deeply engrained tendencies that underpin the way we habitually act and interact with others. People with certain tendencies or traits are more likely to lead well and to develop new leadership capabilities 4. These traits include self-monitoring, self-confidence, energy and extroversion. In some organisations where innovation and improvement are critical, leaders also need to be creative and adaptable. To be clear, a person does not need to possess all of these tendencies or traits to be a good leader. However, the more they possess, the more likely it is that they will lead well, which gets to the very heart of assessing potential. You can assess the tendencies of your applicants using specially crafted personality tests. Such tests, when used on their own, are not a great predictor of leadership potential, but when used in tandem with IQ tests, they provide a more accurate prediction than any other selection technique.
It is therefore important that personality tests are administered last. This allows you to consider and weigh both ability and aspects of personality to make your final decision about whom to include in your high-potential group.
- I. Robertson, & M. Smith (2001), ‘Personnel selection’ Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 74, 441-472; M. Cook (1998), Personnel selection: Adding value through people, (3rd ed.). NY: John Wiley & Sons; P. Sullivan (1991), Paper presented at IPMA Seminar, 19 September. ↩
- See for example the meta-analysis of research conducted by R. Lord, C. DeVader & M. Alliger ↩
- D. Goleman (1998), ‘What Makes A Leader?’, Harvard Business Review. ↩
- Northouse, P. (2006). Leadership: Theory & Practice, Sage; Robbins, S., Millett, B., & Waters-Marsh, T. (2004). Organisational Behaviour (4th ed.). Sydney: Prentice-Hall; House, R., Hanges, P., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P. (2004), Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies, Sage; S.,Foti, R. & Kenny, D. (1991). Self monitoring and trait-based variance in leadership, Journal of Applied Psychology, April, 308-315; and Dobbins, G., Long, W., Dedrick, E. & Clemons, T. (1990). The role of self-monitoring and gender in leader emergence, Journal of Management, September, 609-61; Locke, E. (1999). The Essence of Leadership, Lexington Books ↩
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