How to identify high potential employees

Every year major companies spend upwards of $3 million each to develop and mentor their high-potential or 'hi-po' employees. But what is a hi-po employee and how can a company retain them?

Mohammed Farid, CEB managing director for the Middle East discusses the traits and abilities these types of employee commonly have. Pawan Singh / The National

Are you a high potential? The chances are in your favour. The UAE ranks 12th for the number of “hi-po” employees globally and one in three professionals have the capacity to become leaders in the future, according to a study by CEB, a member-based advisory company. Mohammed Farid, CEB managing director for the Middle East discusses the traits and abilities these types of employee commonly have and explains why, somewhat confusingly, a high performer is not necessarily a high potential whereas a mid-level performer could be.

How do you define a high potential employee?

There are three factors that really matter in high potential. They are ability, so their ability to do the job, and that is a combination of personality traits and cognitive abilities. For example, leading and deciding, coping with pressures and setbacks [which they have to be good at] and cognitive ability, which is a combination of verbal and numerical reasoning.

And the second factor?

The second is aspiration – to really aspire to the next level. Not everyone has the aspiration to move upwards. The third one is engagement – the likelihood of them staying with the organisation. If you have someone who has a very high ability and very high aspiration but they are not likely to stay in the company they cannot be a high potential.

How do companies assess each of these areas?

For the ability side, which is the personality traits and the ability, we usually recommend using psychometrics and based on that you can identify … if they have the potential in those competencies and if they have the cognitive ability to do the job long-term. From an aspiration perspective usually we recommend using aspirational interviews probing more into their long-term plans for the future. The engagement bit is a questionnaire for the manager and the person because the manager will know if the person is likely to stay.

Once you have identified this high potential employee, how do you deal with them?

Say you have identified someone who has it all. Based on that you need to invest into development programmes. It might be training. It might be coaching. It might be mentoring depending on what we have identified based on that assessment. The problem is that you might not find everyone has everything.

What if someone has everything but engagement?

If they don’t have the engagement, that will be something for the company to decide because if they are not likely to stay I wouldn’t invest in that person. If people don’t have the aspiration you can start talking to them about the value proposition of the organisation and sell the idea a bit. Sometimes people don’t have the aspiration because they don’t know what’s waiting on the next level.

Should you treat high potential employees any differently from the rest and if so, how?

You would develop them and you would fast-track them, because most likely they are your potential leaders for the future, but you don’t want to create a sense of difference between different people in the organisation. You need everyone. You need mid-level performers. You need high-level performers and you need the high potentials. And by the way, research has shown that not all high performers are high potentials.

Why is that?

High performers might be doing a very good job at the current level but you could promote them to a level of incompetence. But high performers will get them noticed to be potential high potentials. Sometimes you might find some people in the organisation who might be mid-level performers. When you really assess them for talent they might have the qualities to be high potentials, but you might need to push them to the next level where they can flourish. Maybe the job they have now is not really getting the best out of them.

Companies like yours sell talent measurement software, but do you have to implement expensive programmes to identify high potential employees? Or is it something any company can do, even smaller enterprises?

Talent measurement solutions are not expensive and if you compare how much you would have to pay to identify potential compared to a bad recruitment decision or a bad promotion decision, that would be very minimal, less than 1 per cent or a fraction of a per cent of a recruitment cost. For example, if you hire someone in an organisation and after six months that person turned out to not be very good, you have to pay his salary for six months, benefits and all of the costs. So all of those costs are huge compared to trying to identify from the start if he is the right fit for that hi-po or not.

Follow The National's Business section on Twitter