Our research shows that concentrating professional development initiatives on your highest potential employees has the biggest impact on your growth. Developing even four or five of your best people moves the needle.

Train Your High-Potential Employees First

Helping high-potential employees advance their careers is a win-win for midsized companies. If you can help four or five of your best people to become company rock stars, you significantly increase the chances that your company’s growth will rocket up the charts.

How to spot high-potentials

When you’re evaluating both employees and candidates, be on the lookout for indicators that a candidate may be a high-potential employee. On resumes, you can spot them from their history of promotions, or the progress they’ve already made in their career in your company. If they’re at the entry level, you may see it from their performance in college and related work or internships, from behavioral preemployment assessments, and from how well they do in the job interview.

In interviews, you can detect high-potential prospects by how they answer questions about their career plans.

Use assessments to detect behaviors and thinking styles that indicate someone’s ability to work at a higher level.

Why it pays for midsized companies to focus on their high-potentials

High-potentials are rarely unemployed. Recruiting them can be expensive. And new hires can be risky because, for many reasons, success is never a given. It is less expensive and less risky to identify a handful of high-potentials in your organization and prepare them to move from one level to the next.

Career Pathing: Creating a Highway for Excellence

Many midsized companies treat hiring as the end of a process, rather than what it really is: the beginning. If today’s digitally empowered employees don’t get the professional development they need, especially the high-potentials, they’re apt to map out their career on their own. This oſten means moving to a new company.

Organizations can address this by creating career paths for their high-potentials. A career path identifies positions to which an employee can reasonably aspire.

The Strategy of Delegation

Strategic delegation means assigning tasks in a deliberate way to help people gain the knowledge or experience they need to take over for someone higher up in the company. Some companies call this progression planning or experiential learning. Whatever it’s called, it should be an integral part of professional development.

How strategic delegation supports succession planning

When leaders talk about needing to do succession planning, what they’re really thinking about is who on the team could do their job if they suddenly weren’t around for one reason or another. The next step is creating a career path for those potential successors, and then delegating tasks to them in a strategic way so they learn how to do those things at a reasonable pace.

The ultimate goal is to have enough high-potential people doing better work at a higher level and itching for new challenges. That drives growth.

Training and Mentoring: Growth Accelerators

Mentorships are one way to teach people how to do a specific job as a part of a career path. But they’re more than that. They can help high-potentials internalize a company’s mission and values, its standing in the industry, its customers and marketing philosophy. Mentors can pass on gems that generally don’t make it into the employee manual: how clients or coworkers prefer to communicate, or how to approach the most exacting C-suite executives.

Leadership Programs

Midsized companies have several leadership-development formats to choose from for management track high-potential employees. These include external training, peer groups, emerging leader programs, and individual coaching. Many are not that expensive.

External training

As high-potential employees move through their career paths, they may need to hone specific skills in order to advance. That presents a perfect opportunity for external training—something midsized companies don’t do oſten enough. But if people haven’t mastered the basics, you’re wasting your money and their time. Getting them trained on the basics could be as simple as recommending a book on leadership, or a class or YouTube video on Excel, Word, the CRM, or other soſtware applications they use at work.

Peer groups

Peer groups are especially helpful for high-potential leaders who’ve been at the same company for some time and need to understand how other smart leaders work and think. Peer groups enable this. The company gains by helping its high-potentials broaden their knowledge base— all for the price of a membership.

Emerging leader programs

High-potential employees who are on track to become company leaders may benefit from development over and above what mentoring, outside standard training, or peer groups can provide. One approach that we’ve found successful is to create customized development programs blending content, discussion and related coaching that makes a client’s leadership team far more ready for succession and growth.

Individual coaching

Thousands of articles and books address professional development, but providing high-potential employees with access to professional coaching speeds up the process. Coaches combine their own experience with their coaching skills—what they’ve read plus what they’ve learned from experience and their other clients. As they learn about your high-potential employees’ circumstances, they can figure out what an individual needs and can benefit from by accessing their internal database of relevant material. For the employee, and for your business, that’s not just efficient, it can be a pearl beyond price.

Assessing Leaders

Mentoring, training programs, coaching, peer groups, and other internal and external professional development tools can help high-potential employees advance as leaders. But it’s not enough to implement these programs, you must track them. To do that, you need to establish a baseline assessment of where your leaders are now. Only then can you measure how they are developing and growing.

Performance Reviews

Performance reviews are the heart of assessing leaders. When reviewing high-potential leaders, use a pre-defined rubric. But for the best outcome, take the following factors into consideration as well:

• How to identify what assets are worth protecting.
• Easy, low-cost steps you can take to provide some protection.
• What your options are when you find that infringer—ranging from cost effective saber-rattling to filing suit—and how to make that important decision.
• Why such decisions are business decisions, not just legal decisions.

Use 360s

Fundamentally, people love to follow great leaders. But the only way really to know how much people enjoy following you is to ask them. While the accomplishment of tasks and goals is one element of success for a leader, another is your impact on others. Periodic 360s measure a leader’s development over time and can identify where someone is succeeding and where they need to improve.

Hire For Potential

Midsized companies must hire for tomorrow’s jobs and needs. They require people with raw skills and experience, who, with development, can become the leaders and star performers the organization will need in the future. These companies need people who want more responsibility and will move up in the organization. People drive growth!

Developing High-Potentials Pays Big Dividends

Maintain a high level of development every month of every quarter of every year. Keep your high-potentials excited about the next skill they can learn and master. Make continuous development an explicit promise and create a plan for how to do it. Give these high-potentials what they crave. This is not an HR policy; it is a business growth plan.

Professional Development Assessment

We’ve created a quick free assessment on professional development. These are many of the same questions we’d ask as consultants to understand where a client company stands on its use of these leading practices.