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Diversity | Catalyst
performance of subordinates most likely to
yield the highest payoff.”
These elites have also been seen as ‘force
multipliers’, modelling behaviours that
positively influence not just their own
performance, but that of their colleagues and
teams too. Extraordinary claims have been
made about their business-enhancing power:
twice as productive; three times more likely to
succeed in next-level promotions; hitting the
sweet spot of ability, aspiration and engagement
that most people at work can only dream of.
It’s unsurprising, then, that the HR
community has embraced HiPos. Debates about
whether the focus should be on performance or
potential, and how potential can be identified,
abound. There’s no shortage of job evaluation
and assessment processes and tools, leadership
competency and reward matrices and best
practice guidelines for succession planning – all
aimed squarely at keeping top talent motivated,
engaged and, crucially, in company.
With the stakes so high, it’s little wonder
that HiPo programmes have proliferated. Some
research suggests that companies can spend
more than a quarter of their total learning and
development budgets on their ‘stars’.
Cultural impacts
Increasingly, though, questions are being
asked about this focus on HiPos, whether that’s
the process by which they are identified and
nurtured, the cultural impacts of this focus on
the few at the expense of developing the talent
of the many, and, crucially, whether they really
do provide desired outcomes.
Marcus Buckingham, author of Nine Lies
about Work, targets potential as his Lie #7 and
has strong views about the efficacy – and ethics
– of focusing on the talent development of the
chosen few: “If all humans have the ability to
learn and grow (and they do), then potential
is nothing more than just ‘human-ness’…
How explicitly awful to cloister opportunity off
to an elite few, while preventing others from
seeing everything that they could be. There is no
such thing as potential, and it is both impractical
and immoral to act as though there is.”
Even more equivocal critics are beginning to
question the validity of their HiPo programmes.
If, unlike Buckingham, we believe that potential
exists, there is still the problem of how we define
and measure it. We all feel uncomfortable
about Elon Musk’s homage to Jack Welch’s
(now outdated) “rank and yank” philosophy,
cutting his workforce based on the 10% of
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“It’s a fact that human beings
are terrible at rating others”
workers scoring lowest in an annual round of
appraisals, but can we be confident that the data
driving HiPo programmes at the other end of the
spectrum is any more robust or reliable?
Americas-based David Swanz, from
Alexander Mann Solutions, fears that talent-
management decisions are often based on
questionable data. “It’s a fact that human
beings are terrible at rating others,” he says.
“Idiosyncratic rater effect shows that 61% of
any rating will say more about the rater than the
person being rated, and that’s before taking into
account important cultural differences around
the world.”
It’s not surprising, then, that using a sub-set
of this data to identify HiPos is under fire, bad
news for the commonly used 9-Box talent grid
and similar identification tools. Writing for
the Harvard Business Review blog in 2017, Jack
Zenger and Joseph Folkman shared research
claiming that more than 40% of individuals in