Developing High-Potential Employees by Bill Hawkins
You’ve got several people on your team who are truly high potential. These people have opportunities for challenge and growth moving forward. What should you be doing to develop them? Well, we asked a bunch of executives exactly that question, only in reverse. We asked these vice presidents and above at large organizations: “Think back over your career and tell me what type of things you found truly developmental. What type of experiences did you have, what type of things did you do that, looking back, prepared you for the challenges that you have today?” From their responses, we found there were five categories of experience that executives found to be truly developmental.
The first was challenging jobs, jobs that people went into saying, “I wasn’t really prepared. I had to learn about the customer, the technology, the business. The direction wasn’t clear. I got in and I found out that there weren’t enough resources. There was a lack of support. I was put in a position where I had to push the team, and push hard, but I learned that there were limits; you could only push so long and so hard.” Challenging jobs.
The second was people. Usually bosses, but not always. Some people brought up mentors or peers, teachers, family members. But if you want to be a great boss, you don’t need to have had a great one, but you need to have had at least a good boss somewhere along the way. That makes sense, right? Do you know what else you need to have had? The boss from hell. What do you learn from that boss? Obviously, what not to do, but just as importantly, you learn about yourself. Think back; when you had that really difficult boss, it was stressful. And you learned about yourself. And if you had people working for you when you had that boss, now you’ve got the dilemma of, “How much of this stuff do I pass on to my people and how much do I protect them from it? I can’t protect them from everything, but I need to protect them from some of it.” You learn about yourself and how you deal with stress. You learn from people.
The third was the hardships. Long hours, heavy travel, and one of the most interesting, I thought, layoffs. If you want to prepare yourself for future challenges, nothing matches the stress and hardships of having to lay people off. This is totally unlike firing someone. In most of your organizations, actually firing someone is a lengthy, bureaucratic process. By the time you’re actually face to face with that person, you’re practically angry with them. Right? It’s like, “If you would have tried, even sort of tried, we wouldn’t be here.” Layoffs are totally different. They happen through no fault of your own, and they are a hardship many executives brought up as developmental.
Next, off-the-job experiences. Some of the executives pointed out that, “You know where I really learned to coach? It was coaching kids in Little League”; “Where I learned to build teams was my work with the United Way”; “I learned to build coalitions from my work in the church.” How do you learn to lead people if there are no opportunities at work to actually lead people? Try off-the-job experience.
And lastly, coursework. Now, I’m a big believer in coursework; about half of my work is doing executive seminars and workshops. But here’s the mantra: people value coursework if it’s just enough, just in time, just for me. Don’t send people off to a course on strategy, and when they come back, basically have no strategic work to do. Once again: just enough, just in time, just for me. Coursework is developmental.
So there are five developmental areas. But do you know what the key area was? 70% of the executives said claimed their best development was through challenging jobs. So if you want to develop your people, make sure, one, they have challenging jobs, and secondly, that you are that mentor or coach giving them feedback and developing them in those jobs. That’s how true development of potential happens.