Unveiling Potential: The Key to Identifying High-Performing Leaders

To spot a high potential leader, you look for rate of progress, not rate of performance. And so you actually want to look at how quickly somebody’s growing in a company, not their current performance. Because somebody who has great performance but has not shown improvement over a year is unlikely to improve in the future. Whereas somebody who’s actually at a sales manager, but they’ve started as a sales person, and they’ve been able to go and jump four steps ahead in just a year, that person has a higher growth trajectory than this person. But the reality is, you actually want to find the people who. They might be a step or two behind, but their rate of growth is really freaking fast. If you consistently overpromote people who do not have that growth trajectory, then your organization will quickly underperform. And so you want to look for people who continue to break through that capacity time and time again.