Managing the retention and development of high potentials is a critical issue for many contemporary organisations.  We tended to focus on this at the end of the 1990’s with the so-called ‘war for talent’ and have moved on to other agendas, yet the ability to attract, retain, develop and secure measurable business benefits from high potentials is as significant a challenge today as it ever was.

Organisations are increasing in complexity, rapid and ever-present change is increasingly the norm, and the pace and scale of innovation increases daily.  These factors mean that the next generation leaders have more challenges and require a broader and deeper set of skills than ever before.  Of course, this generational upshift has been the case for many years, probably since the industrial revolution, yet the scale of the upshift is greater now than ever before.  Identifying people who will be capable and competent in this, as yet undefined future business arena, is a critical organisational issue that ought to be a hot debate in boardrooms across the globe.

We know that this is not the case, as businesses tend to overly focus on the challenges of today and make inadequate preparation for tomorrow, or indeed work on the premise that effective performance in the current role is an adequate predictor of performance in future, more senior roles.  This latter perspective can have validity, but only if the higher level role is similar to the present one, increasing in scope of responsibility and complexity.  This leads to people taking a fairly conventional upward career path through their business functions and leads to a deep technical knowledge that can be deployed for the benefit of their business in successively higher positions.

Yet when we examine the responsibilities and expectations of leaders in contemporary organisations, and forecast the requirements in future organisations, we can clearly see that, whilst technical knowledge is important, it is but one of a wide number of requirements.  Selecting high potential leaders of the future only on this single criterion is, therefore, a flawed approach; even though our experience may tell us that it has worked in the past.

Of course, excellent performance in a current role is a useful entry signal for a high potential programme, but only one of many.  We need to look not only at how an individual performs in the technical aspects of their role, but also how they create and manage relationships with others, how they deal with complexity and ambiguity, how they are able to lead others, how they create and innovate for the benefit of the business, how they engage and work with others in collaborative partnerships etc.  This list is by no means exhaustive, but is indicative of the breadth of skills that our next generation leaders will require in abundance.

The development of competence frameworks over the past twenty years has helped to stratify and evaluate performance in these other areas, although possibly created almost as many problems as they resolved in their structured approach and pursuit of homogeneity.  The central problem today is that our assessment of high potential tends to be grounded in current performance assessments and our understanding of today’s business environment.  Simply put, we are using our knowledge of today to test and develop the leaders of tomorrow.  In essence this means that they are being developed to operate in our world – not the one that they will inherit.  We are in grave danger of providing them with out-of-date skills sets before they even assume their leadership positions.

This means that our evaluation and development of high potential next generation leaders needs to be based in the future, which is after all, where they will be ultimately tried and tested.  We increasingly need to use future-based development scenarios which our prospective high potentials will learn to navigate through and from which they will develop highly tuned skills for dealing with ambiguity and complexity.  Organisations need to stretch their thinking as far into the future as they can to develop these scenarios so that they are able to develop their capability and capacity to deliver excellence in a world that we do not yet know – a world in which our high potentials are ready and able to lead.