Before you become a leader, success is about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

—JACK WELCH

Sylvia personified high potential. After being valedictorian at an elite all-women college, she earned an Ivy League MBA and was recruited by a prestigious consulting firm. Her track record on strategic planning engagements with large companies was nearly flawless. Clients were amazed by her insights and work ethic. Soon she was managing major clients, often exceeding their expectations, and growing revenue. Even though she received top performance ratings and big salary bumps, her senior partner said it would be a few years before she would be considered for partner.

Frustrated, she resigned and quickly found a position as section head in corporate development with a Fortune 500 company. From the start, she received accolades because her group consistently produced insightful analyses. After a year, she was promoted to manage a department with a dozen first-line managers, one hundred professionals, and a support staff. To shorten a long and painful story, the department’s performance deteriorated because of her lack of leadership, and two years later she was fired.

Sylvia was a brilliant individual contributor who did not learn first-line management skills before being promoted into a manager-of-managers position. Her high potential was wasted because neither the senior partner at her first consulting firm nor either of her bosses at the Fortune 500 company mentored her to develop her management and leadership mindsets.

By definition, you and the high potentials who work for you have the ability to be great future leaders. Conversely, you also have the potential for catastrophic failure if you rise too fast without grasping the leadership differences between successive positions. By holding leadership conversations that help high potentials achieve the appropriate blend of leadership and management mindsets, you can make the difference between their success and failure—and yours too.

Assessing Potential

High potentials often can be identified by their rapid rise through the ranks, as illustrated on their resumes. What resumes don’t show is that many superstars have yet to learn the leadership skills required for the next level. High potentials often get the benefit of doubt in personnel decisions because of their extraordinary past performance. As a result, they can zoom up the leadership ladder so quickly that they don’t have opportunities to learn vital lessons. Unfortunately, if you do not know the skills required at each level and how to develop those that may be missing, the first indication of a problem may be a shocking career derailment like Sylvia’s.

High potentials usually have the following characteristics:

• They demonstrate the intelligence, ability, judgment, and emotional intelligence commonly found in top leaders.
• They have a genuine passion for business and sometimes come across as ambitious and aggressive—they want it all and they want it now.
• Many have advanced rapidly without managing through the full cycle of (1) analyzing a problem, (2) developing a solution, (3) gaining buy-in, (4) implementing a plan, (5) evaluating in-process results, and (6) making adjustments to improve the outcome.
• They tend to be process oriented. They understand work flows, problem solving, and how to put together a team to get the job done.

A person can only be labeled as a high potential if she is expected to excel in the future on the basis of her ability to build relationships, apply accumulated technical and professional skills, learn and adapt to change, and tackle complex tasks. A person’s potential can and often does change over the course of a career because of acquired skills, the changing nature of jobs, emerging technologies, and new relationships. Because people sometimes reinvent themselves, keep an open mind about who in your organization is a high potential.

High potentials should be evaluated in terms of three categories:

• Expert potential: ability to do more complex tasks in the same field (example: a manager who has the technical skill to lead a team in developing a cutting-edge technology)
• Growth potential: ability to lead bigger projects at the same level (example: a manager who is happy in his or her specialty who could lead that function for a larger team)
• Promotion potential: ability to deliver results at the next higher level (example: a proficient first-line manager who may have potential to become a manager of managers)

For the purposes of both succession planning and candidate selection, these categories offer a common language for decision-makers in discussing high potential. Likewise, the three categories are useful in performance reviews, career counseling, and interviews. Do the high potentials who work for you have the potential to be high-level experts, to do bigger jobs, or to be promoted? Making this distinction will enable you to coach them more effectively about future opportunities and to recommend appropriate training.

Developing Leadership Skills in High Potentials

Each promotion requires a high potential to learn new ways of leading and to leave some old ways behind—even though the old ways produced success in the past. The five attributes that change significantly after each promo­tion are

• Skill requirements: the capabilities required to achieve objectives
• Priorities: the things that are most important to do first
• Measures of success: the criteria for “doing a good job”
• Time frames: the time horizons that govern the work
• Relationships: internal and external people who are vital to success

Some high potentials persist in using the attributes of their old positions; or, even worse, they may not have learned the key attributes of that position. Similarly, if you did not learn how to perform at a previous level, you will have a hard time mentoring your direct reports in how to perform at their level. As a result, you could be less effective as a leader in your new level, and the development of your people may be adversely affected.

Although high potentials may excel in such management areas as risk taking, finance, and planning, they may be weak in leadership areas, such as people selection, performance assessments, and coaching—if they continue thinking like individual contributors. In coaching engagements, for example, we frequently hear direct reports complain that their bosses treat them like robots and expect them to do exactly what they are told. Coaching your high potentials on how to value and develop people is a high-priority conversation.

Well-defined leadership requirements for each position are essential in providing targeted assistance to high potentials. One-size-fits-all training generally is only marginally effective. Evaluate a person’s readiness to move to the next level by considering his ability to fulfill the needs of the new posi­tion rather than by looking solely at the results he produced in the current one. As we discussed in Chapter 11, one real benefit of developing high potentials is that you will win the battle for talent by growing your own stars instead of being compelled to offer astronomical compensation packages to hire them.

Developing leadership skills in high potentials is not an HR function. Rather, it is a strategic imperative that should be championed by leaders at all levels and in all departments, including HR. Make it part of the culture and demonstrate its importance by modeling it yourself. Expect performance gaps initially whenever one of your high potentials is promoted into a new position. No matter how skilled or successful she was previously, every time a person moves up a level, she enters a new world that has new lessons to learn. Hold conversations to identify and close such gaps in yourself and in the high potentials who report to you.

Demand More from Your High Potentials

One of your goals as a leader is to coach high potentials to achieve excellence. Start by ensuring that they have the knowledge, tools, and attitude necessary for their positions. Hold a conversation to explain the strategy and to specify what you expect from them. For example, consider Matt, a high potential who was just promoted to first-line manager reporting to you. You know Matt’s superb record as an individual contributor and are thrilled to have him on your team. Yet you also know that the move to first-line manager is especially difficult. A good way to begin Matt’s tenure would be to engage in a conversation about your expectations and his challenges as a first-line manager. Those include the skills of

• Communicating expectations and objectives to his people
• Defining and assigning tasks to be done, and establishing schedules
• Delegating work to his people instead of doing it himself
• Providing resources, measuring performance, and giving helpful feedback
• Building effective relationships with you, his peers, and his people

Guide Matt to plan his first tasks carefully. Conversations take time, but if he is a typical new first-line manager, Matt will want to charge ahead to do things rather than plan what must be done. Caution him instead to prepare before acting. Mentor him in filling the vacancy that his promotion created, and ensure that he considers how well the candidate fits the culture. As an experienced leader and coach, you can assist Matt in using a mindset appro­priate for these and other tasks. Do not wait for him to struggle.

One thing that retards the growth of high potentials is not asking enough of them—especially those who have been recently promoted to first-line manager or manager of managers. Instead of treating them like overgrown individual contributors, ask more of them. Encourage them to participate in budget development and strategic planning. Have them give a presentation on a vital topic at your next meeting. Challenge them to do considerable research and stretch their boundaries. Perhaps ask them to prepare and justify the budget for their operation; ensuring that work is done at the right cost is an increasingly important skill these days. One significant benefit of asking more from high potentials is that it softens any unrealistic expectations they may have about how fast they should advance to the next position. It helps them realize how much they still must learn.

Don’t Miss the Signs of Trouble

If you do not ask the right questions and then hold the necessary conversations, poor performance may be just around the corner. If people tell you what you want to hear, are reluctant to put an issue on the table, withhold negative information, or think they can fix problems alone, trouble is coming—or has already arrived. When the meaningful part of a conversation takes place in the hallway after a meeting without including you as the leader, problems can go unresolved, and opportunities may be missed. In our experience, the signs of trouble are more noticeable at lower levels in the organization. This means that you and other leaders need to walk the halls and visit remote offices to see firsthand how your people are doing. Observe the conversations and interactions that take place between your direct reports and their people.

As you visit with your people and engage in casual conversations, use this list of ten warning signs that your people may be focusing too much on management and not enough on leadership:

Also look for favorable developments during your tours and conversations. It is not enough just to take notes. Transform your findings into recognition for people who are doing well and into feedback, coaching, or process changes when they are not.

Delivering Feedback

The objective of feedback is to assist another person in reaching agreed-on goals. A few minutes of well-delivered and well-received feedback can produce behavioral changes that drive more effective actions. Yet if someone stood in front of you right now and said, “I want to give you feedback,” how would you respond? Common reactions include “Oh no, how can I avoid this conversation?” “What did I do wrong?” or “Is it time for another review?” Such reactions are signs of a negative feedback culture. In contrast, reactions like “Great, your office or mine?” or “I’ll clear my schedule and see you in ten minutes” indicate a culture where feedback is both expected and appreciated. Ideally, feedback should be permission based, which is yet another reason to cultivate strong relationships with your people. If you actively work to develop others and are seen as a leader who makes cooperative decisions, your people will relish feedback from you and apply it to improve their actions and results.

For example, let us assume that there is a woman in your group, Lois, to whom you want to provide feedback. You observed Lois interrupting your boss several times in today’s staff meeting despite your having given her feedback in the past about not interrupting others. After the meeting, your boss pulled you aside and suggested that you no longer bring her to the meetings. You are concerned that her inability to participate in the meetings could interfere with your grooming her to take your position and, in turn, even endanger your potential promotion. At the same time, one idea she suggested during the meeting was brilliant, and you want to acknowledge that contribution. To give feedback to Lois, ask her whether she is willing to hear it and where she would like to have the conversation. Within reason, grant her request, but be clear that you are not asking whether the feedback conversation will happen, just when and where it will occur.

When you provide feedback to Lois, you are not telling her who she is. Rather you are describing how you and others experience her. Keep judgments out of feedback. Lois is not good or bad, right or wrong. You are not trying to change her as a person; you are just asking her to modify some behaviors to enable her to reach her goals. This key distinction depersonalizes feedback, usually calms emotional situations, and reduces the need for Lois to defend herself. Feedback is vital to success because it provides clear direction instead of allowing people to make assumptions about their progress.

Three-Phase Process for Giving Effective Feedback

There are three phases in the feedback process: preparation, delivery, and follow-up. Be sure you systematically engage all three and remain focused on why you are providing feedback.

Building a Feedback Culture

Do not reserve feedback for a formal performance review. In fact, no specific incident should be cited in a review that has not been discussed previously. The effectiveness of feedback is highest when it is delivered close to the event and the person has a chance to correct the behavior before a formal review. If casual feedback conversations succeed in fixing the concerns, avoid bringing them up in any formal review unless it is to tell the high potential how well he is working at reaching his goals.

The purpose of a formal performance review is to evaluate results against last year’s objectives and to agree on objectives for the coming year. It is also an opportunity to discuss the progress that has been made (or not made) as a result of informal feedback conversations during the year, and to have the high potential recommit to making and sustaining behavioral changes.

You may be concerned that you do not have time to provide feedback to your people. But when giving and receiving feedback become second nature and embedded in the culture as a competency, an average feedback session takes from fifteen seconds to a few minutes. People crave feedback. In the average workplace, people receive five negative messages for each positive one. As you invest fifteen to thirty minutes per day in one-on-one feedback conversations throughout your team, reverse that ratio to motivate them. When they make a habit of observing their behavior and its effect on others, the feedback conversations will get shorter, and they will perform better because the feedback both motivates them and keeps them on track. Remember, a leader’s job is to grow people and assist them in taking powerful actions. Feedback conversations are central to both of these. Building a feedback culture has other benefits too. Actions become more efficient and conflicts decrease, both of which save time. People perform better in the presence of feedback that is clear, concise, and caring.

The three-phase approach described earlier also is useful in requesting feedback and provides an opportunity for you to model effective ways of receiving feedback. Go to someone who regularly observes you at work and ask her for feedback on aspects of your performance and behavior. If she does not know how to provide feedback, ask questions that lead her through the “impact, context, observations, and next-steps” phase. No matter what you hear, thank her. At the end of the feedback session, restate what you heard and summarize the actions you will take as a result of her feedback. Follow up later with her and ask how you are doing. Asking for feedback in this manner shows how important feedback is to you and helps embed it in your organization’s culture.