Do organizations have a structured process to identify their HiPOs? In this complex and ever-changing disruptive world, leadership development has become more important than ever before. But how do you identify a successful employee who won’t falter in higher leadership roles? How can an organization create a talent pipeline for challenges ahead?

A leader’s personality, research has shown, impacts employee engagement and which culminates into organizational performance.  There are leaders who achieve business results, but don’t necessarily drive engagement.  In the long run, these leaders are likely to meet limited success, if they are unbale to connect with their employees and build a humane workplace. 

We have known for years that engagement is driven from the front-line -- managers drive engagement. Hogan’s Research has shown that there is a huge cluster of managers who are really ineffective. Then how do we identify HiPOs or leadership talent from the strings of ineffective managers?

Hogan’s perspective on leadership is to define leaders from the perspective of a follower – someone who could drive the survival of the team and is a resource to the group, and not someone who only wants the power and authority but doesn’t focus on enhancement of quality of life of the followers.  The first question that needs to then be asked is do your managers or leaders operate with a sense of entitlement or do they think of themselves as resource for the team they lead?  

When you look at leaders as a resource for the group, it essentially helps in measuring the effectiveness of leadership. Leaders set high goals, create vision, inspire their team, and drive people to achieve the goal. People look up to leaders who define the vision and help them become productive.  

The next question is: How do you recognize the ideal leader or the leader-to-be? Examples are aplenty with senior level executives who were not fit to take on the roles they were entrusted with. But if we look at some systematic way of assessing the same leaders, and supporting them with timely coaching, feedback and calibrating mechanism then the probability of those leaders being successful increases.

Top talent identification has always been coloured by personal preferences. Past performance has been used as a predictor of “potential”.  But, performance is not potential.   This begs the question, potential for what?  And can we measure future potential in a reliable and valid way.

The Hogan High Potential is one such approach that is based on academic research and empirical validation. The model was derived from a sample of 21,000 global managers with matched performance data across multiple countries. Defining leadership as the ability to build and sustain high performing teams, the Hogan High Potential Leadership model defines leadership using three pivots:  Leadership Foundations, Leadership Emergence, and Leadership Effectiveness.  And nine universal competencies.

Leadership Foundation: is being a good organizational citizen.  At the interview stage, charming leaders get hired, however, they are not always successful. They might turn out to be complacent, not a great team player, they might lack follow through. Three universal leadership competencies that are foundational include – are you able to follow process, are you able to think broadly and strategically and do you get along with people .

Leadership Emergence: to be given a leadership role, you need to appear leader-like and hence it’s important to demonstrate the competencies of standing out, influencing others especially without authority and also building connections and relationship networks. 

Leadership Effectiveness: is about being able to run the business.  Leading the business, managing resources and leading the people are the associated universal leadership competencies.

The Hogan High Potential model and report, provide a theory-driven, empirically validated, easy to use, easy to deploy and highly scalable solution for high potential identification and development.  It also allows organizations to customize and prioritize which of the nine universal leadership competencies are more / less important for leadership success in their context.

Final questions to consider - Is your organization over-focusing on Leadership Emergence? Are you also identifying and developing people who are also likely to be effective (but may not be emergent)?