Henryk Krajewski, Ph.D. is a partner at Kilberry, a firm of management psychologists. He specializes in advising CEOs and teams to improve trust and the speed and quality of their decisions and outputs.
If you heard the statement “the best performers make the best leaders,” what would your reaction be? For many, their personal experience would lead them to believe that it isn’t true.
For example, we can all imagine the best salesperson – driven, straightforward, maybe even somewhat aggressive – not being the greatest leader and motivator. They may lack inspirational qualities and listening and coaching skills.
Yet, despite this seemingly obvious discord, and decades of research and experience, companies are still promoting ‘top performers’ into leadership roles.
It’s easy to understand why. Performance can be seen, felt and measured. But if we take this away, how else could companies decide who ‘deserves’ to be in a top job?
Enter the concept of potential for leadership. Consonant with both experience and research, we know leadership has to do with setting and directing people toward a goal, teaching and mentoring and creating a place where people want to come and stay.
But these are hard to measure. When humans make critical decisions, we prefer to use data and facts. If I ask you to show me who gets the best results, you can point to the numbers.
If I ask you to show me great potential, that is much harder. Great potential is not largely defined by numbers – and research supports that performance can decline, appropriately as one takes on successive management roles.
How might we, then, predict potential?
Predicting something assumes you can measure the variables that matter and there are several models and measures of leadership potential that work well. Let’s start with two main features that are consistent across much of that research and practice.
Some aspect of self-awareness/humility/learning mindset
As Google’s Project Aristotle showed, it’s not tenure, seniority or performance that predicts team outputs. Instead, it’s the ability to create psychologically safe workspaces. Such workspaces allow for non-personal, authentic and diverse exchanges of ideas and counterpoints. When we are open, curious and unbiased in discussion, the best decisions emerge.
A leader’s ability to bring this curious, open, ‘true confidence’ to the table predicts their team’s psychological safety and ability to achieve their goals. Over time, this learning orientation will add to the leader’s growth and skills, and keep them open to getting it right, not being right.
Some aspect of drive/resilience/discipline
For all the openness and ability to connect and inspire, it all falls flat without a burning desire to strive and succeed. Be it termed ambition, conscientiousness or grit, it provides direction and discipline to people and goals. It’s the engine by which visions are achieved and provides a signpost for others to follow. All the openness and objectivity in the world will be wasted if one doesn’t have the drive to greatness.
With these core aspects in hand, the final big question emerges: What can I do to measure potential – and how can I ask my managers to do that accurately?
1. Define potential for the organization and train your managers
One of the biggest flaws in the current state of practice has been asking managers to give a global rating of ‘readiness for leadership’ in a given time frame (for example, ready in 1-2 years). This is extremely hard to do, especially across people with limited opportunities to observe employees’ day-to-day, and susceptible to widely different views of what actually makes a person ‘ready,’ hampering comparability of ratings across the organization.
Publishing – and training – managers on how exactly potential is defined, how they’ll know when they see it and giving them practice is an absolute must. In our observation, this is done in few organizations. Consistent with the research, one client partner of ours uses a model that defines potential as competence, emotional intelligence and drive. They trained all people managers in the model and created tailored scenarios that managers could rate and get feedback on, and calibrate across levels.
2. Adjust assessment complexity depending on job level
It’s reasonable for organizations to use technology-based solutions to gather potential ratings for the broader work force. However, for the most senior leadership levels, given the points above, getting an objective assessment of potential is critical.
Certain mainstream measures that purport to measure potential have little peer-reviewed research behind them, and standard self-report measures are often flawed. At the highest levels of leadership, structured interviews, valid, deep insight testing on personality and even role-play analyses give the high fidelity, in situ validation of potential required to identify candidates for high-impact, high-salary roles.
Another client uses their more global rating system via their software as a service (SaaS) partner to gather manager ratings of potential across most of the organization and engages us to assist in gathering more objective insights for their three most senior levels, including to create successors to the CEO.
In the end, potential will always be an intangible concept, but also a critical one for organizations of all sizes. Knowing to differentiate it from performance, how to define and measure it properly, and how to invest more time and cost in its identification for crucial roles are all essential to do business better.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.