“High Potential” Is Not Enough of an Answer

Organizations invest meaningfully in high-potential programs. They commission assessments, design curricula, secure executive sponsorship, and track participation rates. And then, with some regularity, they find themselves a few years later with programs that feel less valuable than they should — participation that's more about status than development, nomination processes that seem to reward visibility over capability, and a nagging disconnect between the people in the program and the talent decisions the organization actually makes.

The diagnosis I keep returning to isn't about any of those execution failures specifically. It's about a prior question that most organizations never explicitly answer.

Potential for what, specifically?

A metaphor I've found useful: a match in this room could be fire. The same match on the moon is a stick. Potential isn't a fixed property of a person — it's a function of the environment, the role, and the moment.

The question that changes everything

"High potential" without a clear answer to that question is almost meaningless as a selection criterion. Potential is not an open-ended proposition. An organization that defines its hi-po population as "people who could rise two levels" is running a fundamentally different program than one that defines it as "people who could fill our five most critical roles within a decade." Both are legitimate answers. But they produce — well, should produce — different nomination criteria, different development content, and different connections to actual talent decisions.

This isn't a minor design detail. It's the load-bearing question underneath everything else. And organizations that skip it end up with three predictable problems simultaneously.

Nomination defaults to advocacy. When there's no precise definition of what the program is selecting for, the path of least resistance is departmental sponsorship — which means the program develops the people with the most visible champions rather than the people with the most relevant potential. Those are not always the same group, and in organizations with uneven political cultures, they're often quite different.

Content defaults to the generic, with programs delivering little that participants couldn't have gotten from a well-curated reading list. The things that actually accelerate development — accountability for real work with real stakes, exposure to senior leaders as thinking partners rather than guest lecturers, structured reflection on what's actually changing as they take on more — tend to be underweighted in favor of things that are easier to design and schedule. Some programs, if we're honest, are designed less to develop capability than to confer status — to make participants feel chosen. That's not nothing; people stay at organizations that invest visibly in them. But you shouldn't sacrifice program quality to achieve the effect. A useful diagnostic: if the primary benefit participants report at the end of a hi-po program is "I grew my network," the program delivered social capital rather than development. That's not worthless, but it's rarely what was advertised.

Connection to talent decisions gets severed. A program that ends without any meaningful link to how the organization actually makes promotion and succession decisions has a ceiling on what it can accomplish. The participants know it. Those three problems tend to show up together. One additional design choice I find particularly revealing: hi-po programs that include people management content — coaching skills, feedback practices, developing others — that isn't available to the general people manager population. The implicit logic is troubling. It suggests that only the employees lucky enough to report to a hi-po deserve to be managed well. Or it reveals that the organization doesn't believe in that content enough to offer it broadly. Either way, it's a tell about what the program is actually for.

A note on action learning

One of the most common design responses to the content problem is action learning — cohort-based projects on real organizational challenges, with the dual promise of participant development and genuine business impact. The instinct is right: real-stakes work is what actually accelerates development, and the best hi-po programs are built around it.

But action learning is considerably harder to execute well than most program designers anticipate. It requires an organization with a genuine inventory of problems that are appropriately scoped for a cohort to tackle, senior sponsors who will actually engage with and potentially implement the output, and an environment where a good idea from a hi-po cohort wouldn't already have surfaced through normal channels. When those conditions aren't in place — and they often aren't — action learning produces presentations that get politely acknowledged and filed, which teaches participants something, though probably not what was intended.

The alternative I've found more reliable is individual work that approximates the conditions of senior leadership without depending on the organization being ready to act on the output: high-pressure, consequential, and subject to rigorous critical scrutiny from people whose opinions carry real weight. The development value comes from the experience of doing that work and defending it — not from whether the organization runs with the idea.

What good looks like

When I've seen hi-po programs done well, a few things are consistently true.

The design starts with the "potential for what" question — and the answer is specific enough to actually drive nomination criteria. Not "leaders with executive potential" but something that connects directly to the organization's succession plan, its capability gaps, and the roles it most needs to develop people into.

Nomination is tied directly to the talent review process rather than running parallel to it. The program isn't a separate track; it's an extension of the organization's ongoing thinking about its leadership pipeline.

The development work centers on real-stakes challenges — individual or cohort-based, depending on what the organization can genuinely support — with outcomes that are tracked not just for completion but for what actually happened to participants afterward. Not just whether they finished the program, but whether they moved into expanded roles or expanded contributions, and at what rate compared to peers who didn't participate.

And the program is honest about what it is. Not a reward for past performance, not a status marker, not a networking opportunity dressed up as development. A deliberate investment in specific people for specific reasons, connected to specific organizational needs.

That last part — being honest about what the program is actually for — turns out to be both the hardest thing to get right and the thing that determines whether everything else works.