Identifying Potential

Identifying Leadership Potential

Identifying leadership potential in personnel is the key to the long term success of your business. Whether you are recruiting new executives, considering candidates for promotion, or planning ahead for the future talent needs of your organization, we can help ensure that you have the right people in the right roles.

hfi classifies individuals with high potential as those who demonstrate the personal characteristics to rapidly advance two or more levels within an organization.

There are a number of methods used to identify high potential, most of which are subjective, possibly biased, and often based on inferior indicators such as current job performance.  Our method is much more effective. It combines ability testing with the identification of behavioral disposition through personality inventories and motivation. To truly benefit from these measures it’s critical to identify and understand which personality characteristics and motivational values are required for a given transition.

The means to Identify Leadership Potential

Learn more about the specific areas of identifying potential by clicking the buttons below.

Consider this example: A mid-level manager embraces the hands-on, tactical component of his job and has great success balancing the variety of interpersonal challenges his position often handles. And because of his success at this level, he is advanced to a more strategic business unit leadership role that requires responding to competitive challenges and market opportunities as well as creating alignment within the business unit to corporate and business unit objectives. Here, however, this same employee who achieved so much as a mid-level manager does not find success at all. It’s not uncommon for an individual with an excellent track record at the mid-level to fail to make the transition to the strategic planning and management of the larger business challenges that await in the next role.

The graphic above underscores the benefits of comprehensive testing and evaluation when identifying those employees who can make the most substantial contributions to your business. We provide companies like yours the ability to gauge the hidden potential of their workforce and learn how to best develop and utilize it.

Psychometrics to Identify Potential

It’s obvious that values and personality are contributing factors affecting an individual’s work performance. However, research shows that general reasoning ability is the most significant factor and far more accurately predictive than either personality or personal values.

The Characteristics Predicting High-Leadership Potential

When identifying individuals as high potential through our psychometric assessment process, we consider the following complex of assessment results:

General Reasoning – GRT, S-GRIT, and GRIT

General reasoning ability demonstrates an individual’s understanding and handling of abstract and complex concepts. It also predicts a person’s speed of learning and mental agility, which involves the ability to think both laterally and logically; to be able to imagine possibilities and to work through their implications.

We provide three levels of General Reasoning Assessment. This ensures we are able to supply each participant with the test whose norm group is most appropriate and applicable.

The three levels are:

• GRT: For operational personnel
• S-GRIT: For managers and mid-level technical personnel
• GRIT: For executives and senior managers

Personal Enterprise Profile– PEP

Our Personal Enterprise Profile questionnaire identifies an individual’s attitude to business and personal risk. It distinguishes those who focus on technical excellence from those who take a wider view of business and prefer to take risks by seeking out new market opportunities or even starting new businesses. 

Personality – 16PF and PI-5

These questionnaires identify behavioral tendencies associated with personality traits such as:

• Level of drive and competitiveness
• Curiosity, desire for knowledge, openness to change and new ideas and approaches
• Resilience, or the likelihood that the individual will be derailed by pressures of high level job
• Flexibility, or the skill to change direction when the priorities change and make decisions in conditions of uncertainty
• Attention to detail and focus on quality
• Self-confidence and belief in one’s own ability to succeed
• Vision, or the ability to anticipate future issues and plan for them in a broad way

Motivational Values – MVQ

This questionnaire ranks five major motivational values in terms of the influence that they have on an individual’s behavior at work. For example: Someone whose overriding value is security is less likely to achieve a top-level business role when compared to someone who seeks challenge and reward.

Leadership Qualities

Other behavioral tendencies and abilities may be required only when considering certain levels within the organization’s hierarchy. As we suggested above, strategic thinking often becomes a requirement only at relatively senior levels. Our psychometric assessment identifies potential for these higher-level abilities even when individuals show no sign of such aptitude within their current job roles. In order to achieve this comprehensive summary and level of accuracy, it’s vital to consider the whole complex pattern of the assessment results and not simply any single measure. As creators of a comprehensive diagnostic system designed specifically to identify potential, hfi is the industry expert in identifying and interpreting the qualities that your workforce truly owns so that your business can benefit from that potential.

Current Performance

Current performance may not always be a reliable indicator of potential, but it should not be discounted either. Still, competence at the current level should never be considered anything more than a minimum prerequisite. There are occasions when current performance is misleading as an indicator of potential. For example, innovative and strategic enterprisers are likely to find middle management roles difficult and slow-paced and may leave the company before their potential is ever recognized.

Recommended Reading:

Differentiating High Potential from Performance

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