A Future-Focused View of High-Potential Leader Development
You know that high-potential leaders are the future of your business. But you have to develop them to lead in a future that is unknown, unclear, and uncertain … perhaps more so now than ever before.
As an HR professional, you may find yourself wondering how to leverage the talent needed for today’s business strategy, while also prepping your highest-potential leaders for tomorrow’s?
“Too often, a hi-po’s value is defined in terms of the current business strategy,” according to Kevin O’Gorman, author of “Developing High-Potential Leaders” in The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Coaching in Organizations.
The problem is, that approach misses the bigger picture. “The deeper value of developing high-potential leaders is creating the proving ground for leading in future ambiguity.”
“Typically, organizations select and develop high-potential leaders based on notions of near- and longer-term future needs. They push competencies designed to create success within these scenarios,” O’Gorman explains.
“But high potentials are the leaders who will operate in an unpredictable future; they need to be able to adapt to whatever comes.”
Certainly, some development of your high-potential leaders should focus on the “known present,” says O’Gorman. At the same time, though, you must help your high-potential leaders develop their skills and capacity to respond to the unknown future.
Best Practices for Hi-Po Leadership Development
The best development for high-potential leaders helps them take an active approach to making sense of the challenges they face.
Creating leader readiness for operating successfully in an unknown future might involve on-the-job learning such as creating extremely challenging assignments that provide “disorienting” learning opportunities. Or, it might entail putting high-potential leaders in new, unknown roles where they practice navigating ambiguous situations by engaging in collective sensemaking and relying on new ways of thinking from others. Such heat experiences test high-potential leaders’ basic assumptions.
In terms of formal development opportunities, executive coaching is one of an organization’s best tools for developing and retaining high-potential leaders with the capability to secure current and future success. Combining coaching for performance with other development can help your hi-pos realize long-term implications and wrest understanding, insight, and meaning from their experiences.
As your high-potential leaders process and make sense of the challenges, differing perspectives, and learning experiences they encounter, they experience vertical development that enables them to “grow bigger minds” and gain larger, more advanced worldviews.
This increases their pattern identification, their ability to recognize and leverage polarities, and their learning capacity, adaptability, and agility. (After all, great leaders are great learners).
It also helps them find novel ways to understand business problems, thereby securing your organization’s future.
What Else Do High-Potential Leaders Need to Succeed?
Finally, HR leaders need to remember too that high-potential leader development is not just about developing the high-potential leaders themselves.
It’s also about the surrounding leadership culture at your organization, the support these leaders receive, and the performance strategies the organization pursues. Consider:
- Is there a coherent leadership strategy in place for your organization that takes both the near- and long-term into account?
- Is there a succession plan in place enabling the transfer of leadership knowledge and capacity from one set of leaders to the next generation?
- Is there clear executive sponsorship, development, and accountability to provide a new generation of leaders?
Without a comprehensive plan for developing your organization’s high-potential leaders, any coaching and development will have limited impact — and leave your organization ill-prepared for the uncertainty and change that is waiting around the corner.
You also run the risk of your high-potential leaders becoming disengaged, or worse, leaving the company entirely. So consider the ways you can strengthen your organizational culture to increase retention of high-potential talent to shore up your leadership pipeline, securing your organization’s future.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Invest in your high-potential leaders with leadership development that helps them build critical competencies and mindsets. Partner with us to design highly individualized leadership development that’s tailored to your organization’s unique context and culture.
