Spotting Potential

There is an old Indian story about three wise men who were walking in the jungle when they came across the bones of an animal. The first wise man said: “My special skill is in joining bones together so that they form a working skeleton again”. And he reconstructed the bones. The second wise man said: “My special ability is in restoring flesh, muscle and skin to cover a skeleton just the way it was in life” And he did so. The third man then said: “My gift is to breathe life into animals that have died” – and he bent to do so. Now one of the wise men had an apprentice accompanying him and the boy interrupted the proceedings to ask his master’s permission to climb a high tree nearby. Permission was granted as the three men focussed on the task they had undertaken… The apprentice got as far up the tree as he could: he alone had recognised that a live tiger is a very different proposition from a dead tiger.

The three sages may have been supremely competent in their fields, but the boy had potential!

Potential is just another word for ‘learning capacity’. People with ‘high potential’ are defined by their ability to learn quickly, and to learn more, from the experience available to them. They look beyond the obvious to understand and see new possibilities in the situations they meet. They see the wider implications of breathing life into the tiger! Most learning in the workplace is based on experience. To learn from experience you have to be able to understand what the experience means – why did this happen? What caused it? What effects might it have? What opportunities might it offer?, and so on. The better you understand the situation the more you can learn from it.
“Understanding” implies Thinking – the ability to analyse what is going on, recognise the key elements of the situation and the alternatives they suggest. So potential is related directly to the ability to think. But we are concerned with leadership and management here and “thinking” means more than simply grasping the intellectual or technical challenges. It includes social thinking - about the people, politics and relationships involved. Leadership potential depends on the ability to “think completely” about the situation and make sound judgments about both things and people.

Finally, potential lies in the future and is defined by the way a person can think about things he or she has never come across before. It is how the person thinks about an issue that counts, particularly -
• how the situation might evolve over different time frames;

• how it might develop to influence other parts of the business environment;
• how risk associated with the problem might change over time.

- rather than what he/she thinks, which tied to present information. So potential is a process of thinking, not a learned competence. While we cannot know the answers to future problems, people who have a very well developed process of thinking can work out what the correct questions are going forward into the future. This is how we see potential in young or inexperienced people: they can think effectively about situations that are well beyond their current competence to deal with. Someone who can’t see what the questions are for the future will find it difficult to spot the answers as they emerge!

Now the big question is: “Can we measure this process of thinking?” – and the answer, of course is YES!

Our research with very large samples of successful leaders shows the thinking qualities that are necessary for success – and the thinking ‘patterns’ that are required to learn how to work successfully at different levels in a big organisation. Potential is defined by ‘how much’ of each quality a person has; and how these qualities work together to enable him/her to make balanced judgments about action for the future.
You will have noticed that the process of thinking completely about problems is a quite fundamental talent. It is found to be stable in people once they reach adulthood and not to vary much thereafter. As a talent, it is something you have, more than something you learn in later life. Because it is so fundamental, it tends to be equally distributed in any large population. We have conclusive evidence that the thinking qualities we measure are not influenced by race, gender, culture or social background. Competence may vary widely across these divisions, but the capacity to become competent (potential), given the correct opportunities, does not.

Lastly, how do we measure this capacity? We do so through a structured conversation – usually 20 minutes on the telephone – that challenges the candidate to think at successively higher levels of difficulty, and to demonstrate the ability to make sound judgements about what to do and how to do it as the tigers gather!!