Why is identifying potential important?
It’s important to identify the top performing employees within your organisation, so that you can best support, develop and incentivize them to stay. But it’s also important to identify those with high potential, so that you can focus on getting them to top performer level.
Sometimes those with high potential may slip under the radar, as they aren’t yet excelling as much as others in the company. It could be that they are in a role that doesn’t push their potential, or that they are newer to their role and need just a little extra support to push them to the next level.
Whatever the reason you want to ensure your high potential employees don’t sit stagnant and forgotten about, and end up leaving to go somewhere that will utilise them better.
How do you figure out who has high potential?
By using a good continuous performance management system within your organisation you can use information gathered throughout the year to spot high potential.
Managers need to have regular performance conversations with their team members, tracking progress against short term goals, asking questions about how well they are doing, and assessing where their employee’s want to progress to in the future.
They can then record the outcomes of these meetings quickly and easily, using a performance management platform like Advanced Clear Review. This information is stored and can be viewed by the manager and HR staff, allowing them to carry out performance snapshots whenever needed.
These snapshots are done by asking a series of questions that can be tailored to identify those with high potential. These questions need to yield answers that are evidence based using the information gathered through the year, rather than opinion based, as this gives a bias view from managers.
HR will be able to assess the results of these questions and flag up any high potential employees to managers and leaders.
What next?
Once you have identified a high potential employee it’s important not to sit on that information for a long time without taking action, as mentioned these people are high risk for moving to another organisation that will use their skills better.
So ensure managers take action as soon as possible, sitting down and working on a development plan that reflects that person’s strengths and potential.
This could be getting them a mentor who currently does a role they aspire to, so they will be ready to progress as soon as they are ready / a role becomes available. Or it could be giving them training, either in house or externally, to fill in any gaps that might be preventing them from reaching their full potential.
You shouldn’t promote anybody until they are ready, even if they show a lot of promise, but ensure that as soon as a high potential employee is ready to progress that they do so as soon as possible, not to do so would be a waste of talent!
Book a demo with our team today to learn about Advanced Clear Review, and start saying yes to great continuous performance management